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Borders: Created, Contested and Imagined: Borders Contested

An on-line exhibit based on Borders: Created, Contested and Imagined, a map exhibition in Zimmerman Library on display in 2024.

The Permeability of Borders

Even as commercial, personal and national borders are established and asserted, these lines often seem arbitrary and illusory for the people who live in these spaces. The maps on this page explore some of the ways that national and state boundaries remain permeable and subject to contestation and change. 

Religious contestation

Commercial Interests

The “Map of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway, and connections” was part of an 1872 stockholder report promoting the rail company’s expansion. The narrow-guage railway itself was a remarkable feat of engineering in the 1870s. Railroad builder William Jackson Palmer envisioned a north-south network of trains to promote settlement and commercial development in the new southwestern territories. The spur to New Mexico was connected in 1887 originating in Antonito, Colorado and ending in Santa Fe. At its peak in early 1900s, the system operated the largest network of narrow gauge railways in the United States through some of the most difficult and scenic terrain in the country. The Durango and Silvertown Narrow Gauge Railroad and the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroads, now heritage tourist trains, were originally part of this system. 

The Denver and Rio Grande Railway Map looks straightforward but is in reality a complex political document. It contains geographic features like mountains and rivers. It marks settlements – cities, towns, villages and pueblos. Rail lines, completed and proposed, are its primary focus marked by heavy dark lines. These include intersecting rail lines owned by companies designated as Southern, Atlantic and Pacific and the Texas and Pacific Railway. Other text remarks on available natural resources like “Abundant Land,” “Heavy Timber,” “Gold and Silver,” and “Extensive Holds of Bituminous Coal.” These comments on resources are an invitation to potential settlers, a statement of the richness of this available land. But was this land truly available for settlement? What you will not see on the map is how the development of the railroads further encroached on native communities. Railroad grants took land and water from many Pueblos. More importantly, the railroads represented an existential threat to their
communities as Anglo settlers moved in to dominate cultural and political landscapes.

 

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Hand-drawn in the early 1600s, the original Spanish colonial “Map of the Pacific Coast from Guatemala to California” is from a Spanish Inquisition file held by the Archivo General de la Nación de México. Church authorities were examining the activities of Thomas Cavendish as he became the second captain to successfully circumnavigate the globe in 1588. As Cavendish journeyed up the coast of South America, he visited towns on the coast to resupply and in some cases raid. He also captured several Spanish ships including the Santa Ana, a large galleon fully laden with gold, jewels and other commodities. For this capture and the riches he brought back, the English hailed Cavendish as a hero. The Spanish considered him a pirate and potentially dangerous heretical influence on Catholic territories under the nominal control of the Spanish empire. 

 

Water rights

Pueblo land and water rights were contested from the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1500s. The “Sketch Map of the Acequia del Llano” and related letter highlight a dispute between neighboring residents of Nambé Pueblo and Hispano settlers. U.S. settlement of the Southwestern territory increased pressure to define land ownership for both settlers and tribes. The letter to Attorney George Hill Howard documenting Nambé Governor Francisco Tafoya’s report of settler trespass was one in a long series of complaints. The case was taken to court where the hand drawn map was used as Exhibit A for the plaintiffs from the Pueblo. Unfortunately, the Nambé lost this case in part because of the defendants’ use of fraudulent documents, a common practice at that time.