Antonio Garcia Cubas's "Carta general" of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country's geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life's work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how Garcia Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies.

From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had...