Ana Pulido Rull

In Mapping Indigenous Land, Ana Pulido Rull, Associate Professor of Latin American Art History at the University of Arkansas, analyzes a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps drawn by native peoples in New Spain for land grant cases (mercedes de tierra). Building on recent decades of scholarly study on Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial mapping, especially maps made by indigenous peoples—like Barbara Mundy’s works on the Relaciones Geográficas—Pulido Rull argues that these maps are evidence of native power to negotiate within the Spanish legal system and the continuing influence of pre-Spanish views of landscape and mapping. Pulido Rull writes that these maps “constituted a spatial practice that enabled Native painters or the parties they represented… to participate in discussions regarding land distribution” (4) and that they “presented indigenous views and understandings of the contested land to the viceroy and other Spanish magistrates” (5).… (altro)