A Worldmaking Plant
West of Cancún and Tulum’s popular beach resorts and the iconic pyramids of Chichen Itzá, a renovated plantation bills itself as a “living museum” transporting visitors to Yucatán’s nineteenth-century gilded age, when Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state, purportedly housed the most millionaires per capita in the world. The plantation-museum runs tours showcasing the opulence of Mérida’s “casta divina,” or “divine caste,” comprised of European-descended planters made rich by the boom in agave fibers called henequén produced on their plantations. These tours include walkthroughs of the renovated master’s house, filled with ornate furniture and porcelain imported from Europe, and an excursion aboard mule-drawn wooden platforms on the plantation’s original railroad tracks.
From the platforms, guests can admire the agaves dotting the fields. What the tour does not mention is that these agaves were planted upon dispossessed Maya land and harvested by Maya debt peons under conditions including whipping, starvation, and incarceration—practices that journalist John Kenneth Turner, in his 1909 exposé, Barbarous Mexico, equated with slavery. The tour also neglects to note that, as international demand for henequén soared near the turn of the twentieth century, other groups were trafficked onto the plantations to work alongside the Maya: Yaquis starting around 1902, forcibly removed from their northern homelands divided by the U.S.-Mexico border, and over a thousand Koreans who were lured to Mexico by the promise of a better life in 1905—the same year the Japanese Empire declared Korea a protectorate, dependent territory, five years before officially annexing Korea as a colony.
I learned about henequén while researching the history of Korean indentureship in the Yucatán Peninsula, yet the racial and colonial dimensions of the plantation economy are rarely acknowledged in public narratives of the historic henequén zone’s past, upon which the region’s tourist economy is quite literally built. Many of the Yucatán Peninsula’s crumbling plantations, abandoned when the henequén bubble burst as rival commodities crowded the world hard fibers market, have been refashioned by real estate developers and foreign investors into upscale museum-resorts. What was once the company store that pushed workers further into debt is now a luxury spa, the majordomo’s quarters honeymoon suites.
“Defining the relations of domination and exclusion in neocolonial touristic spaces is useful, but we shouldn’t stop there.”
Even museums that might be expected to present a more critical account of the region’s past sanitize the historical record. Take, for instance, the Museo Conmemorativo de la inmigracion Coreana a Yucatan (Commemorative Museum of Korean Immigration to the Yucatán). Located south of Paseo Montejo, Mérida’s Champs-Élysées lined with the henequén planters’ old mansions, the museum is housed in a humble green building that once served as the headquarters for the local branch of the Korean National Association, an organization founded by overseas Koreans dedicated to fighting Japanese colonialism in Korea. The common narrative circulating among Korean descendant communities is that their ancestors were deceived into migrating to Mexico, told they were heading to the United States. Stories of runaways being whipped as punishment have been passed on through generations. But none of this is mentioned on the plaque at the museum’s entrance, which states simply that 1,014 Korean immigrants arrived at Progreso Port—now a popular stop for Caribbean cruise ships—to work in “the trade in agroindustrial agave fiber processing” on May 15, 1905. The only difficulties the plaque describes the Koreans as having faced are differences in language and food customs.
The exhibits inside do include a few reminders of the community that existed among Korean, Yaqui, and Maya families on the henequén plantations: a portrait of Korean and Yaqui workers together here; a newspaper clip memorializing the first marriage between a Korean man and Maya woman there. But the museum falls short of threading the Korean migration history into the Yucatán Peninsula’s colonial context, which would bring out the story’s parallels and intersections with the experiences of the Yaquis and Maya.
Naming and defining the relations of domination and exclusion on specific plantation sites among racialized groups—indentured Koreans, displaced Yaqui, and dispossessed Maya workers alongside wealthy European-descended planters, for example—would be better than pretending those relations did not exist at all. But I wonder if stopping there might limit our horizons for critique, especially in neocolonial touristic spaces like Mérida. After all, colonialism as a logic, force, and structure is unconfined by such spatial boundaries; it both conditions and is sustained by the partial narratives that reflect the present politics and economic capture of any given place, which sever our connections to contexts beyond our immediate fields of vision.
Here, focusing on nonhuman movements within the plantation economy reveals a web of colonial entanglements among previously occluded people and places. Following agaves in particular surfaces an overlooked history of a global fiber fever sparked by colonial extraction in Mexico that spread to plantations in Florida, German East Africa, Hawai’i, Taiwan, and beyond. The transnational circulation of plants, products, and people in the henequén industry not only exposes the colonial structures bridging plantation sites and workers in Mexico’s southeastern states, but also the reach of different empires across the hemispheric Americas, Asia, and Africa—and, consequently, the potential transracial, ethnic, and indigenous solidarities forged by that shared history.
Relatively unfamiliar in the English-speaking world, agaves are sometimes confused with cacti, aloe, and other succulents. They are hardy plants that can grow in hot climates and rocky soil with little water, native to the southwestern United States and Mexico, and perhaps most recognized as the source of Mexican distilled spirits like tequila or mezcal, fermented beverages like pulque, or sweeteners like agave syrup, all of which are derived from the agave’s pineapple-like base. But the agave’s blade-shaped leaves also harbor long, strong fibers that indigenous peoples, including the Maya, spun and wove into textiles and twisted into cordage for generations. The Yucatán Peninsula’s agave monocrop economy arose as the Spanish navy started using agave fibers for strategic materials like shipping rope and U.S. farmers used them for agricultural binder twine. It was in these imperial contexts that henequén became known as the region’s “green gold.”
Henequén, which is also called sisal in Yucatán, is commonly identified as Agave fourcroydes. But outside of Mexico, sisal is the common name for another agave species, Agave sisalana, whose fiber production is dominated by Brazil. According to Mérida-based ethnobotanist Jorge Carlos Trejo-Torres, both agave varieties were cultivated in the Yucatán Peninsula during the Spanish colonial period; henequén was the trade name for both Agave fourcroydes and Agave sisalana, differentiated as “henequén blanco” and “henequén verde” based on the color of their leaves, following the Maya taxonomy of “sak kij” (white agave) and “ya’ax kij” (green agave). However, by the mid-twentieth century, Agave sisalana virtually disappeared from the Yucatán Peninsula, leading botanists to pin the origin of this species to elsewhere in Mexico, or even outside of Mexico entirely. The assumption followed that the historic henequén referred to only Agave fourcroydes, considered the sole agave species native to the region. The common name “sisal” thus attached exclusively to Agave fourcroydes in Yucatán while Agave sisalana was cleaved from Yucatecan history.
“The global fiber fever sparked by colonial extraction in Mexico reached empires across the hemispheric Americas, Asia, and Africa.”
Pushing against the plant science community’s consensus around Agave sisalana’s non-native status, which has propped up public fixation on Agave fourcroydes as the emblem of the region’s henequén past, Trejo-Torres sought to reclaim the Yucatán Peninsula as the home of Agave sisalana through his own research, combining phytogeographical analysis with historical study. It was in the archives that he came across a key piece of evidence on Agave sisalana’s peninsular origins: the work of a little-known doctor-turned-diplomat and eventual agave entrepreneur, Henry Perrine.
Perrine was the U.S. consul stationed in Campeche, the walled port city on the Yucatán Peninsula’s west coast, from 1827 to 1838. Born in New Jersey, Perrine trained as a physician before he joined the U.S. diplomatic service in Mexico—a move motivated by health reasons, as he sought a warm location to convalesce after accidentally ingesting arsenic during a medical experiment. The same year Perrine was dispatched to the Yucatán Peninsula, then-president John Quincy Adams directed the Treasury Department to publish a circular instructing U.S. consuls to collect knowledge and samples of plants with commercial value in their respective posts, with the goal of planting lucrative foreign cash crops domestically to boost the growing U.S. settler republic’s economic position. The Navy was tasked with transporting samples to the United States, but consuls were expected to cooperate with the Treasury directive out of civic duty, as no funds had been allocated for these bioprospecting missions. Perrine was one of the few to heed the call.
