Overview

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Overview

A map does more than represent physical space. It situates space in time and in a particular social, political, cultural, and scientific context. Geographic maps make select elements of natural spaces into cultural places whose physical features have meaning for humans who use them, among other purposes, to navigate voyages and claim land or govern peoples. Mapping in the Americas existed before the arrival of Europeans in 1492, but, as Argentine urban historian Jorge Hardoy noted in 1983, there is no history of Latin American cartography, perhaps because of distinct national and imperial histories and multiple mapmaking traditions derived from and sometimes combining Amerindian and European practices.

PRE-COLUMBIAN MAPPING

Pre-Columbian mapping to represent space was most developed among the Nahua and Aztecs (Mexica), a people without a word for map because their pictorial representation on paper, cloth, and hides of landholdings, territories, routes, war plans, and rivers did not differ significantly from their image-based writing. Although the Maya are reported to have created similar maps, only pre-Columbian cosmographical maps representing sacred space survive. Scholars identify Andean peoples as representing secular and religious space using abstract images on ceramics and textiles, but only Mexica scribes are known to have made maps to facilitate conquistadors' travels, confirming not only their expertise but their ability to make representations legible to heirs of a different symbolic tradition.

MAPPING IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

From initial sketches to methodically constructed and lavishly illustrated maps, European cartography from Columbus's earliest expeditions not only depicted geographical space but claimed literal and figurative control over land and inhabitants and reflected Europe's changing understanding of the globe. Europeans were the first to map the Americas as a unit comprising the Caribbean and North, Central and South America, setting the stage for justifications for controlling this unit. The Portuguese, under Prince Henry the Navigator, were perhaps the most advanced cartographers in Europe, but the Spanish-sponsored Columbus expeditions were the first to map American lands. Initial maps identifying Central America's coast as part of Asia were soon replaced with more accurate renderings of continents that undermined the medieval understanding that only water separated Western Europe from Asia to the west. They also highlighted claims by European states to control specific territories by naming or renaming places, using saints' names (San Salvador), names of metropolitan centers (New Spain), or geographic features (Buenos Aires), applying hybrid names (San Luís Potosí) to existing villages. In this way they largely inscribed European territorial control across American places.

Iberian Manuscript Maps

Few detailed Spanish or Portuguese maps, particularly city plans or maps of shores, harbors, and sea routes, were published in the sixteenth century, for fear of use by rival European powers, particularly France and England, whose pirates, privateers, and naval vessels sought to hijack bullion and develop contraband trade. Instead, pilots' reports and maps were likely to be held in manuscript form in government archives. Such maps might include navigational innovations, such as scales of latitude and longitude that put locating grids on rhumb lines or formerly empty space, transforming medieval-style maritime charts, such as the 1500 portolan world map by Spanish cartographer Juan de la Cosa, into precursors of modern maps. Or they might include navigational charts, such as Lisbon cartographer João Teixeira's 1630 manuscript atlas of secret maps of Portugal's empire that, among other things, pushed the line separating Spanish from Portuguese possessions to the west. So foreigners such as Britain's Sir Walter Ralegh were particularly delighted to collect "a secret mappe of those partes made in Mexico … for the King of Spaine" (Harley 1988, p. 64).

Published World Maps and Atlases

Outside Iberia, New World discoveries prompted multiple innovations in cartography, as mapmakers who had never visited the New World developed and published maps for European consumption, based on explorers' reports. In 1507, cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller published the first map to label the continents as the Americas, probably due to Amerigo Vespucci's identification of this "unknown land" as a continent unheard of by Ptolemy and the classical world, and to show the Pacific Ocean as a separate body of water. The Eurocentric world map, with north on top, would remain a standard (and seemingly objective) representation until twentieth century cartographers not only flipped the world upside down, but also made Afrocentric or Asia-centric maps, revealing how this seemingly neutral map actually symbolized and naturalized Western European power.

Abraham Ortelius published the first full world atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570, Antwerp), a map in book form made for transport, not walls; Cornelius Wytfliet's first atlas of the Americas, Descriptionis Ptolemaicae augmentum (1597, Louvain), followed, along with Gerardus Mercator's cylindrical projection, which is still used for navigation charts and world maps. By 1601, with information widely available, the chronicler of Spain's Council of the Indies, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, published Spain's first official atlas of fourteen folding maps of its American territories as part of his four-volume Historia General de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas i tierra firme del mar océano (1601, Madrid).

Despite extensive exploration and mapping, lacunae remained in early imperial cartography; California was occasionally represented as an island, and the fabled city of Cíbola and the Northwest Passage sometimes appeared as real places. In addition, shores, bays, and rivers connecting coastal settlements were more accurately depicted than the interiors, which Europeans had neither settled nor fully controlled. Early European maps of the New World thus showed a progression in understanding basic geography and topography, and the limits of control over territorial interiors (which served as refuges for many indigenous peoples as well as maroon, or runaway slave, communities).

