A nationalist metaphysics: State fixations, national maps and the geo-historical imagination in nineteenth-century Mexico

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 82, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 33-68

  Craib, Raymond B ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 31144447588     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-82-1-33     Document Type: Article

References (162)

1. Mariano Otero, "Considerations Relating to the Political and Social Situation of the Mexican Republic in the Year 1847," in The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War, ed. and trans. Cecil Robinson (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1989)
2. The most comprehensive statement to this effect can be found in David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991)
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993)
4. and Alan Knight, "Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation," Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 10, no. 1 (1994)
5. Manuel Orozco y Berra, Apuntes para la historia de la geografía en México (Mexico City: Imp. de Francisco Díaz de León, 1881), 425
6. See the essays collected in Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994)
7. and Horacio Capel, "Institutionalization of Geography and Strategies of Change," in Geography, Ideology and Social Concern, ed. David R. Stoddart (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)
8. On the rapid rise of national geographic societies, see J. B. Harley, "The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography," in Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, vol. 1 of The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987)
9. See Héctor Mendoza Vargas, "Historia de la geografía en México: Siglo XIX" (bachelor's thesis, Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989), esp. 42-50
10. See Edmundo O'Gorman, Historia de las divisiones territoriales de México, 3d ed. (Mexico City: Ed. Porrua, 1966)
11. Gerald L. McGowan, Geografía político administrativa de la reforma: Una visión histórica (Aguascalientes: INEGI, 1991)
12. and Carlos San Juan Victoria and Salvador Velázquez Ramírez, "La formacion del estado y las políticas económicas (1821-1880)," in México en el siglo XIX: História económica y de la estructura social, ed. Ciro Cardoso (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1980)
13. On the abundance and precision of state maps see Tomás Ramón del Moral, "Condiciones del trabajo geográfico de la Comisión de Geografía y Estadística del Estado de México, 1827-1829," in Lecturas geográficas mexicanas: Siglo XIX, ed. Héctor Mendoza Vargas (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 3-6
14. See also, Orozco y Berra, Apuntes para la historia
15. and Timothy Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821-1835 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998), 100
16. See Ramón del Moral, "Condiciones del trabajo geográfico," 3
17. quoted in Héctor Mendoza Vargas, "Las opciones geográficas al inicio del México independiente," in México a través de los mapas, ed. Héctor Mendoza Vargas (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2000)
18. Actas de la Comisión de Estadística Militar, 27 Oct. 1839
19. On the way in which politics and poetics dovetail in the active verb "to represent," see Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 15
20. For critiques of the powerful and persistent notion that maps simply mirror a spatial reality, see J. B. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge and Power," in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988)
21. idem, "Deconstructing the Map," Cartographica 26 (1989)
22. idem, "Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe," Imago Mundi 40 (1988)
23. idem, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992)
24. See also Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 1992)
25. I discuss this literature further in Raymond B. Craib, "Cartography and Power in the Conquest and Creation of New Spain," Latin American Research Review 35, no. 1 (2000). It is understandable but somewhat ironic that efforts to deconstruct the map and problematize space have arisen at the same time that spatial metaphors - "mapping" and "space" are prominent examples - have gained increasing popularity in academic writing. While the pervasive use of spatial metaphors is welcome in as much as it may reflect an increased sensitivity to space in critical theory, there is a very real danger that a proliferating and uncritical metaphorical promiscuity may give such words little more than a trendy banality, simultaneously sapping them of their critical meaning and inadvertently implying that cartography, and space itself, is unproblematic
26. See Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, "Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics," in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge, 1993)
27. and Geraldine Pratt, "Spatial Metaphors and Speaking Positions," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992)
28. See the analysis in Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1994)
29. On signs as predictive - as representing things as yet only imagined - see Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996)
30. On the increasing role of territorial coherence in the definition of the modern nation-state, see Charles S. Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era," American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000). Maier locates this new emphasis on territoriality around 1860, "for the sake of simplicity," although he does note that already by the late seventeenth century fluid zonal frontiers were progressively being superceded by defined boundaries, which set the limits of sovereign control
31. An exemplary study of this shift, rooted in the social experience of agrarian life in the Pyrenees, is Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989)
32. The phrase is Christon Archer's from his review essay, "Discord, Disjunction, and Reveries of Past and Future Glories: Mexico's First Decades of Independence, 1810-1853," Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 16, no. 1 (2000): 192
33. On cartographic determinism and U.S. imperialism, see Raymond B. Craib and D. Graham Burnett, "Insular Visions: Cartographic Imagery and the Spanish American War," The Historian 61, no. 1 (1998)
