How to lie with maps; a practical example.
Geopolitical narratives of the hispanic threat in the cartography of The Economist.
I sincerely think that Monmonier’s book “How to lie with Maps” about the distortions embedded in cartographic information should be a required reading for anybody working to develop critical thinking skills, and for every citizen interested in becoming a better consumer of geospatial information presented by the media.
Maps are models of reality created to convey geographic information in a way that improves the sense making capacities of the observers. They are also, like any model that abstracts reality, a cocktail of compromises between a three-dimensional environment and a bi-dimensional support (think the Mercator Projection and the size of Greenland)and between the information that makes it into the model and the information that does not.
George Box famously said “essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”. While he was talking about statistical modeling, the same can be said about cartographic models.
The cartographer makes a choice about what to place in the map, and what to leave out. He also decides what colors to use and what story to exploit. Because of this, the map is the geopolitical representation par excellence; it exploits narratives and nudges the observer into construing conclusions in ways that words cannot.
A few days ago, the Economist published this map in their printed edition and in their website:
The title of the map is “Old Mexico lives on” and it places on top of the percentage of hispanic population a deep dark line on the US territory that used to be part of Mexico. The claim is evident: the distribution pattern of the Mexican population correlates to these former Mexican possessions:
“But a century and a half later, communities have proved more durable than borders. The counties with the highest concentration of Mexicans (as defined by ethnicity, rather than citizenship) overlap closely with the area that belonged to Mexico before the great gringo land-grab of 1848. Some are recent arrivals; others trace their roots to long before the map was redrawn. They didn’t jump the border—it jumped them.”
While the article ends there, the geopolitical representation is evident:
Beware, The Mexican reconquista is in motion.
This supposed demographic re-occupation has been one of the most common (and false) claims that bigots have used against populations of hispanic origin to question their identity and allegiance to the United States, and a way to produce fear against “the other.”
Nevertheless, a quick redrawing of the line (using my Ipad…so a task not easily accomplished!) tells a very different story. See the blue line:
In this updated version of “Old Mexico” (let us call it the Blue Line Mexico…geopolitical representations need a name), the historic territories now extend to Washington State, Oregon, Wyoming(!) and Idaho; the Rio Grande shares its aquatic centrality with lake Michigan, Chicago is TexMex nation and Florida and North Carolina are now a colony of this fictional reconquista.
As the brilliant Donella Meadows, reminds us:
Systems rarely have real boundaries. Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly. There is no clearly determinable boundary between the sea and the land, between sociology and anthropology, between an automobile’s exhaust and your nose. There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement-artificial, mental-model boundaries. The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries. There are Czechs on the German side of the border and Germans on the Czech side of the border. Forest species extend beyond the edge of the forest into the field; field species penetrate partway into the forest. Disorderly, mixed-up borders are sources of diversity and creativity.
Populations all over the planet do interact with strong singular force near the borderlands. The relation between the US and Mexico is complex, paradoxical and deep, and the map presented by the Economist exploits a narrative of fear of the “other” by placing in the middle of a cartographic model of the population of hispanic descent, a dark line where the US territory used to be Mexico.
This line actually provides very little useful information about settlement patterns of the immigrant populations, while at the same time kindling a geopolitical narrative of fictional separatism to question the assimilation of Mexican-Americans in the USA.
Like the Swiss who live in the French side of the border, or the Italians who call the Bavarian Munich Italy’s most northerly city, neighboring nations with friendly relations naturally create strong cultural and social networks that extend well beyond the borderlands.
The cartography of those networks between the USA and Mexico is rich and complex. It is the product of centuries of integration, conflict and reconciliation. The settlement patterns of the hispanic population in the USA (who, by the way are more than just Mexican or Mexican-Americans) cannot be simplified to a Non Sequitur geopolitical caricature of an “Old Mexico” that explains nothing, but triggers many fears that we do not need and we do not want.
