Mexico a traves de los mapas (review)

Maps, like landscapes, are full of facts and meanings, many of which need more than the eye of the casual reader to discern and interpret. This small volume examines the representation of Mexico (or, more accurately, certain parts of Mexico) via several stages of its cartographic history. The seven chapters take the reader from prehispanic lienzos to atlases of the 1990s. The first surprise for the reader is the fact that the selection of maps reproduced in the book are not indexed and are located together after the bibliography at p. 205, necessitating the major inconvenience of constant moves fore and aft. Furthermore, having examined the first of the almost illegible maps, the reader may soon give up such a task. The maps reproduced are simply too small to be read—even with a magnifying glass—and since in many cases their color content is a key characteristic, most data are lost. Not that one expects a Mexican university press to be able to afford the glossy color prints of a book such as Barbara Mundy's superb The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (1996), but nowadays the Internet offers an alternative method of providing access to key original sources. The editor could quite easily have established a Web page on the excellent UNAM site in order to show all the selected maps at a variety of scales and in full color. Instead, the reader is left with textual analyses in which dozens of maps are cited but not displayed, a frustrating experience.

The first chapter adds very little to Mundy's account, merely noting that very early colonial survivals of native mapmaking focused on a limited range of topics: world images and details of the limits of señoríos (altepeme). We are given an excessive account of Vespucci's explorations and suggestions that the early Spanish interest focused on coastal descriptions, especially the location of rivers that could be used to penetrate inland.

The second chapter also covers indigenous cartography, but here the focus is on local and regional topographic maps. The author raises the interesting idea that perhaps "maps" as conceived by Europeans were not an indigenous form of visual expression, but rather forced colonial representations: spatial texts that were meant to be read as historical narratives (just how is unfortunately not clarified). Such maps were usually not "to scale," and their non-north-polarized nature emphasized the significance of the sun in their worldview.

We next encounter a fine analysis of the Bourbon desire to know more of the complex and rapidly expanding New Spain, and especially the key role played by Jesuit cartographers before their expulsion. The questionnaire surveys of the 1740s were useful sources for major maps such as Villaseñor's wonderfully titled "Yconismo hidrotérreo. . . ." The author demonstrates that copying and transferring information from one map to another was rampant in the eighteenth century, as were attempts to correct longitude and latitude. One is reminded that Humboldt used 28 earlier products to produce his celebrated map of 1804.

The next phase of cartographic expression is the independence period, when the military engineers and the nation had the task of identifying the state to which they belonged. "Geographical Engineering" now appeared in the public education system to allow pupils gain knowledge and hence control. At four million square kilometers, Mexico risked sessionist movements, and it was thus more than mere geography that interested those in Mexico City. Paradoxically, most of the sources available in the early independence period derived from the colonial state's activities, until the establishment of the Mexican Institute, and later Society, of Geography and History, when a new cadre of topographers and cartographers began to be produced. Mendoza...