Abstract

The resurgence of global nationalisms in the twenty-first century demands that we renew and enhance our interrogative methods, with an eye toward disaggregating and disarming that phenomenon. In this paper, I draw on the work
of Claudio Lomnitz and Dipesh Chakrabarty to probe two of the formative processes in early Mexican nationhood: the production of the first national maps and the disamortization of communal and semi-communal landholdings. With Lomnitz’s seminal work on early Mexican nationalism and Chakrabarty’s examination of colonial archival production, I offer a reading of Mexico’s coming-to-be that stresses the importance of chance encounters, individual career trajectories, and strategic friendships in the formation of Mexico. I pay special attention to the friendship of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, a rising star in the Mexican bureaucracy and eventual author of the famous disamortization law, and Antonio García y
Cubas, Lerdo de Tejada’s protégé and perhaps the most famous cartographer in Mexican history. In foregrounding this particular reading, I offer an alternative to the dominant account of Latin American nationalisms offered by Benedict
Anderson in his seminal work Imagined Communities.