Magali M. Carrera
Antonio GarcÃ­a Cubasâ€™s ,Carta general, of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the countryâ€™s geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his lifeâ€™s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how GarcÃ­a 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 displayâ€”such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairsâ€”signaled new ideas about spectatorship. GarcÃ­a 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 geogrÃ¡fico, (1858) and the ,Atlas pintoresco Ã© historico, (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.
Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico