[Aztlan] Journalist's question

[Charles C. Mann]

Listeros,

Greetings from a long-time lurker. I am working on a project that touches on the history of rubber cultivation and use, and had two questions that I have been unable to resolve by looking through books, the FAMSI website, Justin Kerr's terrific photographs, etc.

During the rubber boom in Amazonia (~1870-~1910) rubber-collectors spread from the mouth of the Amazon to the river basin's upper reaches, with notorious and awful abuses of native people occurring in the latter, upland stages. A number of economists and historians have suggested that collectors resorted to enslavement partly because of a difference between the two main latex-bearing tree genuses, Hevea (in the Amazonian lowlands) and Castilla (in the foothills of the Andes and Mesoamerica). By and large, pre-Columbian societies in Amazonia made rubber artifacts out of H. brasiliensis and H. benthamiana; societies in Mesoamerica used C. elastica and possibly C. ulei. A very nice bit of work by Hosler et al in 1999 showed that Mesoamerican peoples could do a kind of vulcanization with Castilla; there are hints that Amazonian peoples did something similar with Hevea. 

Many contemporary accounts of the boom say that when tappers moved from Hevea in the lowlands to Castilla in the foothills they switched tapping methods. Hevea was tapped by cutting thin, shallow V-shaped grooves in the bark and letting the latex slowly drip into a cup at the point of the V. Trees were tapped every other day or so and could be tapped in this way for many years. By contrast, rubber-collectors got latex from Castilla by cutting down the entire tree, ripping it apart, and letting the latex drain into shallow pits dug beneath the fallen trunk. For obvious reasons, you could only tap Castilla once, which put an enormous premium on getting to Castilla trees first. Instead of having workers make daily rounds of trees, as in the lowlands, upland rubber tappers (caucheiros) had gangs of workers who marched for months in the steep forest slopes of the Andean foothills, carrying the huge slabs of dried latex they had taken from the last batches of trees. Unlike standard tapping, a kind of 9-5 job, this was unusually brutal physical labor that took men from their families. Caucheiros couldn't lure people to do it, so they enslaved the people who were around.

Nineteenth century accounts state that native people themselves believed that C. elastica had to be tapped this way -- the caucheiros got their information from them. What's puzzling to me is that C. elastica is still used today (a little) in Africa, India, Mesoamerica and the West Indies, and I can find no instance of it being used in this destructive way. Nor have I been able to find a botanist who could explain to me any physiological difference in the species that would explain why it might be necessary (or might have been necessary in the past). Nor have I been able to find out whether other native people who used C. elastica, Mesoamerican peoples, cut down the tree to obtain latex. 

So my question to the list is two-fold:

Are there accounts or images of pre-Columbian Mesoamericam practices for obtaining latex? I've seen some Spanish descriptions of rubber-processing, but not of tapping. Presumably the existence of such descriptions or images would show whether destroying the tree was thought necessary.

Has anyone encountered a botanist who knows a lot about Castilla elastica? There are hordes of rubber botanists, but all the ones I have contacted seem to specialize in Hevea. Even the guy who is listed as the species expert on C. elastica for the USDA plant database is a Hevea guy.

Thank you,
Charles C. Mann




Charles C. Mann
P.O. Box 66
Amherst, MA
01004-0066
www.charlesmann.org