Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain

Abstract

In Mapping Indigenous Land, author Ana Pulido Rull investigates how Native nobles and painters used maps to intervene in land distribution in New Spain between 1536 and 1620. Mexico City’s Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) preserves over two hundred land-grant maps (mapas de mercedes de tierras) and appended court documents. While Pulido Rull focuses on fourteen maps, the volume’s findings emerged from an exhaustive examination of the genre’s corpus. In New Spain, painted maps were required evidence in land litigation, and the creation of a map was an essential step in the procurement of land titles. Pulido Rull shows how the design and visual conventions of Native-made maps influenced the outcomes of conflicts over land, arguing the cartographs represent subjective understandings of space. The analysis places renewed attention on the pictorial and legal processes that drove the commodification of Indigenous lands in the early colonial period, and further underlines the role of Native elites and painter-scribes (Nahuatl: tlacuiloque) in the legal history of rural land tenure.Each of the book’s five chapters analyzes the “visual-legal interplay” of maps and court records, many of which were transcribed for the first time by the author. Trained as an art historian, Pulido Rull shines when guiding the reader through the legal processes to acquire or dispute land grants. The author starts by examining the contradictions inherent in the Spanish Crown’s legal policies, which sought to incorporate Indigenous peoples and lands into the colonial system and protect Native communities from dispossession. Here, Pulido Rull illuminates how minor colonial officials, particularly Indigenous constables, shaped policies around land tenure. Particularly engaging are Pulido Rull’s nuanced accounts of Spanish schemes to delegitimize and ultimately divest Indigenous communities of their lands, resources, and profit structures.In the second chapter, Pulido Rull traces the preparation of a land grant map by tlacuiloque, arguing that “new challenges generated by colonial land requests and the new audiences the maps were painted for shaped the ways maps from this genre interpreted and represented space” (49). Interesting evidence for this claim is the example of the tlacuilo who used similar pictorial conventions to depict the primordial caves in the Manuscrito Tovar (ca. 1583) and later a land-grant map from Tenayuca. Yet, it is again Pulido Rull’s ability to invigorate court records through deep contextualization that reveals how Indigenous nobles and painters affected change within the colonial bureaucracy. This is especially apparent in the subsequent chapters, which take the form of case studies. Chapter 3 addresses how Indigenous communities used maps to acquire property. The fourth chapter examines how Native communities used maps to protect their territories and oppose Spanish land-grant requests. Finally, chapter 5 foregrounds the role of maps in land disputes, demonstrating how Indigenous communities resolved conflicts and negotiated better terms with Spanish administrators using maps painted specifically to accompany legal proceedings.Greater engagement with decolonizing approaches would have enhanced the author’s argument, which underplays the emergent material relations that cut through Indigenous connections to the land. While the author draws extensively on the interpretative frameworks of established scholarship, Pulido Rull excels at enlivening the multiple actors entangled in land allocation in New Spain. Free of academic jargon, the volume offers compelling portraits of how Indigenous communities confronted settler-colonial encroachment, which complements existing literature and is well suited to undergraduate and graduate students. Drawing on long-term research in the AGN’s Mapoteca section, Mapping Indigenous Land is copiously illustrated and enriches scholarship on cartography, property litigation, and spatial representation in the Americas.