Cartographic Mexico Cartographic Mexico

Cartographic Mexico

A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes

    • $28.99
    • $28.99

Publisher 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.

  • GENRE
    Reference
    RELEASED
    2004
    November 1
    LANGUAGE
    EN
    English
    LENGTH
    328
    Pages
    PUBLISHER
    Duke University Press
    SELLER
    Duke University Press
    SIZE
    6.4
    MB

    More Books Like This

    Frontier Road Frontier Road
    2017
    Crafting a Republic for the World Crafting a Republic for the World
    2018
    Rediscovering The Past at Mexico's Periphery Rediscovering The Past at Mexico's Periphery
    2015
    Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery
    2013
    Trail of Footprints Trail of Footprints
    2019
    Mapping the Country of Regions Mapping the Country of Regions
    2016

    More Books by Raymond B. Craib