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Using unprecedented catalogues of past severe drought data for the Yucatan Peninsula between 1502 and 1900 coming from historical written documentation, we identified five conspicuous time lapses with no droughts between

A catalog containing an unprecedented amount of historical data in central Mexico, covering almost six centuries (1450–1900), is used. This is a catalog of agricultural disasters that includes events associated with hydrometeorological phenomena, or hazards, whose effects were mainly felt in the agricultural sector, such as droughts. An analysis of the historical series of droughts in central Mexico for the period of 1450–1900 is performed. Periods of frequent drought centered at the years 1483, 1533, 1571, 1601, 1650, 1691, 1730, 1783, 1818, and 1860 have been identified. In particular, droughts in Mexico City and northwest Mexico that were identified through poor tree-ring growth are included in the frequent drought periods obtained in this work. Moreover, it was found that droughts occurred in El Niño years mainly for events of very strong and strong strengths, at a significant level. Also, most droughts lasted for 1 or 2 yr. Last, by analyzing the periodicities of the drought time series it was found that those that are the most conspicuous are the quasi-bidecadal frequencies of 18.9 and 21 yr.

We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispecies networks, the politics of knowledge, gifts and mutual aid, and the work of recovery.

Using primary information coming from the two published volumes of Desastres agrícolas en México. Catálogo histórico (Agricultural Disasters in Mexico. Historical Catalogue), this article explores floods that occurred from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries in the Mexican Basin, including Tenochtitlan—later Mexico City—and the Valley of Mexico. Through their description and contextualisation it is possible to confirm the social character of disasters associated with natural hazards, be they climatic or environmental that occurred in the core of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexico.