Cartographic Ethnography
Author(s): MARK DIZON
Source: Imago Mundi, 2021, Vol. 73, No. 1 (2021), pp. 73-81
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Cartographic Ethnography: Missionary Maps of an
Eighteenth-Century Spanish Imperial Frontier
MARK DIZON
ABSTRACT: The maps of a Spanish imperial frontier in the Philippines made in the eighteenth-century by
the missionary Alejandro Cacho reflect an ethnographic approach that simultaneously reified and under­
mined Spanish notions of conquest and civilization. While Cacho celebrated mission towns and denigrated
unsubjugated settlements, several elements of his maps subverted that message by recognizing the presence
of animist communities and the different mobilities taking place at the frontier. The apparent conflict of
messages is explained by the context in which the maps were made.
KEYWORDS: ethnography, cartography, indigenous people, empire, Asia, Philippines, Luzon, borderland,
mobility, Augustinians, conversion, cities, missions, animals, horses.
The early-modern period is typically characterized
as an age of European exploration with maps play­
ing their role in this process of expansion.1 In the
case of the ever-growing and bureaucratic
Hispanic monarchy, Philip II, for instance, needed
maps to be able to see the total extent of his
realms.2 Spanish imperial maps thus performed
both practical and symbolic functions.3 They pro­
vided information useful to the Crown about its
domain in the Indies, and their ability to represent
territories visually was itself a symbolic form of
possession.
In the popular imagination, narratives of imper­
ial expansion and cartographic control went hand
in hand.4 Throughout the early-modern period,
the Hispanic monarchy made increasingly grand­
iose territorial claims accompanied by detailed
maps with precise borders. The story is presented
as a unilinear movement towards more accurate,
scientific maps of the conquered territories.5
Explorers and navigators initiated the project by
charting the seas and coastlines, royal cosmogra­
phers compiled their information in atlases, and
colonial officials on the ground, like missionaries,
finished the task by eventually mapping the
remote interiors of land masses.
In certain respects, the Philippines conformed to
this pattern. The archipelago was one of the
Hispanic monarchy’s most distant territories,
being separated from the Iberian peninsula by the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Although the Spanish
conquest of the archipelago started in the six­
teenth century, by the eighteenth century large
swathes of the islands’ interiors remained unsub­
jugated. Maps of the Philippines had accurate
coastlines but mostly empty, uncharted,
interiors.6 The most famous map of the
Philippines from the eighteenth century, Pedro
Murillo Velarde’s Hydrographic and Chorographic
Map of the Philippine Islands (1734), aided seafarers
with its precise coastlines but was of no help to
overland travellers with its speculation on the
�Dr Mark Dizon is an instructor in the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University. Correspondence to:
M. Dizon, Department of History, Leong Hall, Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City 1108, Philippines.
E-mail: mdizon@ateneo.edu
Imago Mundi Vol. 73, Part 1: 73–81
© 2021 Imago Mundi Ltd ISSN 0308-5694 print/1479-7801 online
https://doi.org/10.1080/03085694.2021.1835315
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74
M. Dizon
Imago Mundi 73:1 2021
islands’ topography. With its obsession with math­
ematical and scientific accuracy and the relegation
of human figures to the map’s margins, it embod­
ied the apparent trend towards abstraction in
European cartography.7
Eighteenth-century Spanish maps of the
Americas and the Philippines did not always con­
form to this pattern, however, because an ethno­
graphic component, for instance, still pervaded on
certain types of maps. Rather than leading towards
mathematical abstraction and a clinical image,
maps of inland missions actually emphasized the
presence of indigenous communities through texts
and drawings.8 Under Patronato Real or Royal
Patronage, the Hispanic monarch appointed and
sponsored the outward travel and living expenses
of priests going to the Indies. Missionaries, among
the few Spaniards who resided outside the colonial
capitals, were thus the main drivers of the con­
quest and conversion of the Philippine countryside
and consequently the chief contributors to the
mapping of the inland spaces. While they har­
boured imperial motives in their missionary and
mapping activities, they occupied an ambiguous
position as both agents of colonialism and partici­
pants in local communities, which undermined
the supposed imperial control inherent in
Spanish cartography of overseas territories.