34. Succinct overviews of U.S. policy towards Mexico during this period can be found in Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Lorenzo Meyer, México frente a Estados Unidos: Un ensayo histórico, 1776-1980 (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1982), esp. chaps. 2-3
35. and Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), chap. 2
36. Quoted in Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 100
37. See D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2 of Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 135
38. Quoted in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 43
39. Quoted in María del Carmen Collado, "Antonio García Cubas," in En busca de un discurso integrador de la nación, 1848-1884, ed. Antonia Pi-Suñer Llorens, vol. 4 of Historiografía Mexicana, ed. Juan A. Ortega y Medina and Rosa Camelo (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996), 443
40. Antonio García Cubas, El libro de mis recuerdos: Narraciones históricas, anecdóticas y de costumbres mexicanas, anteriores al actual órden social (Mexico City: Imp. de Arturo García Cubas, 1904), 452
41. Brantz Mayer, Mexico: Aztec, Spanish and Republican: A Historical, Geographical, Political, Statistical and Social Account of the Country from the Period of the Invasion by the Spaniards to the Present Time; With a View of the Ancient Aztec Empire and Civilization; A Historical Sketch of the Late War and Notices of New Mexico and California, 2 vols. (Hartford: S. Drake and Company, 1851), 2:9
42. Meinig, The Shaping of America, 152
43. On the mapping of the boundary, see Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2001)
44. Robinson, The View from Chapultepec, 29-50
45. On statistics as a science, see Tomás Aznar Barbachano, "Importancia del estudio de la geografía y estadística como base fundamental de un buen gobierno," Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (hereafter cited as BSMGE), vol. 8 (1860)
46. See for example Alfred R. Conkling, Appleton's Guide to Mexico (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), 101
47. and Thomas A. Janvier, The Mexican Guide (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886)
48. See, for example, Antonio García Cubas, The Republic of Mexico in 1876, trans. George E. Henderson (Mexico City: La Enseñanza, 1876)
49. idem, Mexico, Its Trade, Industry and Resources, trans. William Thompson (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento, 1893)
50. and idem, Cuadro geográfico, estadístico, descriptivo, e histórico de los Estados Unidos de Mexicanos (Mexico City: Oficina Tip. de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1884)
51. Mendoza Vargas, "Las opciones geográficas," 104-5
52. Antonio García Cubas, Atlas geográfico, estadístico e histórico de la República Mexicana (Mexico City: Imp. de José Mariano Fernández de Lara, 1858)
53. See the astute analysis in Collado, "Antonio García Cubas."
54. See García Cubas, El libro de mis recuerdos, 395
55. a Epoca, vol. 3 (1909)
56. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996), 174-75
57. Laura Pérez Rosales, "Manuel Orozco y Berra," in Pi-Suñer Llores, En busca de un discurso integrador, 367. These kinds of encyclopedic fetishisms reflected a broader nineteenth-century faith in the presumed unity and totality of knowledge and humankind's capacity to a complete and comprehensive knowledge of physical reality
58. For a compelling literary perspective, see Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993)
59. a Epoca, vol. 7 (1913-1914)
60. Matthew Edney has suggested that the use of a local meridian - the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. - by U.S. map makers constituted a means by which "to declare the status of the U.S.A. as a nation." If the use of the cathedral in Mexico City were considered in a similar light, the shift to an internationally coordinated meridian may have signified a fairly significant and concomitant shift in the nature of nationalist thought. I am indebted to Matthew Edney's insightful commentary on the panel "Cartographic Narratives in the History of North America" (the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Boston, Jan. 2001). See also Matthew Edney, "Cartographic Confusion and Nationalism: The Meridian of Washington, D.C. in the Early Nineteenth Century," Mapline: Newsletter of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at The Newberry Library 69/70 (1993): 4-8
61. and idem, "Cartographic Culture and Nationalism in the Early United States: Benjamin Vaughan and the Choice for a Prime Meridian, 1811" Journal of Historical Geography 20, no. 4 (1994)
62. Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
63. D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000)
64. and Ken Hillis, "The Power of the Disembodied Imagination: Perspective's Role in Cartography" Cartographica 30 (1993)
65. The distinction between "space" and "place" is a common one and the literature is vast. While a variety of definitions exist, I follow here the basic notion that "place" is space to which meaning has been ascribed, and thus an historical and social creation rather than an innate fact. This is the general definition found in Yi-Fu Tuan's classic, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1977)
66. and in Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires, eds., Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993). Engagements with questions of space and place have served as a foundational point for much of the new literature in cultural geography
67. For an overview, see Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994)
68. For particularly astute and careful renderings of the relationship between space and place and the (often uncritical) use and application of the terms in battles over globalization, see Doreen Massey, "Places and Their Pasts," History Workshop Journal 39 (1995)
69. and idem, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994)
70. Anthropologists' careful thinking about place-making can be found in the introduction and essays in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997)
71. in Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995)
72. and in Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1996)
73. I have also found extremely useful three remarkably place-sensitive works of historical reconstruction: Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774-1880 (Honolulu: Univ. Press of Hawaii, 1980)
74. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knoft, 1987)
