Making Monsters, Maps and Empires

"Making Monsters, Maps and Empires: How Conquest Period Spanish and Aztecs Encoded Myth in the Cartography of the Basin of Mexico" Presented at Making the Map: Cross-border and Intercultural Representations from Ancient History to Today, Mulhouse, France, May 20-22, 2019.

At first glance, cartography and mythology might seem diametrically opposed. Maps tell us our location in respect to landmarks and boundaries. They tell us what nations exist and what lands they own; the pictographic equivalent to a global storeroom inventory. But if you sit down, take a closer look, and listen a little more, the line between the two disciplines becomes indistinct. In the late fifteenth century and sixteenth century, some men were driven to push the boundaries of knowledge in the European world. For God. For glory. For gold. When the explorers returned from the New World, they brought back stories of marvelous flora and surreal landscapes inhabited by uncanny monsters like those from Pliny’s writings. Conquistadors, colonizers, and priests manipulated the myth of who lived on the other side of the horizon; showing Mesoamericans as bloody cannibals to ignorant primitives to redeemable souls. On the other side of the globe, several ethnic groups of the Aztec Triple Alliance were putting down the account of their own arrivals to the central basin. Their travel epic showcased faced their own terra incognita populated by fantastic beasts. The codices charted their to the land and the supernatural validation of their power. Despite being from two undeniably different traditions, both the European and Indigenous leave space at the edge of the map for the monstrous. The deployment of horrific marginalia on maps from the Age of Exploration tell us more about the people who used them, than the people they depict. Conquistadors, colonizers, and priests manipulated the myth of who lived on the other side of the horizon; showing Mesoamericans as bloody cannibals to ignorant primitives to redeemable souls. The Nahua used it to showcase what they have overcome, thereby solidifying their claim to rule. It is often forgotten that contact is a two-way endeavor. Other studies have investigated both the monstrous and the human in terms of artistic cartography, but none have compared European myths to native ones. This paper will examine three maps of the Central Basin of Mexico to illustrate how two vastly different traditions used myth to make very real impacts on the lands they were depicting and how the maps themselves expressed socio-political ideologies. I will demonstrate that cartography was the means by which two empires were built in the New World. In other words, making these maps were a way of making the world. By doing so we establish how these taxonomies changed during conquest on both ends. Moreover, when we look at these practices and products together, we see a rolling revision of history, as it organically becomes myth.