In this article I look at two maps of the mission
of Pantabangan and Carranglan, at the centre of
the island of Luzon in the Philippines, made by the
Augustinian friar Alejandro Cacho in the first half
of the eighteenth century. Cacho’s two maps could
be construed as part of the unilinear narrative of
imperial control that moved from the coast to the
interior. After the conquest of Manila and other
coastal towns, the eighteenth century witnessed
the gradual Spanish occupation of the inland fron­
tiers and the proliferation of maps about them.9
I contend, however, that such activities did not
necessarily equate to greater imperial and carto­
graphic control. In fact, the ethnographic content
of Cacho’s maps manifested the lack of Spanish
command over inland spaces and mobility.
Although an agent of the Hispanic monarchy
and his religious order, Cacho became embedded
in local communities during his long stay in the
mission. His intermediary position is displayed in
how his two maps of the mission simultaneously
asserted imperial control and exposed its tenuous
character. Unlike the eighteenth-century imperial
maps that portrayed a mathematically precise
space devoid of indigenous inhabitants, Cacho’s
maps highlighted the human element with their
depiction of Christian and animist communities
and individuals. Their ethnographic content por­
trayed a living place in which people moved about
rather than a highly regimented imperial realm or
an abstract space devoid of inhabitants.
Alejandro Cacho (1681–1746)
Alejandro Cacho was born in Torrelavega, in
northern Spain in 1681; he entered the Order of
Saint Augustine in 1698 and signed up for the
Philippine mission a year later.10 After a few
years in Manila, he was assigned to the newly
opened mission of Pantabangan and Carranglan
in 1705 where he served in various capacities
until his death in 1746 (Fig. 1). His stay of more
than forty years in the same mission was unusual
because priests were usually reassigned to different
parishes or missions every few years.
Cacho’s long residence in the mission meant
that he was no longer a complete outsider and
had plenty of time to embed himself in local indi­
genous dynamics. He occupied an intermediary
position in the hinterland between Spanish offi­
cialdom and indigenous communities. Soon after
his death, Christians and animists in the region
performed an indigenous mourning ritual in his
honour, which they usually reserved for occasions
of great calamity.11 In effect, he had become an
important part of local communities, and when
Cacho sketched his two maps of the mission, he
was as much an insider sharing local knowledge of
the landscape and its inhabitants as an outsider
imposing Spanish imperial norms.12
Map of Pantabangan and Carranglan (1723)
The Augustinians had founded the mission of
Pantabangan and Carranglan (Caranglan) in the
mountains at the centre of the island of Luzon in
1702. Cacho was the third missionary there when
he arrived in 1705. Slowly converting more and
more communities, the Augustinian order had sta­
tioned an additional three missionaries in the area
by 1721. Unfortunately, unlike the first three,
these later arrivals received no financial support
from the Spanish monarchy, so the Augustinians
petitioned for the usual stipend in light of the
progress their missionary work was making.13
The map of the mission made by Cacho in 1723
was part of the official dossier they sent to Manila
to convince Spanish officials of the necessity of
funding the additional missionaries.
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Imago Mundi 73:1 2021
Cartographic Ethnography
75
Fig. 1. Maps of the island of Luzon in the Philippines to show the location of the Augustinian
missions established by the Spanish at Pantabangan and Carranglan (Caranglan) in the moun­
tainous interior to bring Christianity and (European) civilization to the indigenous inhabitants.
(D. Bove.)
Three kinds of communities stand out on
Cacho’s map (Fig. 2).14 Twenty-two circles contain
red-roofed churches and the Christian names of
the towns thus represented. The distinctive colour
of the churches is prominent against the largely
white background of the plains. On the left-hand
side and at the top of the map, the four banderoles
draped over the green and red mountains stand for
another type of community. Unlike the twentytwo encircled settlements with their definite
shape, the banderoles represented the Ygorrotes,
Ylongotes, Yrapies and Ytalones dispersed and hid­
den in the forests. In the upper-left corner, ten
uncoloured circles correspond to the third kind of
community. Of these ten, only two had churches,
both indicated by a black rectangle with a cross.
Nine of the ten retained their indigenous names.
A long but barely readable banderole with pointed
ends (upper left) attests to the Ysinais ethnicity of
the inhabitants spread out between the head­
waters of the river Tui.