COLONIAL MAPPING

As colonization followed exploration, early Latin American cartography developed a syncretism in which both American and European world views mixed in maps by both groups, maps meant to make policy as well as represent territory.

Syncretic Cartography

One European hybrid map is the 1524 woodcut of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital on whose ruins Hernán Cortés founded Mexico City. The art historian Barbara Mundy believes the woodcut's sources is one of two maps, now lost, that Cortés sent to Charles V to promote his conquest: a detailed city map of Tenochtitlán of unknown authorship and "a cloth with all the coast painted on it, and … a river which ran to the sea" (Mundy 1998, p. 25). Mundy makes a convincing case that the European representation "translated" Mexica towns into Renaissance villages, showing both how "civilized" and "well-ordered" this society was and its "barbaric" practice of human sacrifice, seen in the city's temple precinct and skull rack, which justified Spain's conquest. A public domain image of this map can be found on the Web site of the History Project at the University of California, Davis; a black-and-white image is also available from the Library of Congress.

In Mexico, caciques (chieftains) and other holders of pre-Columbian documents converted manuscripts of primarily historical or genealogical content into "written maps" by adding text to indicate boundaries, probably for use as evidence in Spanish courts, and continued to use footprints for roads and bell shapes for communities on postconquest maps. Native authors also integrated their own symbols into maps commissioned by Europeans. The most well-known examples of hybrid cartography are the surviving 160 maps (of 191) produced (relaciones geográficas) in the 1570s in response to Spain's demands for information from all parts of the Americas, a process dubbed "mapping by questionnaire" (Edwards 1969). The Crown asked for details on demographics, political jurisdictions, languages, physical terrain, and native vegetation, as well as city plans, to provide data for metropolitan scholars including Juan López de Velasco author of the 1571–1574 manuscript Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias. Relación geográfica plans of Mexican towns such as Cholula and Culhuacán depict a Spanish grid pattern but add Tlaxcalan glyphs and mountains next to Spanish churches or footprints to indicate pathways, hinting that indigenous informants and authors were as prevalent in this project as in previous and subsequent inquiries into geographic, ethnographic, and natural history.

European Mapping

As Europeans' control and knowledge of the Americas increased, their methods and techniques came to dominate maps produced for and by colonial and later national governments whose elites shared Western values and education. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French officials in the Americas mapped the towns and land of colonial districts; individuals and town councils commissioned cadastral surveys of private land claims and property; governors asked for maps of proposed new roads; mariners took soundings and charted bays and shores; priests and missionaries issued statistical and geographical information from their parish and bishopric visitas; engineers drafted plans of cities and fortresses, and architectural renderings of new buildings accompanied reports to colonial and metropolitan military, commercial, and administrative authorities. Neither the Spanish nor their competitors seem to have expended much energy mapping mining centers, which may have been a strategic decision. European audiences without access to such official maps might turn to books published by the occasional traveler to Spanish or Portuguese America. The Briton Thomas Gage lived as a Dominican friar in Mexico and Central America before returning to England, where he published a critique of Spanish colonialism with maps based on first-hand observations.

Eighteenth-Century Mapping

Eighteenth-century mapmaking continued as part of a larger project of collecting and disseminating encyclopedic information about a region, and as well as extending power over territory by placing particular regions, landmarks, and borders, on an imperial power's map. Military engineers and civilians with training in mathematics, astronomy, and geometry mapped to answer scientific questions. If Latin America did not develop novel cartographic science, it once again proved important to its advancement. Famous maps emerged from surveys done by scientists such as Charles de la Condamine and his associates who traveled to the Audiencia of Quito in 1736 to determine the length of a degree of latitude, and so settle the question of the shape of the earth. Spanish experts on the expedition, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, contributed not only scientific measurements but commentary on problems with colonial society. The most famous cartographer of late colonial Spanish America was, however, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who explored South America, Cuba, and Mexico with French naturalist and illustrator Aimé Bonpland from 1799 to 1804. Like sixteenth-century chroniclers, Humboldt carried not just scientific instruments but "sacks of verbiage" with which to inscribe peoples and places on maps, in copious illustrations, tables, and charts, and in his multivolume travel narratives describing political, social, economic, and cultural as well as geographic, climatological, and biological elements (Burnett 2000, p. 94). Among his other contributions to geographic knowledge, Humboldt was the first to suggest that the Americas and Africa might once have been joined, and his four-month, 1725-mile trip down the Orinoco led to confirmation of the communication of the Orinoco and Amazon River water systems. In a way, Humboldt's work extended the cartographic syncretism of the early colonial cartogra-phers, as he relied on local knowledge as well as his own scientific investigation; however, he drew not from Aztec lords but Creole elites.

