A National Metaphysics: State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

The boundaries [of nation-states], and the naming of the space-time within them, are the reflections of power, and their existence has effects. Within them there is an active attempt to 'make places.'

--Doreen Massey, "Places and Their Pasts"

In 1847 Mariano Otero, attempting to account for the ease with which "ten or twelve thousand men . . . penetrated from Veracruz to the very capital of the republic," offered a stinging explanation: Mexico did not constitute, nor could it properly call itself, a nation. ¹ Locating the absence of nationhood in the persisting legacies of colonial rule, Otero questioned the degree to which Mexico had moved from colony to modern nation. Such an assertion must have proved disturbing to many, coming as it did a quarter-century after the proclamation of independence from Spanish rule. Certainly the Mexican elite that inherited the mantle of independence in 1821 imagined themselves to be members of a distinctly Mexican nation and state. ² Yet acts of imagination were not, in and of themselves, powerful enough to sustain Mexico, regardless of how hard or heartfelt "its" leaders imagined, as the turbulent years leading up to and including the Mexican-American War had amply demonstrated. ³ In the wake of the war, the questions that had confronted the republic in 1821 persisted: How would an extensive and complex landscape and its inhabitants cohere as an intelligible, material unit? How would a new political territory be seen as externally and internally legitimate? And what would be the best way to demonstrate that a nation, a state, a government were something more than mere conjecture? These were, to borrow a term from philosophy, metaphysical questions and the methods devised to answer them were part of a broader nationalist metaphysics. ⁴

Routines of mapping and naming figured as fundamental components of this nationalist metaphysics and in the symbolic creation of the Mexican nation-state. To demonstrate that Mexico was indeed something more than a concept, to legitimate Mexico's spatial and temporal existence, and to make visual arguments about its historical and geographical coherence, intellectuals from the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística [SMGE], with the backing of state officials, increasingly devoted their attention to the construction of general maps (cartas generales) of the republic. On the purportedly objective surfaces of national maps, they blended history and geography to connect a conceptual space to a narrated place, endowing Mexico with both a textual tangibility and a palpable past. Mexico thus materialized on the cartographer's table, a plotted surface upon which the nation-state's past and future could simultaneously unfold.

The following essay is divided into four sections: the first explains why Mexican officials pursued the construction of a national map; the second section analyzes Antonio García Cubas's 1857 carta general of Mexico to show how cartographic science visually naturalized the nation-state; the third section shows how artistic images that appeared on that same map served to connect the plotted territory to an ideologically saturated portrait of a supposedly quintessential Mexican landscape; and the final section focuses on the importance of place names on the map, specifically, how the arbitrary changing of place names by municipal authorities complicated metropolitan elites' desires to spatially (and cartographically) ground a foundational narrative.

Vision

The frontiers are there, the frontiers are sacred. What else, after all, could guarantee privilege and power to ruling elites?

--Basil Davidson, "On Revolutionary Nationalism: The Legacy of Cabral"

"[A]ll nations have begun as we have, on the road of science," averred Manuel Orozco y Berra in 1881. ⁵ It is no surprise that such a statement--revealing as it does the very constructedness of the nation-state--would come from one of Mexico's preeminent geographers. Geography proved a key science in the formation of nineteenth-century...