Alex Hidalgo's thoroughly researched and wonderfully illustrated Trail of Footprints focuses on a collection of 60 indigenous-made maps from Oaxaca produced between the 1570s and the 1730s. The author's approach is notable for its investigation of not only the maps' production but, perhaps more importantly, the processual networks through which these maps circulated. Hidalgo contends that a close examination of these maps' circumstances of production and circulation demonstrates their role in the formation of a new epistemology in postconquest Mexico, one formulated and forged through the interactions and contestations among myriad indigenous and European actors who took part in their production and authentication. The maps not only play a fundamental role in shaping perceptions of the landscape in viceregal New Spain but themselves are emblematic of a burgeoning epistemology in which Spanish notarial culture and indigenous pictographic tradition and oral history all played a part.
To support this claim, Hidalgo...