75. and John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986)
76. On the relationship between plotted points and pictorial representation, see Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, esp. chap. 3
77. Riva Palacio, México a través de los siglos, esp. vol. 1 by Alfredo Chavero
78. On these various forms of self-representation, see Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs
79. On the statue of Cuauhtémoc, see Barbara Tenenbaum, "Streetwise History: The Paseo de la Reforma and the Porfirian State, 1876-1910," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1994)
80. For the changing political and intellectual context of these conceptions, see Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), esp. chap. 7
81. and idem, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989)
82. On the office of Inspección, see Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs, 84-89
83. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 217
84. Quoted in Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1971), 412
85. Manuel Orozco y Berra, Materiales para una cartografía mexicana (Mexico City: Imp. del Gobierno, 1871)
86. Manuel Orozco y Berra, Historia antigua y de la conquista de México (Mexico City: Tip. de G. A. Esteva, 1880)
87. and García Cubas, Etude géographique statistique descriptive et historique des Etats Unis Mexicains (Mexico City Imp. du Ministere des Travaux Publics, 1889)
88. On Orozco y Berra's work, see the useful discussion in Luis Villoro, Los grandes mementos del indigenismo en México (Mexico City: Secretaria de Educación Pública, 1987), 149-68. Not surprisingly, while Mexican intellectuals labored over Nahua, Tarascan, and Mixtec languages, the study of the Athapaskan languages of the northern frontier was left to foreign intellectuals
89. This was, in other words, a selective tradition, "an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a preshaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification." See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 115
90. For a suggestive engagement with the relationship between sedentarism, the state and history, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine," in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987)
91. Francisco Pimentel, La economía política aplicada a la propiedad territorial en México (Mexico City: Imp. de Ignacio Cumplido, 1866), 186
92. Ignacio Ramírez, quoted in Brading, The First America, 661
93. In this sense, scientific discourse - archeology, history, and the developing field of anthropology - reconfirmed the distinction between self and other which had previously been mediated by a colonial legal system which recognized two independent republics, la república de españoles and la república de indios. See Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998)
94. Thus Luis Villoro's argument that the Indian at midcentury was "no longer-present," but reduced to a "pretty archeological theme." See Luis Villoro, Los grandes mementos, 161
95. On reviving the indigenous as dead, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 134. Pratt refers specifically to the "European imagination" and how it produced contemporary non-European peoples as "archeological subjects." Although not speaking of Europeans, I think the general concept translates quite well to late-nineteenth-century Mexico in which a Europeanized imagination revived the indigenous past both for their own contemplation and for that of their European counterparts
96. On landscape as a way of seeing, see the critical perspectives of Denis Cosgrove, "Prospect, Perspective and the Landscape Idea," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10 (1985)
97. and Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (New York; Hill & Wang, 1986)
98. A more celebratory view can be found in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: HarperCollins, 1995)
99. For varying perspectives on the separation of "nature" and "culture," see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967)
100. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), esp. chap. 1
101. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. pt. 1
102. and Bruce Willems-Braun, "Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, no. 1 (1997)
103. On understanding landscape as both verb and noun in the geographic ordering of the world, see Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory, eds., Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry (London: Arnold Publishers, 1997), 292
104. See García Cubas, The Republic of Mexico, 6
105. and Pimentel, La economía política
106. On metonymy, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), esp. the introduction
107. On metonymy and geographical landmarks, see Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 130
108. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 7
109. W. E. Carson, Mexico: The Wonderland of the South (New York: MacMillan Company 1909), 7, 10
110. See Alfred Siemens, Between the Summit and the Sea: Central Veracruz in the Nineteenth Century (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1990), 53
111. A. K. Shepard, The Land of the Aztecs, or Two Years in Mexico (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1859), 11-12
112. See also R. H. Mason, Pictures of Life in Mexico (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1851)
113. and Albert Zabriskie Gray, Mexico as It Is, Being Notes of a Recent Tour in That Country (New York; E. P. Dutton and Company 1878)
114. A good selection of travel accounts through Veracruz is available in Martha Poblett, Cien viajeros en Veracruz: Crónicas y relatos (Xalapa-Enríquez: Imp. del Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1992)
115. See also Siemens, Between the Summit and the Sea
116. a Epoca, vol. 8 (1860)
117. a Epoca, vol. 1 (1869)
118. Mexico City: Imp. de Francisco Díaz de Léon Agustín Díaz, Memoria de la Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora presentada al oficial mayor, encargada de la Secretaría de Fomenta, sobre los trabajos ejecutados durante el año fiscal de 1878 a 1879 (Mexico City: Imp. de Francisco Díaz de Léon, 1880), 26-7; ;
119. García Cubas et al., "Dictamen sobre los inconvenientes de variair los nombres." I discuss the administrative aspects of names and maps in more depth in Raymond B. Craib, "State Fixations, Fugitive Landscapes: Mapping, Surveying and the Spatial Creation of Modern Mexico, 1850-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 2001)
