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Cartography and Power in the Conquest and Creation of New Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Raymond B. Craib
Raymond B. Craib*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Abstract

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With the so-called linguistic turn, historians have begun to study the ways in which a multitude of cultural forms are imbricated in the colonial and imperial project. In analyzing the infinite ways in which power is exercised and manifested, historians are turning a critical eye toward a myriad of cultural productions for a better understanding of how culture, politics, and power work in concert. One example is the increasing scrutiny given to geographical conceptions and representations. In Latin American colonial studies, a number of recent works have analyzed the ways in which deep, culturally rooted structures of spatial perception and representation have influenced the colonial process. This essay attempts to bring a number of those works into meaningful dialogue with one another with respect to the cultural and political facets of cartography. It also introduces work by scholars studying other regions of the world that may push the field farther and the work of the “new cultural cartographers” who have problematized traditional notions about the mimetic quality of maps and their presumed objectivity. In sum, this essay surveys recent literature pertaining to colonial cartography in Latin America, analyzes a number of comparative and theoretical studies that may broaden future research, and suggests that cartography and maps offer a fruitful avenue for further study and analysis of colonialism, imperialism, and state formation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 7 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I am especially grateful to Rolena Adorno and Gil Joseph for their encouragement and close critical readings of previous versions of this essay. I would also like to thank Stuart Schwartz for numerous bibliographic suggestions and insightful comments on an early draft of this essay written for his seminar, Colonial Latin American Social and Cultural History, as well as three anonymous LARR referees for their sharp critiques. I have also benefited substantially from discussions with Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Jim Scott, Graham Burnett, Robert Holden, Rick López, Todd Hartch, Kevin Repp, and Jonathan Amith. I am indebted to Mark Overmyer-Velázquez for his last-minute help.

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