Being a missionary, Cacho categorized the set­
tlements according to their religious affiliation,
hence his rendering of the mission towns as circles
with a red-roofed church, the listing of uncon­
quered indigenous communities in the banderoles,
and the use of uncoloured circles for the uncon­
quered indigenous communities in process of con­
version. He wanted his map to be a showcase of
the Augustinians’ missionary achievements. In the
span of twenty-one years, they had established the
twenty-two mission towns that are scattered over
the landscape, and Cacho highlighted this success
by creating a clear visual boundary between the
Christian settlements on the plains and the animist
communities in the mountains. He conformed to
the Spanish convention of portraying civilization
in the form of cities, which had a distinct, perma­
nent structure in contrast to unsubjugated settle­
ments with their dispersed, imprecise location.15
If the plains and mountains portrayed religious
opposites, the upper-left corner of the map cap­
tures a snapshot of the mission’s transitional stage.
Ten potential new mission towns were located in
that area. The two depicted with churches had
already converted, while the remaining eight
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Fig. 2. Alejandro Cacho’s map of part of the interior of Luzon (1723). Ink and watercolour on paper. Northeast is at the top. The mission towns, indicated by circles containing a
red-roofed church and the place-name, are all on the lowlands at the foot of the Caraballo mountain range. Banderoles giving the names of the various naciones (nations) represent the
still-unconverted animist communities living in the mountain forests. The town of Carranglan (written Caranglan) is prominent in the centre with Pantabangan (written Pantabagan) to
its right. The topographical distinction between plains and mountains represents the cultural divide between mission towns and the naciones. The isolation of the area is underlined by
the names of places outside the region in the margins; Manila (erroneously placed on the right) lies 135 kms from Pantabangan. (Seville, Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport, Archivo
General de Indias, MP-Filipinas, 148.)
Imago Mundi 73:1 2021
Cartographic Ethnography
were about to convert.16 The banderole identifying
the Ysinais inhabitants in this region is shown in
the process of disappearing into the background as
each place became Christian.17 Cacho was follow­
ing the usual tripartite religious classification of
converts, pagans and catechumens while showing
each group’s designated space. As his map demon­
strates, conversion meant relocating from a moun­
tain settlement to a mission town on the plains as
traditional ethnic designations were shed and
a new Christian identity under the Catholic
Church was embraced.
While Cacho’s map celebrated the progress of
the Augustinian mission, its topographical and
ethnographical content also expressed the obsta­
cles the missionaries encountered on the ground.
The surrounding mountains and river systems,
which are the main topographical features, inhib­
ited mobility in this frontier area. The rough ter­
rain made the mountain settlements difficult to
reach, especially during the rainy season when
rivers overflowed and pathways became muddy
and impassable. Despite the recent success, mis­
sion towns were sometimes inaccessible, hence
the need for more resident missionaries to alleviate
the pressures imposed on them by the problems
involved in moving about the terrain.18
The ethnographic portrayal of unsubjugated
communities on the forested mountains reflects
the lack of complete control on the part of the
Spanish monarchy and the Augustinian mission­
aries over the region. Furthermore, in contrast to
the tendency to impose a ‘cartographical silence’
over indigenous peoples in imperial maps, Cacho
continued to portray animist communities on his
map even if he did not present them in the best
possible light.19 After all, his missionizing targeted
nonbelievers in order to convert them.20 However,
in an ironic twist, such ethnographical details and
hints of animists in the forests and mountains
undermined any claim to territorial possession or
control. If anything, the visually vibrant and
imposing mountains only emphasized the resis­
tance of independent peoples to missionary
overtures.
Map of Northern Luzon (c.1740)
In the succeeding years, the Augustinians contin­
ued to establish more mission towns to the north
of Pantabangan and Carranglan. In 1740, how­
ever, they transferred a significant portion of
their mission to the Dominicans who had been
operating nearby. At about this time, Cacho
77
compiled a chronicle of the mission and drew
a map to accompany it.21 Both map and chronicle
were to be seen as celebrating the culmination of
the Augustinian missionary presence in the area.
To this end, both describe in detail not only the
work of the missionaries, but also the character
and actions of the indigenous people. Hence the
documents’ strong ethnographical content.
Cacho’s second missionary map covers a wider
area than the one already described (Fig. 3). It still
focused on the Augustinian mission, but it placed
this in the context of the whole of the northern
section of the island. The lower half of this second
map thus corresponds to the entire space of the
first, while the upper half shows the more recently
established mission towns, those created from the
late 1720s onwards. Unlike the majority of Spanish
maps, which emphasized urban centres along the
coast, Cacho’s map focuses on the mission towns
that were lined up along the central spine of the
island. Far from being geographically accurate, the
area they occupied has been distorted to appear
more extensive than it was in reality. In contrast,
except for one big town in the northeastern corner
of the island, the coastal colonial towns are barely
visible at the margins of the map.
While both maps share similar cartographical
elements, from subjugated and independent com­
munities to mountains and rivers, a unique feature
of Cacho’s second map is the scatter of vignettes
depicting everyday life in the interior frontier.
Several scenes show people travelling, pounding
rice, participating in a cock fight, cutting a tree,
collecting wax, hunting, and more. They provide
a certain dynamism to the map. Larger than the
towns, people and animals dominate the landscape
as they move about and perform their activities.
While the ethnographical content in the first map
is limited to banderoles and the acknowledgement
of independent groups hidden in the forested
mountains, these activities are much more explicit
in the second, which human figures occupy
prominently.
Similar to the first, Cacho’s second map exhibits
a contrast between so-called civilization and bar­
barity. In several lowland towns, various figures
perform the tasks associated with sedentary farm­
ing, such as pounding rice and tending water buf­
falo, of which the missionaries approved. In
contrast, the independent peoples are represented
on some of the mountain tops holding spears and
shields, hunting deer and in one case targeting an
unsuspecting passer-by with bow and arrow.
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Fig. 3. Alejandro Cacho’s map of the northern part of the island. North is at the top. The bottom third of the map represents roughly the same
area as Fig. 1. On the right-hand side, the still independent peoples in the mountains are armed with their distinctive weapons. Near the centre at
the bottom before the start of the mountains is a frontier inhabitant hunting deer on horseback. From Angel Pérez, Relaciones agustinianas de las
razas del norte de Luzon (Manila, Bureau of Public Printing, 1904.)
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Imago Mundi 73:1 2021
Cartographic Ethnography
These images were intended to drive home the
point that animist communities were barbaric
and in need of Christian salvation.
Each figure stands for a particular community,
with the different weapons indicating the various
ethnic groups.22 While Ylongotes brandish spears
and shields, Negros hunt with bow and arrow.
Even though Cacho reduced specific indigenous
communities to diagrammatic form, his stick fig­
ures are far from being ‘despatialized, delocalized,
floating decoration’.23 Despite the derogatory judge­
ment implicit in Cacho’s portrayal, independent
groups are still granted their proper place on the
map and no longer left as hidden entities lurking in
forests. In fact, here is implicit recognition of their
defiant presence outside Spanish control.
The lack of circles and banderoles on
Cacho’s second map reinforces the reality of the
overlap and interaction between mission and inde­
pendent settlements. Specific vignettes of mission
life—such as the scenes of natives hunting deer on
horseback—manifest the entanglement of Spanish
and indigenous practices and the blurred bound­
aries between the two groups. For example, the
Spaniards had introduced horses to the island
partly to facilitate overland travel, especially to
the distant interior frontier.24 To Europeans,
horses symbolized grandeur and civilization at
the same time as they were part of the package
of domestic animals that Spanish colonizers and
missionaries found necessary to have about them
as they were establishing colonial towns.25
However, instead of exposing the frontier com­
munities to a benign civilizing influence, the intro­
duction of horses to Luzon unintentionally
exacerbated a local practice that the Spaniards
considered barbaric: the hunting of deer by chas­
ing them on foot, spear in hand.26 The availability
of horses, however, enabled indigenous hunters to
adopt the new animals into their own hunting
practice; they started to hunt deer on horseback.
Cacho’s map depicts both methods of hunting deer
—on foot and on horseback—as visual proof of the
transformation in progress even though, ironically,
the effect was exactly what Spaniards like Cacho
wanted to avoid. In Cacho’s cartographical ethno­
graphy, such slippages and overlappings under­
mine the conventional dichotomy between
Spanish civilization and indigenous barbarity.
