Mexican urban cartography 1880 - 1910: Guadalajara, Mexico, Puebla and Veracruz

This essay analyzes four examples of Mexican urban cartography from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries using an interdisciplinary frame and historical accent, when the "order and progress" project promoted by the Porfirian government contributed to important changes in urban geopolitics, geo-economics and geo-culture. Mexico City, Guadalajara, Veracruz and Puebla, among others, were built and transformed using the vision of the national government, and through the investment and intervention of municipal governments and through private initiative, which used cartography for the first time as a promotional tool. All three groups in power demonstrated their shared agenda in the graphics and iconography of cultural and political representations. This essay identifies the imaginary, symbolic, economic, cultural and scientific content of late Porfirian cartography, highlighting the similarities as well as differences in three types of urban maps: commercial plans, municipal expansion plans, and representations of the historical city.