front cover of The Ethnohistorical Map in New Spain, Volume 61
The Ethnohistorical Map in New Spain, Volume 61
Alexander Hidalgo and John F. López
Duke University Press
This special issue brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to examine the relationship between cartography and the expression of ethnicity in the Viceroyalty of New Spain from 1521 to 1821. Maps from Oaxaca, central Mexico, and the Philippines, spanning the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, provide important yet understudied illustrations of the social, political, and geographic complexity of the regions. This collection of essays scrutinizes maps made by cosmographers, surveyors, indigenous painters, and scientists. The contributors explicate how ethnicity can inform discussions of colonialism, social memory, land tenure, visual representation, and science and technology, ultimately demonstrating how New Spain’s culture and society were forged during the early modern period.

Essays featured in this issue analyze the use of cartography to communicate the urban form of early colonial Mexico City and the application of botanical and protochemical knowledge to make ink for native maps from Oaxaca. Other essays address the representation of ethnicity and space in seventeenth-century Manila, the construction of spatial boundaries through the use of word and image in central Mexico, and the survival of Nahua place names and social ordering in eighteenth-century Mexico City.

Alexander Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Texas Christian University. John F. López is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.

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front cover of Trail of Footprints
Trail of Footprints
A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico
By Alex Hidalgo
University of Texas Press, 2019

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

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