Much of what is known about Perrine comes from his government and research correspondence detailing his quest to catalog the Yucatán Peninsula’s flora. During his first few years as U.S. consul in Campeche, Perrine wrote detailed letters to the Secretary of the Treasury about agaves and their fibers, including how “ancient Mexicans” used them for “their thread and cordage, mats and bagging, shoes and clothing, webs, equivalent to cambric and canvas; the hammocks in which they are born, repose, and die; and the paper on which they painted their histories, and with which they adorned and adored their gods.” When Perrine reported to Congress about his success in procuring samples of the region’s agaves and documenting their indigenous names and uses, he made sure to note that he had done so at considerable personal expense, by providing “gratuitous and politic” medical services to “all ranks of [the region’s] semi-barbarous people.” He would later refer to these foregone profits to bolster his ambitious pitch for starting an agave plantation economy in the United States.
Perrine unabashedly lobbied for fiber-producing agaves as the next blockbuster plantation commodity. In an 1834 publication in the American Journal of Science and Arts, he proclaimed that Agave sisalana could “extract more wealth from the sandy and rocky surface of [the Yucatán Peninsula] than from all the gold and silver mines of Mexico.” In a letter to the Treasury Department, Perrine asserted that agave cultivation could “form an era in our agricultural and manufacturing prosperity, as distinguished as the invention of the cotton gin.” In another memorial to Congress, Perrine requested a township to start an experimental agricultural station for tropical plants, designating southeastern Florida as an optimal site for the venture. Agave sisalana could thrive in the southern state’s “ruined fields and most steril districts,” rendering the supposedly agriculturally useless earth productive. The returns from Agave sisalana alone, he argued, would not only make him whole after the pecuniary sacrifices he made to gather tropical plants and botanical knowledge on behalf of U.S. national interests, but also “contribute greatly to the prosperity and perpetuity of the Union” as a “profitable staple” to southern planters, “cheap material” to northern industrialists, and critical supplies for both commercial and naval ships as well as everyday citizens. In other words, according to Perrine, developing a domestic agave fiber industry was vital to the nation’s security and future.
In 1838, near the end of Perrine’s tenure as U.S. consul in Campeche, Congress granted Perrine his Florida township. Yet he would not be able to begin his project right away: three years before he could step foot on his allocated land, the Second Seminole War had broken out, as Seminoles defended their homelands and resisted deportation by U.S. government forces under the Indian Removal Act. Perrine set up camp in the small island of Indian Key while waiting for safe passage to the mainland and, according to written recollections left by Perrine’s young daughter, tended to the plants he had sent over from the Yucatán Peninsula, including his agaves. Before his grand agave colony plans could bear fruit in Florida, however, he was killed during a Seminole raid in 1840.
Perrine’s daughter wrote that she wanted to bury Perrine “under the broad spreading leaves of [his] Agave Sisalana” growing in his garden in Indian Key, and she was prescient in linking Perrine’s legacy with the plant. After Perrine’s death, the Agave sisalana he planted survived and thrived in Florida, where it is now considered an invasive species, and his research publications on Agave sisalana’s economic potential continued to ripple through planter circles. Tanzania and Kenya’s sisal industry, for instance, was allegedly started by a German agronomist who had read Perrine’s work on the promise of sisal in a Kew Royal Gardens bulletin. Some records state that this agronomist transplanted several of Perrine’s Agave sisalana plants from Florida to German East Africa in 1893. In another version of the story, agave bulbils were smuggled directly out of the Yucatán Peninsula, stuffed in the stomach of a taxidermied alligator.
The same year Agave sisalana was successfully introduced to the African continent, European-descended sugarcane planters also brought it to their plantations on the Hawaiian Islands. These sugar planters were aiming to diversify their business portfolio ahead of lackluster sugar prices on the world market, the impending threat to sugarcane yields posed by pests, and mounting competition by Californian beet sugar; agaves were drought-resistant plants that could be cultivated in areas that received less water and were thus less suitable for sugarcane production. A few years later, in 1901, another U.S. consul transplanted agaves from Florida to an experimental agricultural station in Taiwan in collaboration with the Japan-occupied Taiwanese government. The Japanese Empire built sisal plantations in the Hengchun Peninsula at the southern tip of Taiwan to produce military supplies such as naval rope in the leadup to World War II. These sites were abandoned after Japan’s defeat.
Across Africa and the Asia-Pacific, public memory of a region’s agave plantation past seems to correlate with the visibility of agaves in the present landscape. Among the agave destination countries previously noted, the commodity is most strongly associated with the colonial plantation in Tanzania and Kenya, the world’s second and third largest producers of sisal fiber today and the only sites where sisal plantations have continued operations at scale. Most Tanzanian sisal is produced from a new agave cultivar developed during the colonial period at an experimental agricultural station near the border between British and German East Africa—Hybrid 11648, which has more leaves and thus yields more fibers per plant than Agave sisalana.
“A recruiter for planters in the Yucatán Peninsula worked with a Japanese immigration firm to secure Korean “coolie” labor.”
In southern Taiwan, the Japanese-built sisal plantations and processing plants have been preserved as regional museums, where agaves are presented as one of Hengchun’s three treasures alongside onions and tea. These sites rarely highlight the agave operation’s colonial character or the likelihood that the plantations were fueled by Indigenous labor, however. This may be explained by the KMT’s oppressive, authoritarian governance following Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule after World War II, which eclipsed national reckoning with Japanese colonial legacies while inflicting new political traumas. Historical and transitional justice for Taiwan’s indigenous peoples is further complicated by Taiwan’s multilayered imperial, settler past that predates Japanese colonial rule, which involves the Dutch and Qing regimes and Han Chinese settlers.
In contrast, Agave sisalana has seemingly all but disappeared in Hawai’i. The agave fiber industry there is said to have failed once sisal prices dipped in the twentieth century, as planters could no longer turn a profit while competing with production from Mexico and German East Africa, where wages were lower. Land that had been previously earmarked for agave production was thus flipped to cultivate more lucrative crops like pineapple, which became the Hawaiian Islands’ signature settler colonial fruit by the mid-twentieth century.
There is one place in Hawai’i where the story of Agave sisalana cultivation is briefly featured, however: on the Hawaiian Railway Society’s touristic train rides that follow the historic tracks along the former sugar plantation grounds of Ewa, O‘ahu. The peripheral land around Ewa Plantation where the train’s tracks were laid may have been drier areas where these agaves were originally planted during the sugarcane planters’ brief experiment. As is the case in post-Perrine Florida, decades after the death of the agave fiber industry in Hawai’i, stray agaves are still found scattered around the train station—outside the ticket office, behind a bench, next to a parking sign. Within the first fifteen minutes of the train journey, tour guides point out the spiky sea urchin–like plants peeking out between the shrubs and grass on the west side of the tracks, an indelible imprint of a transnational colonial legacy that has yet to be pictured in full relief.
While agaves were not transplanted to Korea for fiber production in the nineteenth or twentieth centures, henequén was introduced in the Korean popular lexicon: the 1905 Mexico migration event as well as the Mexico-bound migrants themselves are often called “aenikkaeng,” the Korean transliteration of “henequén,” memorializing what has been called a forgotten migration episode and people in the name of an often-overlooked plant.
Koreans were sent to Mexico in 1905 almost by accident. During the height of the henequén boom at the turn of the twentieth century, agave planters in the Yucatán Peninsula were looking to recruit Asian contract workers—so-called “coliés,” or “coolies”—to boost their labor pool. Following the abolition of slavery, the prevailing scientific racism of the day propagated notions of Asian servility and constitutional fitness for manual labor in tropical climates; this rendered Chinese and Japanese laborers in particular highly desirable to planters seeking to supplement and discipline the indigenous workers they had previously relied upon, upon whose lands they had built their plantations.
The white labor recruiter hired by the planters was unable to find workers in Japan and China, as news of the abysmal working conditions and harsh treatment workers received on Caribbean plantations had reached Asian homeland populations during the previous half-century. But once in East Asia, the recruiter learned of a new potential “coolie” labor supply that had recently started arriving in Hawai’i: Koreans. Korea historian Wayne Patterson chronicles how, at the turn of the twentieth century, European-descended sugarcane planters in Hawai’i conspired with the U.S. Minister in Korea to open Korea’s borders—borders that had been closed precisely to protect Koreans against foreign exploitation—and ultimately succeeded in changing the country’s immigration laws and passport bureaucracy to secure a reliable supply of Korean transpacific “coolie” labor. These planters were motivated by the threat of Japanese labor strikes and flight to the U.S. mainland; they also anticipated a shortage in Chinese workers after the United States officially annexed Hawai’i in 1898 following its illegal invasion and occupation in 1893, which would lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act being applied in the Islands. Korean imported labor simply comprised the next chapter of European settler colonialism in Hawai’i, and agave planters in the Yucatán Peninsula were able to leverage the administrative groundwork the sugarcane planters in Hawai’i had laid in Korea to recruit their own “coolies” shortly thereafter.
The agave planters’ recruiter worked with the Continental Colonization Company, a Japanese immigration firm, to search for Korean workers on the ground. Because of the Company’s involvement in the recruitment, some South Korean popular narratives have suggested that the Korea-Mexico migration was a Japanese colonial conspiracy to sell Korean colonized subjects into virtual slavery abroad, a story that mirrors the experience of the Yaquis forced out of their northern homeland and into plantation labor in Mexico’s southeast, as well as that of the Maya who were captured and sold into slavery in Cuba following indigenous-settler skirmishes in the region. But the Korean story must reckon with Japan’s position as a “colored” empire, to borrow Japan historian Robert Tierney’s coinage, which serves as a reminder that race and racialization needs to be examined and understood in their localized contexts.
“The Japanese state leveraged white capital’s appetite for colored labor to manage its own surplus populations while other Japanese citizens became colonists.”
At the time Koreans were trafficked to Mexico, the Continental Colonization Company was one of the top five Japanese immigration firms actively sending Japanese workers to plantations across the Americas. As Japan historians Eiichiro Azuma, Sydney Xu Lu, and Jun Uchida have pointed out, Japan promoted peopling and planting as settler colonial strategies to strengthen its growing empire and extend its reach across the Pacific, following the imperial scripts of earlier European settler empires. While Koreans were sent to European settler plantations, many Japanese immigrated to agricultural colonies that were joint ventures between Japan and Latin American host states—like the Japanese state-backed colony of Chiapas, Mexico, where land was bought and Japanese colonists and workers sent to grow plantation commodities like coffee in 1897. The Japanese state thus successfully leveraged white capital’s appetite for colored labor to manage its own surplus populations while presenting other Japanese passport holders as white-adjacent colonists in their own right. “Colonization” in the corporate name of the Japanese immigration firm that brokered Korean indentureship in Mexico both referred to Japan’s settler ideology and evinced its capitalist underpinnings.
Studying agave plantations in global context serves as a check against drawing easy equivalences between states and people, however. While the power and reach of Japanese empire manifests starkly in Taiwan’s agave plantation economy and Korean labor trafficking to the agave plantations of the Yucatán Peninsula, in Hawai’i, many agave workers on white-owned plantations were likely from Japan’s rural agrarian communities as well as internal colonies such as Okinawa. Regional manifestations of the global agave plantation demonstrate that an individual’s position relative to an imperial power certainly bears upon, but is not dispositive of, their mobility or vulnerability within the international capitalist system. Japan’s status as an empire with colonies as well as racialized citizens and subjects certainly resonates with the familiar, painful histories of Black enslavement, indigenous dispossession, and Asian indenture under white settler empires. At the same time, keeping historical agave plantations in sight across regions also focuses our attention on the intersecting possibilities for not only racial and ethnic but also class-based anticolonial solidarity.
Trejo-Torres is working on a new research project, looking into how Agave sisalana nearly disappeared from the Yucatán Peninsula to begin with. This developing study has led him to consider the role of the Maya Social War that was sparked in 1847 and lasted for decades; it is considered one of the most successful nineteenth-century Indigenous uprisings waged against unjust land, labor, and taxation policies under settler colonialism in the western hemisphere. As Trejo-Torres notes, Agave sisalana was likely cultivated on plantations located in present-day Quintana Roo, the easternmost state of the Yucatán Peninsula, where soil conditions were more favorable to the species’ growth but where fighting was fiercest and plantations were likely destroyed and abandoned.
Trejo-Torres has also helped set up an agave preserve, the Agavario de Xoclán, to commemorate the region’s endemic agaves, including Agave sisalana. The agavario is located on the outskirts of Mérida’s tourist zone in an area that was once a nineteenth-century henequén plantation built upon an older Maya archaeological site.
One spring afternoon, I met him for a tour, where he presented the various agave species planted around the grounds. Up close, side by side, it is easy to differentiate between Agave fourcroydes and Agave sisalana. Agave fourcroydes has a longer trunk, while Agave sisalana does not appear to have one at all. Agave sisalana’s blades are a verdant green, while those of Agave fourcroydes reflect a white cast. The blade margins of Agave fourcroydes are serrated, while those of Agave sisalana generally seem smooth. When I ran my fingers along the length of the leaves’ edges at Trejo-Torres’s direction, however, I could feel Agave sisalana’s tiny teeth, imperceptible to human sight but obvious upon touch. He also pointed out the resident Hybrid 11648 plant, which resembles Agave sisalana with its dark and smooth leaves, but is noticeably rounder and fuller.
Trejo-Torres’s research and public education initiatives, preserving space for historical memory of a worldmaking plant, are politically critical—especially in its home in Mexico’s southeast, where both agaves and related knowledges are falling victim to touristic development and environmental destruction. The Maya Train project that broke ground in 2020, aiming to connect tourist sites across the region, has been deemed a national security project and thus shielded from lawsuits by environmental and indigenous rights groups; the inaugural route connecting Cancún and Campeche commenced operations before the Christmas holidays last year. The consequences of ecological and cultural devastation and its connection to our fragmented knowledge of the past and present are already evidenced on the famous scuba diving destination of Cozumel in Quintana Roo. There, an important Maya temple was destroyed to make way for an airport during the years leading up to World War II and, after the war ended, coastal areas that used to harbor agaves were razed to build beachfront hotels in a bid to sell the island as a new Caribbean paradise to North American tourists. Today, a few hints of the Cozumel’s agave past can be found off the beaten tourist path in the Cozumel Island Museum, whose exhibits contain scattered references to ropes made by henequén used with Maya stone anchors, a Maya stone scraping tool used to wrest agave fibers from the plant’s pulpy leaves, and even a henequén plantation that operated at the island’s southern extremity during the nineteenth century, when fibers were exported abroad from the local port.
The stories of individual plantations are the essential building blocks for a global environmental and visual history from which to abstract the component parts of the colonial experience—racial difference, Native displacement, migrant labor, and foreign capital—and reassemble them into a more robust lens for capturing what could be otherwise. Recovering and preserving these agave stories around the world must be a grassroots movement, planted in solidarity toward a collective vision for an anticolonial future. Maybe we can learn something through the agave’s historical resistance and endurance across time and space. Maybe, through agaves, we can begin to see each other and imagine a more just world, together.
refer to this article: A Worldmaking Plant
