This post is part of a series about “uncharismatic” species in environmental history, emerging from a workshop at Universität Augsburg in September 2026.

In the early 1500s, a smallpox epidemic swept across the island of Hispaniola, decimating the Indigenous labor force that worked in Spanish fields and mines. In response, Spanish monasteries and estates turned to agriculture, planting cassia and citrus fruit trees. By 1519, Spanish writer Bartolomé de las Casas noted that the trees “grew so quickly and in such numbers that it seemed as if this soil had not been created for any other tree, nor these trees for any other soil but this one.”¹ For a brief moment, it seemed as though these agricultural projects would successfully replace the economic value of the human labor lost during the smallpox epidemic. However, as estate owners began to reap their first harvest, a new and devastating plague hit the island: ants. The ants destroyed orchards, consuming “the trees from the root up,” leaving them “scorched and dried out.” When not in the fields, they moved into residents homes, covering furniture and crawling into bedding. “They bit and caused greater pain than wasps that bite and hurt men,” and the island’s residents “could not defend themselves from these ants at night in their beds, nor could they survive if the beds were not placed on four small troughs of water.”² There was little to be done except wait out the onslaught of ants, as residents watched their orchards and their profits wither away. Eventually, the presence of the ants diminished, and new orchards could be planted on the island. 

Las Casas’ description is one of the more  prevalent depictions of ants in colonial texts: as uncharismatic and aggressive pests that bite, destroy, and generally derail agricultural projects. However, his observations are part of a greater corpus of commentary on ant behavior in sixteenth century New Spain. Across Spanish and Indigenous sources, observers consistently remark on the biting, swarming behaviors of ants, but these behaviors alone do not determine whether they appear as charismatic or uncharismatic. Charisma may be understood as a cultural production, rather than an immutable fact determined by a creature’s objective characteristics. Even within Spanish sources, authors produce distinctive characterizations derived from their religious and military experiences.  In the Relaciones Geográficas, responses to the Spanish Empire’s 1577 questionnaire that surveyed officials in the Spanish colonies about local cultures, governance, and resources, ants appear on multiple occasions as local pests. One such discussion comes from the 1580 Relación de Tancitaro. According to the author, a local gentleman owned a garden near the mines of Guaxacatlan where he grew several edible crops that were prone to invasion from ants. In an attempt to protect his crops, the gentleman dug a small moat around his garden filled with water from a nearby stream. Undeterred, the ants built and crossed a bridge of straw to reenter his gardens. The owner eventually surrendered his gardens to the invaders, who expanded into his neighbors’ gardens shortly thereafter.³

Shocked by the behavior of the ants, the author relayed this account to local Spaniard Pedro de Villegas, “a person to whom all credit can be given,” who recalled spotting two large anthills seemingly at war while he was on the road as a mayor and captain on the frontier of Chichimeca. The ants “attacked each other with such fury that it was a marvelous thing, and they struck so hard that they hurt each other greatly, and cut off each other’s heads.” The miniature battle was so viciously fought that “they left a large quantity of heads and bodies on the ground.” Aided by Villegas’ account, the author of the Relación de Tancitaro recounts the battle between the two ant hills in great detail, emphasizing the strategic decisions and militant capabilities of the ants in a way that reflects the original observer’s military background.⁴ Spanish colonizers walked a line between admiration and fear when describing ants that could cross rivers, destroy orchards, and march against their enemies.⁵ Ants offered Spanish observers a way to acknowledge the limitations of their ability to conquer, control, or subvert outside forces in New Spain using cultural discourses—military and spiritual—that were familiar to them. 

