Re-membering Veracruz: A Decolonial Reading of Regional Colonial Cartography

Martinez-Abbud, Sophia

Re-membering Veracruz: A Decolonial Reading of Regional Colonial Cartography

dc.contributor.author	Martinez-Abbud, Sophia
dc.date.accessioned	2020-04-19T22:31:29Z
dc.date.available	2020-04-19T22:31:29Z
dc.date.issued	2020
dc.description	This paper was originally prepared for Course HIST 596, Spring 2019: Port Cities of the Atlantic World, given by Professor Alida Metcalf, Department of History.
dc.description.abstract	Upon the so-called discovery of the American continent, the Spanish crown wanted the means to document and surveil its new lands from afar. For this reason, the Relaciones Geográficas—questionnaires about the physical description of each colonial settlement in New Spain—were distributed, filled out, and sent back to the crown with the purpose of updating the Spanish world map. Recently and, I argue, relatedly, a different kind of colonial map, the Mapa Quetzalecatzin (1593), was made available to the public for the first time; as of yet no sustained scholarly analysis of the Mapa exists. In this essay I place it in context with indigenous and colonial maps produced for the Relaciones Geográficas to suggest the Mapa Quetzalecatzin is a kind of land claim. Its hybrid artistic style, the lands and physical markers depicted, the material qualities of the Mapa as object and the arguments it makes as a text, complicate our understanding of the colonial history of the region between Veracruz, Puebla, and Mexico City. Finally, reading the Mapa as a transaction provides a window into the kinds of strategies that indigenous peoples were forced to adopt in order to navigate a colonial system of land ownership.
dc.identifier.citation	Martinez-Abbud, Sophia. "Re-membering Veracruz: A Decolonial Reading of Regional Colonial Cartography." (2020) Rice University: <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108314">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108314</a>.
dc.identifier.digital	Martinez-Abbud
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108314
dc.language.iso	eng
dc.publisher	Rice University
dc.rights	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
dc.subject	History
dc.title	Re-membering Veracruz: A Decolonial Reading of Regional Colonial Cartography
dc.type.dcmi	Text
dc.type.genre	Research paper