Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain. By Ana Pulido Rull

Abstract

Ana Pulido Rull has written a first-rate book on a genre of painting in New Spain known as mapas de mercedes de tierras, preserved in the Mapoteca section of the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City. Many of us who have worked on the history of Indigenous communities in New Spain have consulted one or more of these “maps,” but Pulido is the first to study the entire corpus systematically, examining how Native artists crafted the paintings on behalf of communities or native elites to (1) request royal land grants, (2) oppose petitions for land grants that threatened their own interests, or (3) negotiate the terms of a land grant. Pulido dedicates a chapter to each of these three functions, after describing land distribution in New Spain and how Indigenous artists adapted Mesoamerican conventions of representing space to the early modern European genre of mapmaking. Numerous...