Puebla/Tlaxcala Indigenous-Community Forged Maps of 1870: Reaching Back to Sixteenth-Century Traditions

This presentation will explore a collection of 24 maps currently held in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress that was seized by Mexican authorities in the 1871 case against Melecio Yañes of Puebla. Yañes and associates were caught selling "títulos" to indigenous communities in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala. Although their efforts were thwarted, what is fascinating is the way Yañes tried to draw upon sixteenth-century cultural capital to the benefit of indigenous communities in need of documenting their altepetl three and a half centuries later -- including ancient dates of town founding, founding couples and legitimate ruling families, as well as territorial claims. He was sufficiently familiar with native traditions that he wove into his maps perceived canonical themes (albeit somewhat distorted or evolved) such as ferocious serpents and "tigers," people on the landscape, and speech scrolls that included Nahuatl words. He shunned nineteenth-century cartographic "science," if he even had any knowledge of it, in favor of a real or imagined mode of production, cultural milieu, and vocabulary that was closer to older Amerindian conventions.