By the eighteenth century, regional and local map­
makers in Spain as elsewhere in Europe were
becoming more concerned with abstract,
79
mathematical spaces than with human figures
intruding into their portrayal of the landscape,
even from the margins. In the imperial context,
though, the delineation of exact measurement on
maps was the equivalent of territorial possession.
Amateur mapmakers who, like Cacho, had their
feet on the ground, did not feel obliged to follow the
trend towards mathematical maps. Cacho resorted to
whatever cartographical style suited his particular
needs. In his first map, he paid particular attention
to the exact number of settlements and their precise
geographical location. In his second map, he disre­
garded geographical proportion and fleshed out the
everyday activities happening at the frontier instead.
Cacho shows himself to have been flexible in
his map making, but a common thread is his
attention to ethnography. As a missionary, he
valued—and at the same time denigrated—the
indigenous people at the frontier in the interior
and created maps with an explicit ethnographical
approach. Rather than existing in a rigid abstract
space, the Augustinian mission in Cacho’s maps
was a living place where people moved about in
the landscape. Some—the unsubjugated individu­
als—roamed the mountains and the plains; others
—the missionaries—ventured into the mountains
to contact independent animists who aimed their
arrows at unsuspecting passers-by; yet others—
the native converts—hunted indigenous deer
while riding on Spanish-introduced horses.
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Jorge Flores,
Filomeno Aguilar, Jr., and Catherine Delano-Smith for
their ideas and feedback on the article.
Manuscript submitted April 2019. Revised text received
September 2020.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
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Laxton (Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001), 51–81; Matthew H. Edney, ‘The irony of imperial
mapping’, in The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery
of Empire, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 11–45.
2. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain:
Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones
Geográficas (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1996), 8–9.
3. María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish
Cosmography and the New World (Chicago, University of
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80
M. Dizon
Imago Mundi 73:1 2021
Chicago Press, 2009); Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain
(see note 2), 1–27.
4. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Maps and exploration in
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jesuita Pedro Murillo Velarde (1696–1753)’, in El Siglo de
las Luces: III Centenario del Nacimiento de José de Hermosilla
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colonial
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8. Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr., Where Caciques and Mapmakers
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9. Ibid., 12–38; Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands:
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Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 2006), 42–45.
10. Carlos Villoria Prieto, ed., Un berciano en Filipinas:
Alejandro Cacho de Villegas (León, Universidad de León,
1997), 26–70, 263–65; Tomás González Cuellas, Presencia
berciana en Filipinas (Valladolid, Ed. Estudio Agustiniano,
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los religiosos agustinos de la provincia del Santisimo Nombre de
Jesús de las Islas Filipinas desde su fundación hasta nuestros
días (Manila, Estab. tip. del Real Colegio de Santo Tomás,
1901), 175–76.
11. Antonio Mozo, Noticia historico natural de los glorio­
sos triumphos y felices adelantamientos conseguidos en el pre­
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missiones que tienen à su cargo en las Islas Philipinas, y en el
grande Imperio de la China (Madrid, Andrès Ortega,
1763), 53.
12. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and
Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 2015), 75–77.
13. Seville, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI),
Filipinas, 140, n.29, fols 1v–2v.
14. AGI, MP-Filipinas, 148.
15. Richard L. Kagan and Fernando Marías, Urban
Images of the Hispanic World, 1493−1793 (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 2000), 19–44.
16. AGI (see note 13), Filipinas, 140, n.29, fol. 55v.
17. Alejandro Cacho, ‘Compendioso manifiesto del prin­
cipio y progreso de la misión de italones que los religiosos
de nuestro padre San Agustín de la Provincia del Santísimo
Nombre de Jesús de Filipinas mantienen en los montes de
la Pampanga, así al oriente de dicha provincia’, in Villoria
Prieto, Un berciano en Filipinas (see note 10), 373–99; Jeffrey
A. Erbig and Sergio Latini, ‘Across archival limits: colonial
records, changing ethnonyms, and geographies of knowl­
edge’, Ethnohistory 66:2 (2019): 259–64.
18. AGI (see note 13), Filipinas, 140, n.29, fols. 62r,
66r, 68v, 73r, 80v, 83v.
19. J. B. Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda
of cartography in early modern Europe’, in Laxton, The New
Nature of Maps (see note 1), 83–107; Neil Safier, ‘The con­
fines of the colony: boundaries, ethnographic landscapes,
and imperial cartography in Iberoamerica’, in Akerman,
The Imperial Map (see note 1), 136, 145–55.
20. Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Ethnography and cultural trans­
lation in the early modern missions’, Studies in Church
History 53 (2017): 272–310; Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘The
Spanish contribution to the ethnology of Asia in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Renaissance Studies
17:3 (2003): 418–48.
21. Alejandro Cacho, ‘Conquistas espirituales de los religio­
sos agustinos calzados de la Provincia del Santísimo Nombre
de Jesús de Filipinas, hechas en estos cuarento años (1700
a 1740) en la alcaldía de la Pampanga’, in Relaciones agustini­
anas de las razas del norte de Luzon, ed. Angel Pérez (Manila,
Bureau of Public Printing, 1904), 25–57.
22. Ibid.; Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the
Invention of the Human (see note 7), 258.
23. Valerie A. Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The
Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2006), 179.
24. Greg Bankoff and Sandra Scott Swart, ‘Breeds of
empire and the “invention” of the horse’, in Breeds of
Empire: The ‘Invention’ of the Horse in Southeast Asia and
Southern Africa, 1500−1950, ed. Greg Bankoff and Sandra
Scott Swart (Copenhagen and Abingdon, NIAS, 2007),
13; Greg Bankoff, ‘Colonising new lands: horses in the
Philippines’, in Bankoff and Scott Swart, Breeds of Empire
(op. cit.), 85; Archives of the University of Santo Tomas,
Archivo de la Provincia del Santísimo Rosario (hereafter
AUST, APSR), Cagayan, tome 30, n.1, fols. 114v, 229r;
AUST, APSR, Cagayan, tomo 28, n.27, fols. 457r, 460v.
25. John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An
Environmental History of the Conquest of California and
Hawaiʻi (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina
Press, 2015); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008).
26. Mozo, Noticia historico natural (see note 11), 31.
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Imago Mundi 73:1 2021
Cartographic Ethnography
81
Ethnographie cartographique: Cartes missionnaires d’une frontière impériale espagnole au XVIIIe siècle
Les cartes d’une frontière impériale espagnole aux Philippines, réalisées au XVIIIe siècle par le missionnaire
Alejandro Cacho, reflètent une approche ethnographique qui a simultanément réifié et sapé les notions
espagnoles de conquête et de civilisation. Alors que Cacho célébrait les villes missionnaires et dénigrait les
agglomérations non soumises, plusieurs éléments de ses cartes ont subverti ce message en reconnaissant la
présence de communautés animistes et les différentes mobilités qui se déroulaient à la frontière. L’apparente
contradiction des messages s’explique par le contexte dans lequel les cartes ont été réalisées.
Kartographische Ethnographie: Missionskarten einer Grenze des spanischen Imperiums im 18. Jahrhundert
Die Karten einer Grenze des spanischen Imperiums auf den Philippinen, die der Missionar Alejandro Cacho
im 18. Jahrhundert erstellte, spiegeln einen ethnographischen Ansatz, der die spanischen Vorstellungen
von Eroberung und Zivilisation sowohl manifestierte als auch in Frage stellte. Während Cacho
Missionsstädte feierte und nicht unterworfene Siedlungen verunglimpfte, widersprachen einige Elemente
seiner Karte diesen Bewertungen, indem sie die Anwesenheit animistischer Gemeinwesen und unterschied­
liche Formen von Mobilität in der Grenzregion dokumentierten. Dieser Konflikt in der Aussage der Karte
erklärt sich aus dem Zusammenhang, in dem die Blätter entstanden.
Cartografía etnográfica: mapas misioneros de una frontera imperial española del siglo XVIII
Los mapas de una frontera imperial española en Filipinas elaborados en el siglo XVIII por el misionero
Alejandro Cacho reflejan una aproximación etnográfica que simultáneamente cosificaba y minaba las
nociones españolas sobre la conquista y la civilización. A la vez que Cacho ensalzaba los pueblos misioneros
y denigraba los asentamientos no sometidos, varios elementos de sus mapas subvirtieron ese mensaje al
reconocer a comunidades animistas y la diversa movilidad que tenía lugar en la frontera. El aparente
conflicto de mensajes se explica por el contexto en el que los mapas fueron realizados.
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