States of Geography: Alzate's Maps Between New Spain and European Cabinets

In the late 18th century, the Mexican intellectual José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, wrote on the importance of geographical description for both public and private purposes. Instructing about the location of cities, villages, mountains, harbours, river courses and maritime currents, geographical descriptions (maps, charts, tables) were indispensable for commercial agents, generals, and judges, and for the lonely traveler who could avoid dangers and unnecessary costs by studying a well-made plan. Yet, while European academies had drawn detailed maps of Europe, Africa, Asia and North America, Alzate lamented the “state of geography” in New Spain, which was little more than an “empty” space on the globe.

Drawing on a series of Alzate’s little-studied geographical and topographical descriptions, and on his various plans and maps, this talk analyzes how Alzate transformed space into territory. In other words, what mathematical, astronomical, and cartographical inscriptions underscored his inventory of places, making them subject to knowledge, appropriation and administration by the maps’ different kinds of readers (the Spanish Crown, ecclesiastical patrons, mining agents, and European savants, among others). On one hand, as a well-trained astronomer, Alzate relied on conventional codes and symbols which would invest his textual and visual productions with truth and credibility in the eyes of a wider, trans-Atlantic community of scientists and of the royal and viceroyal patrons who commissioned maps and descriptions. But, at the same time, his maps and geographical writings allow the historian an unparalleled glimpse unto “local knowledge”, what Alzate referred to as “knowledge of practical and rustic men”: facts gathered by priests in an attempt to better administer to their respective parishes; beliefs held by indigenous informers; useful observations by miners, field-laborers and merchants. The incorporation of idiosyncratic and local inscriptions in the works of eighteenth-century creole intellectuals is characteristic (and little-attended to) trait of Mexican Enlightenment.