Spanish naval officers, including Alejandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante, continued to map for political purposes as part of imperial cartography's emphasis on defending claims to poorly explored areas, such as the Pacific Northwest and South America's interior, which had dense forests, difficult mountains, and challenging climates, and lacked easily exploitable natural resources and labor pools. As Europeans moved inland, notional boundaries, such as the 1494 division of Spanish and Portuguese South America under the Treaty of Tordesillas, came to need real markers. As a result, after 1750 and 1770 treaty attempts proved fruitless; the Portuguese and Spanish mounted joint expeditions starting in 1778 to determine the boundaries between their South American colonies.

THE NATIONAL PERIOD

By the early nineteenth century, as most Spanish and Portuguese territories became independent of their European metropolises, the new national governments harnessed cartography (much as did other governments of the time) to fill in blanks, set boundaries, catalogue natural and human resources, and project an image of the legitimacy and authority of their states for both internal and external audiences.

Defining Countries

Who mapped in this period? National governments worked assiduously to create maps that would define their territorial boundaries in what historian Raymond Craib has called "state fixations": attempts to control "fugitive landscapes" in which competing forces—individual landowners, village elders, military officials, tax agents—fought over boundaries, water or drilling rights, and other issues. Such mapping projects continued the colonial tradition of seeking to improve knowledge and accuracy of representation of topographic features, and resulted in locally authored atlases, such as Miguel Rivera Maestre's 1832 atlas of Guatemala's seven departments and a national map and Antonio García Cubas's 1858 General Map of Mexico. Maps were compiled using information from expeditions and surveys, colonial records, and even vignettes from nineteenth-century travel accounts, to provide not just a topography but a more complex physical and political geography that incorporated distant and sometimes autonomous populations into the new states, fixing them on the map and, symbolically, under the control of national elites, while providing a catalogue of local customs, costumes, products, flora, and fauna. Agustín Codazzi, an Italian-born military officer and engineer, was hired in the 1830s by Venezuela with a mandate that shows just how closely the new republics correlated having an accurate map with good governance. Codazzi was to "facilitate military operations, further the knowledge of provincial limits, determine what the exact tributary contributions should be, aid in the development of agriculture, facilitate the opening and construction of roadways, help in the drainage of lakes and swamps and facilitate the navigation of rivers" (Del Castillo 2004, n. 5).

International Borders

Marking national and international boundaries motivated a significant part of nineteenth-century Latin American cartography, because the outer limits of the colonial administrative districts forming most present-day Latin American states were often unclear. For example, Rivera Maestre's 1832 Guatemala atlas left its border with Mexico undefined while claiming parts of Honduras far beyond colonial boundaries. Codazzi later directed Colombia's Chorographic Commission (1849–1859); his recommendations for where to set the country's borders in the Caquetá region with Ecuador and Brazil largely hold. In general, as in the case that settled the Honduran-Nicaraguan border in 1906 using (among other sources) nineteen German, Dutch, and British maps dated from 1597 to 1777, historical maps of varying accuracy were called on to support both sides. Such disputes also prompted new surveys. The British government sent Robert Schomburgk to Guyana in the 1830s to explore the colony's backlands, as Venezuela, Brazil, and British colonial authorities disputed its national boundary (much as independent Guyana and Venezuela still do, despite U.S. arbitration in 1899). Schomburgk, like Codazzi, used the traverse survey that Humboldt favored, which allowed a small group to chart altitude and latitude and longitude positions, transcribe their route and sight lines, and later create a map that provided detail on the colony's rivers, mountains, and territory. The trigonometric survey technique, while more accurate, required unfeasibly larger and more expensive teams of surveyors.

Nineteenth-century conflicts created additional cartographic demands, from the War of the Pacific to the Mexican-American War. After the latter, a Mexico Boundary Commission demarcated the border after it had been described and agreed upon in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Changing riverbeds and water rights disputes led to the creation of a permanent body, the International Boundary Commission (1889; as of 1944, the International Boundary and Water Commission), to address disagreements and preserve the boundary at the Rio Grande and Colorado River. As the post-independence civil wars largely drew to a close by the late nineteenth century, governments institutionalized national cartography by creating geographical and statistical institutes charged with mapping political boundaries, populations, mineral resources, and road and river systems; they also established military institutes that mapped for military purposes, with cartographers trained in U.S. and European techniques and schools. Mexico's Geographic Exploration Commission, created by Porfirio Díaz, was one such institution. Business, academic, and leisure travelers, too, grew in numbers and supplemented official maps with cartography about themes that interested them: plans of Maya ruins, geological surveys of valleys with mining potential, charts locating ethnic groups or volcano chains.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAPPING

Twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin-American cartography has been affected by changing technologies and international organizations. After World War II, aerial photography enabled cartographers to combine ground observations and remote sensing to increase the accuracy of maps, and in the 1970s and 1980s computers allowed databases of information to be stored in geographic information systems (GIS) in which there are multiple ways to store, analyze, and display georeferenced information. These techniques have resulted in more complete and accurate maps produced by government agencies and private companies. By the 1940s many states had established national geographic institutes, eventually combining cartographic offices with other statistics-gathering agencies to create institutions such as Brazil's Institution Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE, 1937) and Mexico's INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía, e Informática, 1980), which produce not only maps but demographic and other important population and economic statistics. Equally important, America's nations created regional organizations which promoted multinational and regional geographical and cartographic advances. The twenty-two-member Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia (1928) based in Mexico City became a specialized agency of the Organization of American States (1948) in 1949, and has spent eighty years funding, promoting, and coordinating cartographic, geographic, geophysical, and historical studies.

Maps and Travel

The twentieth century also produced two relatively novel kinds of mapping projects. First, starting in the early part of the century, there was a boom in mapping for business travelers and tourists who could choose road, rail, or air travel to visit modern cities, ancient ruins, sunny beaches, or folkloric villages. National touring clubs promoted the travel business and developed specialized maps and guidebooks for a new group of map consumers, travelers who scheduled their own flights and hired their own cars to visit formerly difficult-to-access places on newly paved roads. In Mexico, the result was the Guia Roja series, and in Brazil, the Guía Rodivaria of the Río de Janeiro branch of the national auto club. In the United States, Rand McNally and General Drafting, among other companies, provided maps for foreigners planning driving tours on parts of the Pan-American Highway. Such maps, in addition to including practical information such as distances and driving times, might include icons of sombreros or happy tourists throwing beach balls in water, emphasizing the tourists' interest in Latin America as a place for pleasure and entertainment, and one in which natural wonders—whether agricultural export items or caves and rivers to explore—abounded. In the early twenty-first century it is not unusual for a tourist center such as Antigua, Guatemala, to distribute maps of its colonial center ringed with advertisements for the hotels, restaurants, and boutiques that underpin the local economy.

Indigenous Knowledge and Cartography

Until the late twentieth century, state and private mapping followed late colonial and early national precedent, often ignoring indigenous knowledges and methods of representing or marking space. More recently, the political success (with international support) of indigenous movements has resulted in the second mapmaking novelty, indigenous participation in cartographic projects from Belize to Panama and from Venezuela to Guyana and Brazil to secure land titles, sometimes in coordination with conservationists. Quechua- and Aymara-speakers living near Lake Titicaca use maps that blend both Western and Andean representational precepts in negotiations with Peruvian officials, and there are foreign-funded GIS labs in both Bolivia and Perú. In the early 1990s, Colombia launched a mapas parlantes (speaking maps) project, intended to recover and promote history as recalled and spoken by indigenous peoples. Activist geographers have fostered such projects. Peter Herlihy and Bjorn Sletto, among others, have returned to a syncretic cartographic tradition and work with native groups using new technologies, including GIS, to allow these groups to create their own representations of the territory they occupy. In the Honduran La Mosquitia region (the Mosquito Coast), Herlihy developed a form of "participative cartography" that invited Garifuna, Miskito, Pech, and other indigenous populations to give interviews to help "ascertain their popular geographical conceptions" in the 1990s. In 2001, sponsored by the Honduran and German governments, the same team worked on "participatory research mapping" to develop a zoning and management plan for Central America's oldest biosphere reserve, "transforming cognitive knowledge of local peoples into standard maps and data, seeking to catalyze partnerships for conservation" (Herlihy 2001).

ART AND CARTOGRAPHY

Cartographers, official and unofficial, were not the only authors of influential maps of Latin America. Artists have used maps across the centuries to create and display knowledge and challenge power. In the colonial period, portraits of viceroys and explorers might locate the subject standing next to or seated at a table on which a map of newly conquered or visited territory symbolized control. In 1943 Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García inverted a map of South America by flipping the continent so that Patagonia and the "South Pole" were at the top, drawing in white on a black background to emphasize the oppositional politics of his message. Nestling the map in between a sun and moon that appear to be derived from Inca iconography, the "upside-down" continent seems to propose a world in which North America and Mexico are not even on the map. Why? Some argue that the image promoted a Latin American art with indigenous as well as European roots, one intended to displace Northern artistic production with Southern creativity. Such a map, combining scientific and artistic aspects, is a reminder that cartography of and from this region is part of a long tradition of using representations of physical space to claim and contest power.

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Jordana Dym

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture