Mexico Map 1943 Regional Print - Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara

The Matthews-Northrup Division and J.W. Clement Company of Buffalo produced this map of Mexico in 1943 for the World Publishing Company's New Matthews-Northrup Global Atlas of the World at War, a wartime reference volume that paired straightforward political maps like this one with a running visual record of military actions from the war's opening moves in 1938 through the summer of 1943. Unlike the atlas's more dramatic invasion and military-action sheets, advertised on its own cover as tools for following "every phase of the Global War," this Mexico sheet is a comparatively conventional political map, each state outlined in color and its capital and rail connections clearly marked, useful reference material for an American readership increasingly attentive to hemispheric geography as the United States coordinated wartime cooperation with Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Mexico had itself formally entered the war on the Allied side two years after Pearl Harbor, following German attacks on Mexican oil tankers.

Mexico City anchors the map at the national center, with a dedicated inset of the country's central region giving readers a closer look at the capital's immediate surroundings, much like similar insets in atlases published decades earlier. Guadalajara and Monterrey both appear as major marked cities, their positions along the rail network the map traces reflecting Mexico's steadily industrializing wartime economy. Railroads crisscross the country throughout, a deliberate emphasis given how central rail transport was to both civilian logistics and the flow of wartime raw materials northward to American industry. Shaded relief gives a general sense of Mexico's varied terrain, from its coastal lowlands to the mountainous interior separating them.

A distinctive gift for a World War II history enthusiast or a collector interested in wartime atlas publishing specifically, since this sheet's context, bound into a volume tracking global military campaigns, sets it apart from every other, peacetime-published Mexico map in this collection. TheMapVault also carries Cram's 1893 Mexico, Cuba and Central America map and the Weimar Institute's 1886 sheet, both produced half a century or more earlier under entirely different circumstances; this 1943 printing is the only one from an active wartime publishing context, its railroad emphasis reflecting genuine strategic logistics concerns. It's supplied unframed, available in the full range of nine sizes.