Atlas ilustrado de los pueblos de indios. Nueva España, 1800 (review)

There are coffee table books, and then there are Coffee Table Books! Dorothy Tanck de Estrada has produced one of the latter. Not only is it heavy and filled with gorgeous full-color pictures, plans and maps, but it is also a positive contribution to scholarship in the tradition of Peter Gerhard's works on geography. She and her collaborators have culled statistical and visual information created between 1766 and 1800 regarding 4,468 officially recognized Indian communities within the sixteen intendencies of New Spain encompassed within the boundaries of the modern Mexican republic. These communities and their elected officials along with those of 20 Hispanic cities and 50 villas constituted the administrative foundation of viceregal government.

Tanck de Estrada's most important contribution is to produce modern maps on which these Indian towns are accurately placed. The degree of her success represents no small accomplishment—or effort. While INEGI (the Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática) already had information on 4,304 of these sites, the remaining 164 were not in its electronic databases and had to be rediscovered and identified by the Tanck de Estrada team. Many of them had been absorbed into larger communities or had simply disappeared except in folk memory. Two of the most extreme examples of the effort required to recover them lead to the book's partial dedication to two anonymous individuals who answered the single telephone is two small Yucatecan communities and provided her with the last pieces of her puzzle. Amazingly, in the end only 73 communities lack precise cartographical coordinates.

To add to the volume's utility, the publication includes a searchable CD-ROM so that students and scholars will be able to quickly access its treasures and put them to other uses. All of this makes this volume extremely valuable to any researcher with cartographical interests and in the formation of the indigenous towns of the colonial period.