The maps on this page explore the ways that physical space is also symbolic space where inhabitants and visitors imbue land with social, mythical and spiritual meanings dependent on their own cultures and world views.
Accounts of world travel were popular in the eighteenth century as European nations colonized and expanded their territories in the Americas and around the globe. “The Trail of the Ancient Mexican to found Tenochtitlan” is a map copied by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri circa 1697. It was printed in the English travelogue A Collection of Voyages and Travels in 1704. Gemelli collected this drawing in the midst of a trip around the globe visiting sites from the Middle East to China to New Spain. In Mexico City, Don Carlos de Siguenza y Góngora, a leading intellectual and scholar, took Gemelli to visit nearby archaeological sites at the Mesoamerican city of Tenochtitlan. Gemelli’s book, Giro del Mundo, contained this map and other copied Mesoamerican documents. His writing introduced a wider European public to remote sites and is thought to have influenced Jules Verne’s popular 1872 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. The CSWR Archives contains a six-volume expanded edition of this popular travelogue, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, printed in 1744.
As Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko writes, “the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.”
“Mountains are Sacred” is one of a series of educational posters created by the Chinle Public School District in Arizona to teach Diné history and stories. Sisnaajiní (east), Tsoodził (south), Dook’o’oosłííd (west), and Dibé Nitsaa (north) define the boundaries of Dinétah, the Navajo Nation, but represent much more than 25,000 square miles of land. The mountains and area they circumscribe are inextricably linked to Diné history, philosophy, spirituality, language, governance, and individual and social identity. For the Diné and their neighboring Puebloans, geographic space is an on-going narrative, a story of experiences lived on the land rather than an abstract or political set of borders.
Emily Edwards created the Mapa de la ciudad de Mexico, y alrededores, hoy y ayer in 1932. Edwards was an artist and historical preservationist known for conservation work in San Antonio, Texas. From 1926 to 1936, she lived and worked in Mexico City. The Mexico City map was created during that time as a collaboration with local businesses to promote a new and expanded electric and railway system in the growing capital city. Edwards included Mesoamerican and Spanish symbols to signify the city’s indigenous origins as Tenochtitlan and its history as colonial capital of New Spain. Note Cuauhtémoc, Descending Eagle, the last Aztec emperor delineated within the streetscape and the pictorial border which borrows from Mesoamerican pictographs and calendar systems combining them with Spanish coats of arms.
