Centering Animals in Latin American History is a book that lives up to its thematically inspired title. While Latin American historians have written about non-human animals before, the latter have usually been tallied as resources, vectors of disease, or human-introduced factors contributing to ecological change. This anthology, edited by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, is the very best example of a new trend in historiography that studies non-human animals as our partners in the generation of history.

Sometimes the non-human animals in this collection are approached as resources, as in Reinaldo Funes Monzote's references to animal labour in nineteenth-century Cuba, John Soluri's study of seal hunting along the Patagonian littoral between 1860 and 1930, and Regina Horta Duarte's exploration of the use of Brazilian birds' feathers in early twentieth-century hat manufacturing. However, the animals in the book are never reduced to mere resources. All of these three contributors are primarily focused on how the exploitation of animals and nature could lead to the adoption of conservationist and protectionist positions by some. In Brazil, conservationists noted that the decimation of birds like the tico-tico (rufous-collared sparrow) eliminated ‘workmen’ in insect control who aided agriculture by destroying 33,600 insects per week in a 30-square-kilometre area (p. 289). In Cuba, ‘the late nineteenth-century supporters of the Sociedad Cubana Protectora de Animales y Plantas regarded both nonhuman animals and African slaves as exploited labor forces’, and, just as in the United States, there was some overlap between abolitionists and those struggling for early animal welfare legislation (p. 222). Although non-human animals remained resources, as elsewhere, they were also clearly seen as sentient beings by reformers in Latin America – as sufferers and much more than mere Skinnerian condition-response machines.

Centering Animals does not shy away from a self-identified ‘challenge’ to attempt ‘more comprehensive and less anthropocentric cultural histories’ when the only documents that can be used are written by humans (p. 3). In their introduction, Few and Tortorici state: ‘While we will never be able to know what the animals were thinking, we can look at nonhuman animal reactions to invasive human cultural practices as evidence of their sentience, their cognition, and their instincts to circumvent what they perceived to be particularly threatening, dangerous, or painful situations’ (pp. 14–15). Like the primatologist Jane Goodall, Few and Tortorici allow for animal agency, and essays like Soluri's and Neel Ahuja's on Clarence Ray Carpenter's efforts to establish a rhesus colony for medical research in Puerto Rico in the 1920s provide the evidence to support the introduction's claim. By the 1870s, Patagonian seals had adapted to human predation and Soluri's seal hunters could no longer be certain ‘from one season to the next about where large seal colonies would be found’ (p. 263), while by the 1940s, Carpenter's rhesus monkeys had started swimming from the islet of Cayo Santiago to the Puerto Rican mainland (p. 189). The actions of these animals imply choices made that defy the mechanistic interventions of humanity.

Martha Few herself contributes to this discussion with her chapter ‘Killing Locusts in Colonial Guatemala’. Casting new light on the changes wrought by the eighteenth-century Bourbon regime's efforts at centralisation, Few shows how earlier community-run efforts at locust eradication saw locusts as evil agents who could be exorcised like humans. As the eighteenth century progressed, ‘good’ domesticated human allies like pigs and sheep might still be used ‘to eat the insects and trample and crush their egg sacs’ (p. 81), but systematising manuals and centralised coordination of groups of locust killers expressed a proto-industrial approach to non-human animals that never completely reduced these living beings to the status of mere machines. Indeed, Zeb Tortorici's essay on canine baptisms, weddings and funerals in Bourbon Mexico provides insight into both human love and concern for pets and the use of animals in Carnivalesque satires of hierarchy and religious tradition. In 1780, a mock baptism of two dogs was stopped when ‘the owner of the dogs, María Dolores, became concerned that they would be harmed if they were doused in the makeshift baptismal font’ (p. 100).

While humans like the Maya and non-human animals alike might have been described as ‘wild’ and ‘diseased’ – subject to the medicinal and social hygiene of nineteenth-century state-building, according to Heather McCrea's chapter ‘Pest to Vector’ – this is never the entire story. Amerindians also appear as human contributors to the construction of cultural ‘animality’ in Latin American history. Sometimes they blurred the boundaries between human and non-human animals, but sometimes they also reinforced them. Adam Warren shows us the extent to which non-human animals were, like plants, used as medicinal resources by indigenous populations such as the colonial Kallawaya of the Andes, while León García Garagarza mines colonial documents and codices to show how pre-Columbian traditions of nagualismo survived in New Spain to promote resistance to Spanish rule and to describe Spanish-induced cultural transformations in terms associated with Amerindian shape-shifting traditions. In the words of the nahualli Juan Teton, ‘Those who eat the flesh of cows will be transformed into that’, and ‘Those who eat Castilian chickens will be transformed into that’ (p. 39). Finally, ‘problematising’ Juan Teton's magical vision, Lauren Derby's ‘Trujillo the Goat’ shows us the extent to which ‘[c]alling Trujillo a goat, then eating him as a form of resistance’ had overtones of both sympathetic magic and political metaphor in a Carnivalesque release that was more sophisticated than ‘superstitious’ (p. 319).

In the anthology's concluding essay, Neil L. Whitehead reminds us that while finding animal agency in human documents is problematic, animals do not appear to be the mere ‘passive recipients of human agency’ (p. 337). They are part of the deep history of Earth, despite our anthropocentric conceits. Available in a paperback edition, Centering Animals can help bring this human critical reflection into the Latin American history classroom. It is a truly worthy book.