120. Romero, "Dictamen sobre los inconvenientes."
121. On the relationship between permanent names and state control, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), chap. 2
122. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Press, 1994), 226
123. To what degree nineteenth-century Mexico can be described as "postcolonial" is open to question. The term itself, for all (or because of) its prominence in academic discourse, is susceptible to a number of interpretations and usages. As the point of this article is in part to draw attention to the discursive devices used to simultaneously efface and confirm persistent forms of domination, "postcolonial" in this instance should not be understood as a description of some entirely new situation that superceded colonialism. As Arif Dirlik observes, such an understanding "mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier forms of domination." See Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism ( Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 54
124. José Jorge Klor de Alva questions to what degree one can even refer to the gente de razón who assumed power in 1824 as previously "colonial subjects." See José Jorge Klor de Alva, "The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of 'Colonialism,' 'Postcolonialism' and 'Mestizaje,' " in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995)
125. See also the cautionary remarks on "colonial and post-colonial discourse" in Rolena Adorno, "Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America," Latin American Research Review 28, no. 3 (1993)
126. The literature on colonialism, naming and possession is extensive. For a sampling, see William Boelhower, "Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis," Word and Image 4, no. 2 ( 1988)
127. G. N. G. Clarke, "Taking Possession: The Cartouche as Cultural Text in Eighteenth Century American Maps," Word and Image 4, no. 2 (1988)
128. and Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995)
129. Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 115
130. See Ignacio Ramírez to Manuel Altamirano, 8 Nov. 1871, in SMGE - Archive Histórico Ignacio Manuel Altamirano - Comisionados y representantes, vol. 75, 1851-1920
131. García Cubas et al., "Dictamen sobre los inconvenientes de variar los nombres."
132. a Época (1890)
133. Boletín de Geografía y Estadística de la República Mexicana presentado al Supremo Gobierno por la Comisión de Estadística Militar 3 (1849), vi
134. Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. and trans. Anthony Pagden (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 54-7
135. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, trans, with an introduction J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 135
136. See García Cubas, "Dictamen sobre los inconvenientes de variar los nombres."
137. See Díaz, Memoria de la Comisión Geográfico- Exploradora
138. I examine the work of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora in more detail in Craib, "State Fixations, Fugitive Landscapes," chaps. 4-5
139. Years later Manuel Orozco y Berra would suggest that the route was not included in the map due to scale, as well as the missing places, but I have found no evidence that in the 1850s the issue of scale was raised: the fundamental failure was the unfixed landscape
140. For suggestive engagements with these questions, see Carter, The Lie of the Land
141. idem, The Road to Botany Bay
142. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995)
143. and Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. chap. 1
144. On modes of historical narration and the process of "emplotment, " see White, Metahistory
145. idem, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987)
146. Paul Ricouer, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983)
147. and Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essays on Epistemology (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1984)
148. D. W. Meinig, "The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus for Geographers and Historians," American Historical Review 83 (1978):1205
149. See also Allan Pred, "Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (1984)
150. Quoted in Orozco y Berra, Materiales para una cartogrofia mexicana, vii
151. See Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)
152. De P. Piña, "Importancia de los trabajos," 390
153. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. chap. 5
154. José Jorge Klor de Alva's questioning of the applicability of the term "postcolonial" to Latin America already constitutes one such fruitful comparative engagement. See Klor de Alva, "The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience."
155. Anna, Forging Mexico, 6
156. On questions of authenticity and representation, see Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "Histories in Transition: Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India," History Workshop Journal 32 (1991)
157. See also the exchange between O'Hanlon and Washbrook and Gyan Prakash: Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography" Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990)
158. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, "After Orientialism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992)
159. and Prakash, "Can the Subaltern Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992)
160. On how the very idea of the state has to be constructed and sustained, see Philip Abrams, "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State," Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988)
161. and Derek Sayer, "Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on 'Hegemony'," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation
162. See Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 148-50