In recent years the history of cartography has experienced dramatic changes. Formerly concerned with the descriptive qualities of maps and broader issues connected to the rise of scientific cartography, the field, thanks primarily to work of J. B. Harley and Christian Jacob, tends increasingly to view maps as texts, imaginative representations that, like works of fiction, can be deconstructed, reconstructed, and interpreted in myriad different ways. This development—the cartographic equivalent of the “linguistic turn”—has opened the study of mapping to a wealth of new questions, many of which have focused on the relationship of maps to power and, particularly, on the manner in which European states represented the world in ways that favored their particular economic and political concerns. This last approach is best exemplified in David Buisseret’s edited volume, Monarcbs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1992); Matthew H. Edney’s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997); and, most recently, Jerry Brotton’s Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London, 1997).
In the last decade or so, maps pertaining to Spain’s American empire, especially the pinturas produced in conjunction with the Relaciones geográficas ordered by Philip II in 1577, have been subjected to similar kinds of analysis. Serge Gruzinski led the way when he likened the arrival of European mapping techniques in sixteenth-century New Spain to a “cartographic invasion” that gradually, but inexorably, obliterated autochthonous ways of spatial representation. Yet Gruzinski exaggerated the differences between native and European mapping, differences that Barbara Mundy’s brilliant The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago, 1996), tended to erase. Using an art historical approach, Mundy examined the extent to which indigenous styles influenced both the content and the character of mapping in sixteenth-century New Spain, and in a series of case studies provided detailed analysis of the manner in which glyphs and other native representational symbols found their way into what were ostensibly Spanish maps.
Duccio Sacchi adopts a similar approach, and indeed his book should be read in conjunction with Mundy’s work. A scholar associated with the Università di Torino, Sacchi begins his study with a detailed discussion of the pueblo, for him the primordial unit of administrative organization in sixteenth-century New Spain. Following this premise, he believes that most village maps produced during this era were little more than extensions of power struggles —over boundaries, pastures, water rights, etc. —that erupted in pueblos as Spaniards attempted to assert control over agricultural life. For Sacchi, therefore, village maps—the majority of which were made for jurisdictional and legal purposes —constitute what he calls a “zone of geo-political action” (p. 228), each of which reflected the interests and the concerns of the individuals, both Spanish and native, who competed for control of village life. It follows that these maps frequently incorporated the cartographic languages of the different groups whose interests they purported to represent. Thus each of these maps amounted to a complex layering that encompassed the symbolic glyphs traditionally used by tlacuilos (scribes) to “map” the territories associated with particular altepetls as well as the geometric designs and alphabetic labeling associated with European cartography. The underlying layer of this palimpsest was generally indigenous, the top Spanish. Yet for Sacchi every map, given its local focus, is a unique “problem” that requires careful analysis.
Accordingly, Sacchi devotes most of his book to a detailed decoding of a series of pueblo maps. Among those analyzed in detail are maps portraying Cuzcatlán (Tlaxcala) and Tehuantepec (Antequera); in each case he offers a careful reading of the disputes and tensions underlying the production of the map; analyzes the various pictorial components contained in each; and, finally, explores the particular way in which the image relates to the local situation. His findings are fascinating, but unlike Mundy, whose interests were primarily art historical, Sacchi uses maps as means to recover the disputes and tensions that punctuated village life. However, he expressly rejects the ethnic-conflict model that informed Gruzinski’s cartographic work. Rather, and more correctly in my view, Sacchi uses the language of “consensuality” or, as he also puts it, “cultural mestizaje” (p. 132), a perspective consistent with that of James Lockhart and other scholars whose approach to the culture and society of New Spain emphasizes assimilation and integration as opposed to resistance and conflict.
In sum, this is an important study that, though perhaps not quite as groundbreaking as Mundy’s book, deserves the attention of specialists in the field of colonial history. It should be noted, however, that Sacchi’s book is not without errors, especially with respect to the author’s treatment of Spanish sixteenth-century cartography. The volume could have also been improved with better reproductions. The muddy, black-and-white illustrations scattered throughout the text do little justice to the complex, often highly colored maps that lie at the core of Sacchi’s argument.