Locating the In-Between: South Texas and Antonio García Cubas’ Map of Tamaulipas (1858)
Maps can be tools for self-definition. What Texan, after all, fails to feel some identification with the state’s iconic outline? Yet maps change — territory is lost and gained through conquest and warfare, boundaries are redefined by diplomats, contours are clarified by surveyors and cartographers. Simply put, the map shapes that we identify with are often less stable than we assume. The map-making efforts of Antonio García Cubas after Mexico’s loss of Texas and the US southwest in 1848 offer a vivid example of how cartographers and intellectuals grapple with the task of promoting a shared sense of place amid significant territorial change.
One of Mexico’s most important cartographers of the nineteenth century, García Cubas created national atlases in the 1850s and 1880s that helped to define the nation and project historical and cultural narratives about Mexico outward onto a global stage. Yet his task was complicated by the elusive character of the northern borderlands, where new international boundaries failed to erase a rich history of encounters and integration dating back to the early eighteenth century. García Cubas’ map of Tamaulipas, which includes the trans-Nueces region of Texas despite being drawn after the Mexican-American War, vividly captures the “in-between” nature of the borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century, and it suggests a more nuanced way to think about South Texas’ history.
An engineer, historian, educator, and geographer, Antonio García Cubas was born in Mexico City in 1832. He attended Mexico City’s premier fine arts academy in the 1850s and received an engineering degree from the city’s College of Mining in 1865. In between, he developed a keen interest in geography and cartography, joining the newly formed Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics) in 1856, where he began work compiling a new national map of Mexico. When it was published in 1857, this Carta General de la República Mexicana quickly replaced Alexander von Humboldt’s 1809 Carte Générale du Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne as the definitive map of Mexico.
Such efforts were far from purely academic. After the Mexican-American War, negotiators to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo had used J. Disturnell’s flawed map of Mexico to set new international boundaries between the countries, resulting in prolonged binational negotiations about the fate of the El Paso region. The diplomatic wrangling that ensued underlined the need for more accurate national and regional charts of Mexico.[1] Further, Mexican thinkers blamed the country’s supposed lack of a “national spirit” for its loss of Texas in 1836 and the defeat of 1848. The country’s intellectuals and officials were thus eager to “fix” the national boundaries in space and promote a sense of shared Mexican identity through historical, cultural, and cartographic undertakings. In this light, García Cubas’ cartographic pursuits in the second half of the nineteenth century helped to construct a legitimate nation-state on paper, since they visualized the Mexican nation as a unified whole with defined boundaries and a shared cultural and historical foundation.
Of course, such cartographic clarity could sometimes prove painful — García Cubas’ 1857 Carta General reportedly upset Antonio López de Santa Anna, since it gave him his first glimpse of the immensity of the territory lost to the United States in 1848.[2] Nonetheless, map-making was widely considered to be vital to the nation, and it was pursued by both the liberal-republican and French imperialist governments of the 1850s and 1860s.
His cartographic bonafides established with the Carta General, García Cubas then moved on to produce several large-scale atlases — compilations of images, maps, and data that required significant historical, statistical, and geographic study. In 1858, at just 26 years of age, he published Mexico’s first great national atlas, the Atlas geográfico, estadístico, e histórico de la república mexicana. Including maps of each of Mexico’s states, along with its federal district and several territories, the Atlas geográfico embellished its maps with historical and ethnographic images and contemporary geographic, demographic, and economic data, offering Mexicans a comprehensive picture of who they were and where they came from.[3] García Cubas hoped such information would help state-makers guide the country into a prosperous and more united future.
García Cubas’ map of Tamaulipas, a high-quality digital image of which is hosted in the GLO’s Map Database, is an especially interesting piece since it captures a slice of Texas at a time of transition and visually demonstrates the fluidity of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century.
The map prominently displays Texas’ trans-Nueces region, which is shaded light green and contains various named topographical features and settlements. Corpus Christi Bay and an outsized Padre Island make an appearance, and two large salt lakes — the easternmost likely corresponding to Hidalgo County’s Sal del Rey — are depicted near the Rio Grande River. Ranchos whose names are mostly lost to history (Salmoneño, Las Animas, El Mulato) dot the trans-Nueces landscape.
Although a thick red line following the Rio Grande denotes the “present boundary between the [Mexican] Republic and the United States,” the two regions are depicted as thoroughly integrated. Several roads — modern successors to the Camino Real — lead from Tamaulipas locations through the Rio Grande Valley and further north towards destinations like San Patricio and Goliad. An itinerary table directly under the map indicates routes and distances from the state capital at Victoria to various places, including Laredo, the Medina River, and “San Antonio de Béjar.”
The text and tables surrounding the map offer the user a crash-course in Tamaulipas’ geography, demographics, and economy. According to the economic statistics, the state relied on mining, agriculture, and especially ranching — García Cubas figured that there were some 171,000 head of cattle in the state, each worth 4–5 pesos. Not terribly different, then, from its northern neighbor, although Tamaulipas’ cotton economy paled in comparison to Texas’. Another table breaks down the number of “foreigners residing in the state,” which included 105 “Anglo-americanos.” Many of these were likely holdovers from an earlier era when northern Mexican states like Coahuila y Texas and Tamaulipas attracted foreign settlers through generous land-grant programs.
In all, García Cubas’ map of Tamaulipas offers a fascinating look at a unique, bicultural, borderlands region at a key moment of transition. It found its way into the GLO’s digital map collection by way of a new partnership with Mexico’s premier map library, the Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra in Mexico City. [Click here and enter Orozco y Berra in the search field to see our current list of maps from the Orozco y Berra.] This is the GLO’s second map by García Cubas; the other being the beautifully illustrated Reyno de la Nueva España al Principios del Siglo XIX, from the Atlas Pintoresco e Histórico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (1885). The latter resides physically in the GLO’s map vault as well as digitally in its Map Store, and it represents a fascinating piece of cartographic history in its own right.
[1] Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849–1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
[2] Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 26.
[3] Craib, Cartographic Mexico; Magali M. Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
