A True and Faithful Copy: (Re)producing Local Maps in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

My paper examines the relationship between local, hand-drawn Amerindian maps and the copies made from them in Oaxaca during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I use maps and land dispute records from the towns of Xoxocotlán, Ocotlán, and Cuautlatlauca to situate local mapmaking within its legal, social, and cultural context. Examples of originals and copies point to the reliance royal authorities and communities placed on visual records such as native maps. The use of local Amerindian-made maps or other pictorial documents became standard legal practice in sixteenth-century New Spain. By the seventeenth century, authorities in Oaxaca typically called on native painters to produce new maps or copies for contemporary land disputes. Far from being a simple accommodation on the part of bureaucrats, local mapmaking produced a new epistemology where Amerindians served as purveyors of cartographic and cosmological knowledge often inverting relationships of power in colonial society. Local mapmaking also reveals another dimension to the culture of secrecy of Spanish imperial authorities who restricted mechanical reproduction and the commercialization of sensitive information relying instead on hand-produced manuscript copies.