MAGALI M. CARRERA: Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

Abstract

In an 1835 publication, Mexican statesman and historian Carlos María de Bustamante asked three critical questions of his still formative nation, floundering in the aftermath of Spanish colonization: “¿Quienes somos? ¿de donde venimos? ¿para donde caminamos?” In her important contribution to both cartographic scholarship and to the discipline of art history, Magali Carrera finds the most significant answers to these ponderous queries in the form of the 1885 Átlas pintoresco é histórico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos by Antonio García Cubas, a multi-talented governmental agent in the Ministry of Development.