Entangled Spaces
Entangled Spaces
Mapping Multiple Identities in Eighteenth-Century New Spain
By the end of the eighteenth century, various understandings of colonial land coexisted uneasily in New Spain. This is manifest in mapping practices that, while diverse in intention, format and production, adapted common constructs and cross-references that overlap on a continuum of domination and resistance. Consequently, in order to secure administrative reform and commercial expansion for Spain, Bourbon bureaucrats sought to map eighteenth-century Mexico as empirical cartographic space, a place where resources and inhabitants were identified, measured and located. In contrast, inhabitants—indigenous and non-indigenous landowners and colonial elites—mapped this territory within a network of cultural and historical ideas and themes and not just within a grid of geometry. Imperial and local mapping practices of New Spain were persistently entangled within these conditions of contingency and contradiction. Cartographic efforts of nineteenth-century Mexico would also manifest this entanglement as part of the nationalist struggle to resist domination and form identities that were distinct from Spain.
Keywords: New Spain, Spain, Mexico, cartography, mapping practices, colonialism, nationalism, elite
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