Thursday, July 2, 2020

Counter-Mapping the Spanish Conquista


“More lands have been lost to native people through mapping than through physical conflict.” Jim Enote, Director, A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center

I am supposed to be writing a book about the People of the Sonoran Desert based on the people who the mountains are named for in Organ Pipe National Monument. Of the major mountains in the monument, six are named for US-Americans (Gadsden, Pinkley, Tillotson, Levy, Bates, Growler), one for a Spanish Military Conquistador (Diaz), one for an Italian Missionary Conquistador (Kino), one for a Mexican (Ortega) and one, Montezuma’s Head, is a Spanish misnaming of the O’odham Elder Brother I’itoi. The real name for this mountain is I’itoi Mo’o and Oks Daha.

In doing research for the book one of the things that I have thought about a lot is: how do you decolonialize the narrative of a bunch of colonizers? Its not enough to just keep saying, “stolen land.” The words become empty, almost as empty as the pioneer narrative of “terra nullius.” How to bring that land to life? To show that we are not talking about a patch of dirt being stolen. We are talking about the theft of people, culture, history, language, stories, livelihoods, and the place names that connect these to their land. The obvious starting point seems to be the map.

I started looking back through articles and books on the Conquistadors, Melchior Diaz and Fray Eusebio Kino, to see how the maps of their respective Conquistas, drawn by themselves and their respective historians, promoted or opposed colonialism. I found that on almost every map drawn by historians depicting the travels of Diaz and Kino through the Sonoran Desert there, looming large, right in the middle of the map was the US/Mexico border.

To the best of my knowledge neither the US, nor Mexico existed when Kino traveled through the Sonoran Desert in 1701, much less when Diaz made the journey in 1540, so what was the US/Mexico border doing on maps of their expeditions? I believe it is supporting the colonial narrative by explicitly or implicitly suggesting that it had a right to be there, that it had always been there. It was orienting us to the history of the Sonoran Desert through a colonial lens, as though that is the only way we can and should orient ourselves to and understand the landscape.

How can historians do better? We can start by using “counter-mapping” in depicting the journeys of the Conquistadors, both military and missionary. The term “counter-mapping” was coined by Nancy Peluso to describe the creation of maps "against dominant power structures." I decided to see what would happen when I tried very basic counter-mapping on one of the maps of Melchior Diaz’ journey drawn by Ronald Ives in 1936.

Ronald Ives - The Diaz Expedition of 1540

Melchior Diaz -  The Forgotten Explorer by Ronald L. Ives
The Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb. 1936
Ives’ map of Diaz’ 1540 journey is thoroughly colonial. It situates Diaz in traveling through a US-American and Mexican world, not the world of the O'odham, Quechan and Eudeve. It not only includes the US/Mexico border, created in 1854, it also includes numerous other place names that simply did not exist in the 1500s. For example, Tucson, founded in 1775; Bahia Adair, named around 1825; Yuma, which was formed in 1873, from a variety of smaller riverside crossing points; and the Colorado River, called Xakxwet in the Piipaash language or Aha Kwahwat by the ‘Aka Makhav. Diaz called the river, Rio del Tizon and Kino named it Rio Grande del Norte. Exactly when the name Colorado stuck to the river is unclear, but it definitely was not in 1540. 

All of this matters because, by framing Diaz' journey through a US-American and Mexican map, Ives supports the narrative that Diaz has a right to be there, that this is his land, with place names in his language. We know that this is not true, yet subtly we are pulled in to reinforcing it.  Historians have argued for years about whether Diaz crossed the “Colorado” river, thus being the first white man to set foot in California. I have said it many times, "Diaz crossed the Colorado at Yuma," No, he didn't. Diaz did not cross the Colorado at all, he may have crossed the Xakxwet...it is a small but important distinction.

Counter-Mapping The Diaz Conquista of 1540

To place Diaz in his rightful place as an invader in a land that he had no right to be in, that was not his and whose place names were in indigenous languages, I have tried to counter-map the Diaz Conquista. I removed the US/Mexico border and all the Spanish and US-American place names. I replaced them with indigenous place names where I knew them or could find them on the internet. The result, such as it is, is a map that probably more accurately reflects the land as Diaz saw it…but not as it was. This map illustrates with incredible clarity the power of maps as weapons of colonialism and the truth of Jim Enote’s words. Mexican government policies of assimilation, US government policies of forced removal from the land, enclosed reservations and obliteration of indigenous languages, and the consistent stamping of Spanish and US-American names on the landscape have buried the indigenous names and their meanings beneath layers and layers of desert sand. The map is such an effective weapon of colonialism in the Sonoran Desert, that my, admittedly simple, attempt to counter-map has bought me full circle. The map remains colonial by invoking the idea of “terra nullius.” 

As I keep working on the book, I hope to be able to keep filling out the counter-map of the Sonoran Desert and to draw a map that truly decolonializes the history of this stolen land.

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