Colonizing Cartography: José de Escandón’s Mapa de la Sierra Gorda y Costa del Seno Mexicano…
[Map of the Sierra Gorda and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico…]
National Hispanic Heritage Month is a celebration of the contributions of Latinos to U.S. history, culture, and society observed annually between September 15 and October 15, a time of many historical mileposts in the Americas. The observance emphasizes the deep historical imprint of Hispanic cultures on the United States and honors the place of Latinos in the contemporary American melting pot, where they number over 55 million. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we’ll focus for several weeks on genealogical resources and the impact of Hispanic historical figures in Texas.
Maps are not simply neutral, scientific renderings of space — they are cultural, political, and historical products. They claim territories, tell stories, and support arguments for specific actions by governments. Sometimes they reveal cultural modes of thinking about places and people or display the vivid imagination of a cartographer simply trying to use up negative space.
For the cartographer-explorers of the Spanish empire, who often produced maps not for publication and dissemination like many of the famed cartographers of Europe but for internal viceregal or royal audiences, maps were primarily practical. They were tools for advancing the Spanish imperial project.[1]
But their utilitarian character did not mean Spanish maps were any less interesting or beautiful. This 1747 map of the Seno Mexicano (or Gulf of Mexico) provides a vivid example. The map was made to relay information about a newly explored gulf region to royal officials and make recommendations for its colonization by the explorer/cartographer, José de Escandón. It was produced immediately after the Escandón-led exploratory expedition into the region, and it accompanied an extensive report to royal officials.[2]
In conjunction with the report, this map painted a detailed picture of the territory and offered suggestions for settling and governing the new colony. In some ways, then, the map created a new Spanish jurisdictional entity — later dubbed the province of Nuevo Santander — where none existed except in the minds of royal bureaucrats. As we will see, it also helped advance Escandón’s career and led directly to the founding of several Rio Grande communities that still exist today.
Like the report it accompanied, the map is the product of painstaking work — a composite picture of the reconnaissance work of some 765 soldier-explorers (including roughly fifty from the presidios of la Bahía and Los Adaes in Texas) under seven different captains. Embellishing the chart with ships and Indian warriors, Escandón (or his draftsman) depicted a region rich in saline deposits and drained by several large rivers. Groups of colorful “teepees” mark the place where the explorers set up long-term encampments near the Rio Grande.[3] Spanish towns, presidios, and missions in the surrounding provinces are identified by symbols from the key at the lower right.
“Jurisdictions” with imprecise boundaries characterized northern New Spain’s geography (the red lines were added subsequently in an apparent attempt to clarify the boundaries). Further complicating matters, religious jurisdictions followed their own logic, as demonstrated by the second key in the lower left. The key helps the viewer identify north-central Mexico’s many missions, which the cartographer color-coded according to the “Religion” (here, missionary order and province) that administered each. Though its color has faded, the key shows that the lone Texas mission appearing on the map (Bahía del Espíritu Santo, then on the Guadalupe River) was originally painted “azul celeste” or sky blue, indicating that it was under the administration of the Apostolic College of Guadalupe in Zacatecas.
The history of Escandón’s expedition is recorded beautifully on the map itself. Carefully labeled dashed lines extending from the seven points of departure show the twisting route of each party before they converged on the mouth of the Río Bravo (Rio Grande). Meanwhile, red crosses indicate places scouted by the parties for suggested settlements. Each prospective settlement was given a name which, following Spanish conventions, reflected geographic features and/or the liturgical calendar (whereby names were chosen according to the saint’s feast day upon which the place was discovered). The red numbers accompanying each cross referred to a numbered section of Escandón’s long report, allowing the Royal junta to cross-reference the two documents when assessing his colonization plan.
Escandón’s map made a deep impact on the Gulf region’s cartographic history. Housed in viceregal offices in Spain and Mexico City, it almost immediately became the preeminent source of cartographic knowledge of the region and was copied numerous times, serving as the basis for new maps by Spanish colonial cartographers as early as 1748. Certainly, it was used by Joseph de Urrútia y Las Casas, the military cartographer sent with borderlands reformer José de Gálvez in his inspection of New Spain’s northern “Internal Provinces” in 1765 whose 1767 map helped Royal officials reorganize the region. It was even used to set the boundaries for the new bishopric of Linares, founded in 1777.[4]
Thus, Escandón’s map changed history — cartographic and otherwise — even without the widespread publication and circulation that brought other Atlantic-world cartographers fame.[5]
This version of Escandón’s map made its way to Spain, where it now resides in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. A subsequent, updated copy of the map was produced to accompany a 1792 compilation of early sources on the history of Coahuila and Nuevo Santander. A copy of the 1792 map, which shows the progress of Nuevo Santander colonization efforts and features the villas del norte, is held at the Texas State Archives and Library Commission. The GLO retains a digital copy for research purposes, and reproductions are available for sale of the 1792 map courtesy of the Texas State Library.
[1] The Spanish empire adopted a policy of keeping scientific information about its New World territories secret from the prying eyes of other European powers. Such scientific secrecy explains why Spanish maps were not published and circulated in the same way as the work of other European cartographers. See María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[2] See 1747. Informe de Escandón para reconocer, pacificar, y poblar la costa del Seno Mexicano (Ciudad Victoria: Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Tamaulipas, 1999). For an English translation and analysis of the report, see Debbie S. Cunningham, “The Exploration and Preliminary Colonization of the Seno Mexicano Under Don José de Escandón (1747–1749): An Analysis Based on Primary Spanish Manuscripts,” PhD Diss., Texas A&M University, 2010. It is not clear whether Escandón personally drafted the map or simply oversaw its creation.
[3] Octavio Herrera, El noroeste cartográfico: configuración histórica de una región (Monterrey: Fondo Editorial de Nuevo León, 2010), p. 85.
[4] Martín Reyes Vayssade, et. al., Cartografía histórica de Tamaulipas, pp. 91–102; Herrera, El noroeste cartográfico, p. 85.
[5] The 1747 map was never published. See Jack Jackson, Manuscript Maps Concerning the Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Southwest (1519–1836): An Annotated Guide to the Karpinski Series of Photographs at the Newberry Library, Chicago, with Notice of Related Cartographic Materials (Chicago: The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, 1995), Occasional Publication №7, pp. 84–85.
