"Impossible for Me to Satisfy Your Desire": Provincial Cartographies and the Frustrated National Vision of Colombia, 1820–30

This paper examines the surveying routines and related census gathering intended to make resguardo lands, and the individuals that were and were not entitled these lands, visible. The cases in point are the resguardo surveys that occurred from the 1830s-1870s in New Granada’s altiplano cundiboyacense.  This particular kind of mapmaking critically depended on the cooperation of indigenous resguardo leaders with the land surveyors assigned to measure the lands. This was not the only negotiated aspect of resguardo mapping, however.  As surveyors conducted their measurements, comuneros negotiated with resguardo leaders how exactly they would be socially mapped out and recognized. These people were aware that their social identities as legitimate or illegitimate; Indian, vecino, cholo, or mestizo; married or single; man or woman all had a role to play in how much land would be allotted to them.  Given the potential for mistaken identities, together with a lack of trained surveyors, and rampant corruption, it is a wonder the indigenous resguardos of the altiplano cundiboyacence were effectively privatized at all. The push towards training engineers in a “neutral” cartographic language helped empty resguardo lands of their contentious social dynamics. Surveys slowly, if unevenly, naturalized and neutralized these territories into interchangeable land parcels that could be more easily commodified. Gender and ethnicity were crucial components of this process as the people inhabiting these lands increasingly self-identified according to the state-mandated ethnic and gender categories that would allow them at the very least a measure of economic security.