While pervasive in Spanish accounts, the characterization of ants as destructive “others” appears less frequently in Indigenous sources. Indigenous communities catalogued the numerous types and traits of ants that existed around them. In the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century manuscript written by Bernardino de Sahagún and many Indigenous interlocutors, the painful and destructive nature of the ants is described alongside the locations in which they can be found. The connections between ants and trees, and even ants and other creatures, draw as much attention as the negative characteristics of the ant.⁶ For Indigenous authors, labeling ants as pests would capture only one portion of a much more complex identity. They identified a connection between ants and the natural environment and observed the impact that their own agricultural practices could have on insect populations.⁷

While written sources such as the Florentine Codex offer some insight into Indigenous understandings of ants, visual and written depictions in the Badianus Manuscript offer new avenues for exploration. The Badianus Manuscript is the earliest—and only—Mexican medical text created by the Mexica.⁸ It inscribes Mexica medicinal practices, plant taxonomy, and illustrations of native flora. Throughout this text, Indigenous draftsmen depicted plants with their root systems intact, often using glyphs and color to signify soil composition.⁹ By incorporating the environment, Indigenous draftsman drew on a cultural understanding that plants could not be understood independently of the interconnected ecosystems in which they existed. Occasionally, illustrators included depictions of insects that are likely found in and around the subject plants. On two separate occasions, ants are illustrated alongside herbs. Analyzing ants in this Indigenous-authored medicinal text reveals that the very tendencies that labeled ants as ‘pests’ in the European mindset made them perfect place-markers in the eyes of these Indigenous draftsmen.

Ants first appear in the Badianus Manuscript alongside a cure for the loss or interruption of sleep. They are light, almost honey-colored creatures crawling along the roots and the base of the tlahçolpahtli plant. At first glance, their inclusion may seem strange. The cure does not call for ants, and very few other insects appear throughout the text. The corresponding text offers clarity: the herb “grows by ant hills.” No further discussion of the location of the herb, or any discussion of how to locate the other two required herbs, is present.¹⁰ Ants appear once again alongside a cure for pain of the heart, where a series of red ants crawl along the roots of the nonochton herb, which also “grows near ant hills.”¹¹ While the descriptions of ants are brief, they reveal that the ants serve a similar purpose as the water, soil, and rock glyphs more frequently discussed in studies of the manuscript.¹² The decision to include these insects as way-finders indicates that the authors understood the relationship between ants and the environment. In this light, ants become a positive feature of the environment, useful so long as their relationship with the local flora is analyzed and understood. 

In rare instances, ants appear in the Badianus Manuscript as medical treatment. Individuals experiencing weakness of the hands are advised to prepare an herbal mixture to soak their hands in. Once they have done this several times, the patient “should approach an ant hill near which he is to toss a scrap of meat or bread so that they will gather, and is patiently to allow his hands to be bitten by the pincers of their mouths,” eventually returning their hands to the herbal mixture for relief.¹³ In this case, the painful ant bites are part of the treatment. The manuscript also instructs patients with gout to gather “foliage of cypress and laurel,” which “are to be thrown on an ant hill, so that they may be urinated on by the ants or be sprinkled with urine.”¹⁴ Here, the ants interact with the components of the cure rather than directly with the patient, but in both of these treatments, ants are active agents in the administration of the cure rather than passive ingredients to be collected, ground up, and consumed. Indigenous healers leveraged the very traits of ants that identified them as plagues and pests in European descriptions—their tendency to bite and swarm plant material—for the positive purpose of aiding physicians and afflicted individuals. 

Ants are intimately connected to the plant, animal, and insect populations of the areas that they inhabit, and different sixteenth-century communities read this connection through their own cultural lenses. Colonizers typically viewed ants as militant, unstoppable, destructive agents that destabilized agricultural projects. However, these ants were simply responding to the environmental changes that were part of the colonial project. Importing new trees and stripping fields of diverse vegetation to grow gardens with a limited diversity of produce contributed to the increase in ant populations.¹⁵ Attributing ant plagues as a punishment from God, as Las Casas did, or viewing ants as militant actors opposed to colonization in the Relación de Tancitaro, allowed writers to process the behavior of ants in ways that were culturally familiar to them. In so doing, they had to come to terms with their inability to fully conquer the natural environment, a reality that only augmented the “uncharisma” that they ascribed to ants. 

