Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Cartography and the Narration of Nation

FAIN: FT-53185-05

Magali Marie Carrera
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (North Dartmouth, MA 02747-2356)

More than forty years after its independence from Spain, Antonio García Cubas, a geographer and cartographer, created Mexico’s first general map, the CARTA GENERAL DE LA REPÚBLICA MEXICANA (1856). This self-mapping project, in resistance to colonial cartography and early-nineteenth century travel narratives, shaped a spatial stage for a refashioned cultural content of the Mexican nation. Subsequently, Cubas’ ATLAS GEOGRÁFICO and ATLAS PINTORESCO filled this stage with descriptions and visualizations of Mexico’s physical geography, as well as its ideological and historical geographies. García Cubas’ cartographic works assembled a national narrative—one that Mexican culture could tell to the world AND to itself as it traveled from being New Spain to becoming Mexico.

Associated Products

Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Book)
Title: Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Author: Magali Carrera
Abstract: Antonio García Cubas’s Carta general of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country’s geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life’s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how García Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies. From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display—such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs—signaled new ideas about spectatorship. García Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as the Atlas geográfico (1858) and the Atlas pintoresco é historico (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=15478
Primary URL Description: Duke University Press description
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 97808223497-1

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