Spanish naturalists established the Viceregal Botanical Garden of New Spain in Mexico City in 1788 to advance agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine. This colonial institution also served the ideological role of cultivating agents of empire. Rather than establish the garden in the already robust tradition of American botany, the Spanish appropriated this space, employing Creole students and servant workers to Europeanize local botanical knowledge through taxonomic colonialism. The different agendas at work in the botanical garden, which straddled the colonial and revolutionary periods in Mexico, destabilized not only this institution, but also the empire itself from the ground up. That the contributions of the agents of the garden have been forgotten is evidence of the fragility and failure of a European institution in the American colonial state.

中文翻译：

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被遗忘的植物学：新西班牙皇家植物园内的知识政治**

西班牙博物学家于 1788 年在墨西哥城建立了新西班牙总督植物园，以促进农业、制造业和医药的发展。这个殖民机构还起到了培养帝国代理人的意识形态作用。西班牙人没有在已经强大的美国植物学传统中建立花园，而是占用了这个空间，雇用克里奥尔学生和仆人通过分类殖民主义将当地植物知识欧洲化。跨越墨西哥殖民时期和革命时期的植物园的不同议程不仅破坏了这个机构的稳定，而且从根本上破坏了帝国本身。