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19th-Century Mexican Atlas

First edition of this important work, illustrated with 33 maps.

This Mexican atlas includes a separate map for each state and territory of Mexico, along with thematic maps, such as education, hydrography, and mining. The accompanying text pages include statistical and geographical descriptions of each area. The map of Baja California locates pearl fisheries. 

The text accompanying the map of Sonora is interesting for mentioning the Indian tribes inhabiting the state, singling out the Apache and Seri as being in "a savage state":

Constituyen las principales tríbus que habitan las ricas comarcas de Sonora, los ópatas, pimas, pápagos, yaquis, mayos, y en estado salvaje los apaches y series.

García Cubas, a giant of Mexican geography and cartography, is known as "el fundador de nuestra geografia como ciencia" (Dicc. Porrua).

The present educational atlas was in many ways a transitional work for García Cubas, issued after his large-scale Atlas Geografico (1858), but before his famous pictorial atlas, Atlas Pintoresco é Historico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (1885). The latter has been hailed for "seamlessly integrating... diverse imagery with maps, [in which] García Cubas displays his skillfulness with cartographic and geographic bricolage." - Magali M. Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (2011). In the present atlas the "bricolage" is achieved through a thoughtful combination of maps and explanatory text, all designed to aid the student. The atlas opens with four separate maps of the entire nation of Mexico (i.e. state boundaries; physical geography; rivers; coasts and islands), setting the stage for the informative individual state maps that comprise the remainder of the volume.