Edited by Jordana Dym and Karl Offen.
University of Chicago Press, 2011.
360 pages, 118 color plates, 12 halftones, 1 line drawing. $40.00, paperback.
ISBN: 978-0-226-61822-7
Review by: Judith Tyner, Professor Emerita, California State University Long Beach
Although Mapping Latin America would appear, from the title, to be a history of Latin American cartography, it is much more. As the subtitle indicates, the book is a reading of various maps throughout the history of Latin America. They are used not to simply illustrate a place or time period, but are “read” for their meaning and significance to the time.
The book is organized chronologically with three major sections: Colonial, Nineteenth Century, and Twentieth Century. Each of those sections is divided into thematic subsections that deal with particular map types. The editors, Karl Offen and Jordana Dym, a geographer and a historian respectively, have put together a first-rate multidisciplinary team of fifty-four contributors. Some contributors come from geography, history, and Latin American Studies, as would be expected, but others are from archaeology, anthropology, city planning, economics, and environmental science. There are fifty-seven well-written articles, each of which is illustrated by at least one color map, for a total of ninety-eight maps. It is a real plus to have all of the maps in color and within the essays rather than grouped in a color signature.
In a brief but cogent foreword, Matthew Edney speaks of new views of maps and cartography, and notes that the essays in the book embody those new (since 1980) approaches to the history of cartography. He observes that the maps discussed are examined “in terms of the societies and culture in which they were made and consumed.” In many older histories of cartography, the context of a map’s making was generally ignored.
Regardless of whether one reads the book cover to cover or dips into subjects of particular interest, the Introduction by the editors is a must-read. It is an excellent discussion of current thinking on the study of maps. The authors note that they were frustrated with the limited use of maps in the study of Latin America, as maps were usually used only for location or to show distribution of products. In this chapter, which draws on the work of Woodward and Harley, the editors provide the now requisite discussion of “what is a map?” and a section titled “How to read maps”. Defining “map” is important here because most of the maps illustrated are not the conventional maps of traditional histories of cartography, but include such non-traditional types as transit maps, chamber of commerce maps, propaganda maps, and arpilleras—fabric maps of political resistance stitched by women. Many of these map types have been ignored by cartographic historians in the past as not being “real” maps.
How to read maps might seem at first to be an elementary subject for a book of this type, but it is crucial to understanding these discussions. Here the editors are not referring to how to use a road map to find the way from Point A to Point B, but to reading the meaning of maps, to analyzing and interpreting them. They provide a reading of a map of the Bolivar Railway as an opening to the Introduction and go on to discuss how title, legends, scale, projection, and symbols impact the interpretation of maps. Importantly, they discuss putting a map into the context of its time and technology. These last two contexts are often ignored in studies of maps as material culture and can lead to serious misinterpretations.
The editors also provide introductory essays for each of the chronological sections that discuss the period and mapping during that time. These nicely set the scene for the chapters that follow and are helpful for those readers who might be interested in the maps, but are not familiar with Latin American history.
Each essay has notes at the end and a list of resources/bibliography, but at the end of the book is a section titled “Additional Resources.” This is not simply a list of references, but is an essay in itself discussing the literature of the various topics that form the basis of the book, such as “Maps, Lies, and Silences,” “Critical Cultural Cartography,” and “Maps as Art” as well as “National Cartographies” and “Scientific Missions.” It is a succinct review of the literature on the subject of mapping Latin America.
Mapping Latin America could be used as a model of how to create a multi-disciplinary work and I highly recommend it.