Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes

by Raymond B. Craib

In Cartographic Mexico , Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession—or “state fixation”—with determining and “fixing” geographic points, lines, and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking central Veracruz as a case in point, he shows how in the field, agrarian officials, military surveyors, and metropolitan geographers traversed a “fugitive landscape” of overlapping jurisdictions and use rights, ambiguous borders, shifting place names, and villagers with their own conceptions of history and territory. Drawing on an array of sources—including maps, letters from peasants, official reports, and surveyors’ journals and correspondence—Craib follows the everyday, contested processes through which officials attempted to redefine and codify such fugitive landscapes in struggle with the villagers they encountered in the field. In the process, he vividly demonstrates how surveying and mapmaking were never mere technical they were, and remain to this day, profoundly social and political practices in which surveyors, landowners, agrarian bureaucrats, and peasants all played powerful and complex roles.

Genres: History, Cartography, School

328 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2004

About the author

Raymond Craib is an Associate Professor at Cornell in the Department of History. Trained as a Latin Americanist with a primary interest in Mexico and Chile, his thematic interests are eclectic but tend to revolve largely around issues of property, space, history and anarchism. He is currently completing a book on the persecution of ‘subversives’ in Chile in the 1910s.

Reviews

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Craib looks at how Mexico in the 19th century (and continuing on into the 20th) set out to create definitive maps of the state. By so doing the government hoped to prove Mexico's own standing among nations (early maps tied the newly independent nation to the indigenous tradition, to show it wasn't just some colonial creation) and to settle countless land disputes at the local level. A rational project that foundered repeatedly on the irrationality of land and the way local Mexicans saw it in real life — many boundary mapping projects foundered on the inability to even define which local river had which name, for instance. Interesting, though obviously specialized.

[Devon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't be an accurate judge for books like this... They start out fine but then I get bored of it HAVE to finish it by a deadline for school while also writing about it...

[Theresa]

Ursula Villa-Deville recommended