From Food of the Gods to Avocado Toast: Bringing the Mesoamerican Avocado to California in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The earliest avocados of the Americas were so prized by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec peoples for their rich caloric content and buttery flavor that they were portrayed in iconography on king’s tombs and used as place names for ancient cities. During the colonial period, the Spanish used the fruit as food for enslaved people on sugar plantations across their land holdings. However, in the early nineteenth century, the US Consul brought avocados from Campeche, Mexico, to Florida, and by the mid-1900s seedings were transported from Nicaragua and Mexico to California. This started a trend of foreigners bringing avocados in various forms to California, although their popularity was hindered by their poor survival rate due to annual frosts. Using archival sources, family histories, and informant interviews, this paper will discuss the role that Southern California nurseries, “gentleman farmers,” and amateur horticulturists played in ultimately establishing the crop in California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, setting the stage for today’s avocado obsession in the United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38149.0