Cartographic Mexico

Craib Raymond B Craib

Description

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 procedures: 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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• México
• 20th century
• History of the Americas
• Mexico

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385943
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

✴ Cart ographic Mexico

a book in the series

Latin America Otherwise:

Languages, Empires, Nations

Series editors:

Walter D. Mignolo,duke university

Irene Silverblatt,duke university

SoniaSald ´ ıvar-Hull,university of california, los angeles

Maps might appear to be objective records of an objective geography, but, as Raymond Craib has shown, they are anything but. In his sweeping study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps drawn under the auspices of the Mexican government, Craib presents the political side of maps—an underside often hidden by the technocratic surface of ‘‘map- making.’’ For these maps didn’t simply reflect a spatial reality; they cre- ated one. Maps were politics: they made Mexico appear to be a unified, coherent entity, and they did so, in part, by plastering over conflicts be- tween government agencies and local communities. Maps were doubly functional: they gave Mexico internal definition and were a key to its membership in the international club of nations. With great originality and insight, Craib has inspected a ‘‘taken- for-granted’’ of modern life and revealed its immersion in relations of power. Nonetheless, he is careful to record the social contradictions and complications of mapmaking: while maps were a tool of power, they were also challenged; while maps expressed the will of government agencies, they were also lightening rods of resistance. Maps could never totally dominate the geographical vision of Mexico’s subjects, and, to bear out Craib’s argument, Mexico is still confounded by conflicts rooted in a question of maps, in questions of the state’s version of territorial—and political—control. Craib, by penetrating the surface of something as or- dinary as maps, has helped us see Latin America otherwise.

✴ Cartographic Mexico

a h istory of state fixation s

and fugitive land scapes

Raymond B. Craib

✴

Duke Universit y Press

Durham and London

2004

2004 duke university press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Janson by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Publication of this book was made possible by a subvention granted by the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.

An earlier version of chapter1was originally published as ‘‘A Nationalist Metaphysics: State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review82:1(2002). An earlier version of chapter3was originally published as ‘‘Standard Plots and Rural Resistance,’’ inThe Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson. Durham: Duke University Press,2003.

✴ for cynthia

✴ Contents

List of Illustrations,xi

Abbreviations,xiii

Acknowledgments,xv

Introduction: Writing a Spatial History of Modern Mexico,1

1The Terrain of Tradition,19

2Fugitive Landscapes,55

3Standard Plots,91

4Situated Knowledges: The Geographic Exploration Commission ( I),127

5Spatial Progressions: The Geographic Exploration Commission ( II),163

6Fluvial Confusions,193

7Revolutionary Spaces,219

Epilogue: ‘‘These questions will never end,’’255

Bibliography,261

Index,289