Comparatively, throughout the Badianus Manuscript, ants appear as aids to Indigenous populations looking for cures to numerous ailments: as signs that useful herbs are nearby and also as active components of cures. Unlike other animal and insect ingredients, ants always appear alive and in numbers. They are depicted climbing up plants and described as swarming the hands of patients and providing useful ingredients. These swarming, biting traits that make the ant an uncharismatic pest in the eyes of European onlookers are reframed in a more positive light. The result is a cultural portrayal of insects that is often, but not always, at odds with European depictions of ants as plagues and pests. In this view, ants are less easily deemed uncharismatic, and may even be imbued with a certain charisma that is absent in European accounts. Studies of complex species, such as the ant in New Spain, reveal the need for a more nuanced theoretical approach when studying species with uncharismatic traits in zones of cultural contact. Ants do not fit neatly into the pest-producer binary that has become increasingly common as insects receive more attention in historical studies. In sixteenth-century New Spain, ants were inseparable from the cultural experiences and perspectives of their observers. To attempt to characterize the ant is to wrestle with often conflicting accounts from Indigenous and Spanish authors, and to reconcile the multiplicity of identities that ants exhibit in the archive. 

1. Bartolomé de las Casas, “Plague of Ants,” 1561, in The Latin American Ecocultural Reader, eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes (Northwestern University Press, 2021), 35-36. ↩︎
2. Las Casas, “Plague of Ants,” 36–37. ↩︎
3. Sebastián Macarro, “Relación de Tancitaro,” University of Texas Libraries Collections, September 27, 1580. ↩︎
4. Macarro, “Relación de Tancitaro.” ↩︎
5. Santos, Christian & Fiori, Marlon & Bernardelli Silva Filho, Wellington.“La colonia(es) de las hormigas: colonizadores, insectos y la pelea por el Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVI1.” Tempo 28 (2022): 221. ↩︎
6. In the Florentine Codex, a connection between ants and snakes is identified: “There is a snake that is called tzicanantli because they say that it is the mother of ants. It is thick and lives in anthills, in their deepest recesses. It is spotted with every color. It is frightful.” Sahagún et al., Florentine Codex, vol. 11, 69r. ↩︎
7. Dos Santos, Fiori, and Silva Filho, “La colonia(es) de las hormigas,” 225. ↩︎
8. The Badianus Manuscript (Codex Barberini, Latin 241), trans. Emily Walcott Emmart (Johns Hopkins Press, 1940), xiii. ↩︎
9. Rick López, Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914 (University of Arizona Press, 2025), 48. ↩︎
10. The Badianus Manuscript, 223. ↩︎
11. The Badianus Manuscript, 251 ↩︎
12. See López, Rooted in Place, 52. ↩︎
13. The Badianus Manuscript, 247. ↩︎
14. The Badianus Manuscript, 266. ↩︎
15. Dos Santos, Fiori, and Silva Filho, “La colonia(es) de las hormigas,” 233. ↩︎

Cover image: Chuxlancev, Igor. Ant Bridge Crossing 09. 2015. Photograph. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AntBridge_Crossing_09.jpg. Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 

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Elise Milburn

Elise Milburn is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University and a scholar of the environmental history of colonial New Spain. Her work examines the role of botany, Indigenous knowledge, insects, and Spanish agricultural projects in shaping the intellectual and natural environment of Mexico and the Spanish Caribbean. She analyses the impact of Spanish and Indigenous agricultural projects on the natural environment and argues that the environment is a point of cultural contact after the conquest, and an ongoing site of contest between Indigenous, Spanish, and non-human actors throughout the colonial period.

Latest posts by Elise Milburn (see all)

• (Ant)icolonial Figures: Characterizing Ants in 16th Century New Spain - October 23, 2026