Many ethnohistorians will initially doubt the need for a collection of essays to “counteract the relative invisibility of animals in Latin American historiography” (5). After all, animals and other biota, from plants to pathogens, have long been prominent in historical studies of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yet the editors of this collection intend a much more radical centering of animals than, for example, histories about horses and the impact of their introduction on native life on the Pampas. Instead, the editors propose to decenter humans and make horses and other nonhumans the central actors in shared human-nonhuman histories. The emergence of posthumanism in the social sciences provides the inspiration, namely, the recognition that nonhumans also possess the agency to transform social relations. The hope is that the expansion of protagonists from humans to animals will enhance historical accounts to a similar degree as prior expansions from elite white males...