My research examines the ways in which ethnically diverse societies produce knowledge. Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019) analyzes a collection of one hundred, largely unpublished, indigenous maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries made in the southern region of Oaxaca. Mapmaking, I argue, fostered a new epistemology among the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities who used maps to negotiate the allocation of land. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps advanced material technologies that drew from Indian botany and experimentation and established notarial methodologies tied to Iberian legal culture and archival practice.
I have co-edited two special issues of peer-reviewed journals that have brought together historians, anthropologists, art historians, and geographers from Mexico, Colombia, and the US to study the challenges faced by the Spanish crown in its efforts to organize and control land and other natural resources in the New World. A set of essays for the Journal of Latin American Geography examined the interplay between royal policy that legitimized the exploitation of the natural world and the manner in which social groups made sense of the law and their spatial surroundings. My contribution to this themed issue analyzed the way a Mixtec town in the seventeenth century deployed witnesses, social memory, and pictorial records to defend communal land against Spanish encroachment.
In Ethnohistory, authors scrutinized the influence of ethnicity on cartographic activities in the Hispanic world. For this volume, I wrote about a significant yet inconspicuous material from the early modern era--iron gall ink—and its use in the map trade. When examined closely, this ink reveals a series of rich layers that tie Mesoamerican botanical knowledge, learning, and experimentation to Spain’s efforts to study the properties of plants and minerals from the New World and to profit from their use.
I have co-edited two special issues of peer-reviewed journals that have brought together historians, anthropologists, art historians, and geographers from Mexico, Colombia, and the US to study the challenges faced by the Spanish crown in its efforts to organize and control land and other natural resources in the New World. A set of essays for the Journal of Latin American Geography examined the interplay between royal policy that legitimized the exploitation of the natural world and the manner in which social groups made sense of the law and their spatial surroundings. My contribution to this themed issue analyzed the way a Mixtec town in the seventeenth century deployed witnesses, social memory, and pictorial records to defend communal land against Spanish encroachment.
In Ethnohistory, authors scrutinized the influence of ethnicity on cartographic activities in the Hispanic world. For this volume, I wrote about a significant yet inconspicuous material from the early modern era--iron gall ink—and its use in the map trade. When examined closely, this ink reveals a series of rich layers that tie Mesoamerican botanical knowledge, learning, and experimentation to Spain’s efforts to study the properties of plants and minerals from the New World and to profit from their use.