Mexico & Southwest US Map 1893 Regional Print - Mexico City, Veracruz, San Antonio

This wall map of Mexico was composed in 1893 by Antonio García y Cubas, the country's leading nineteenth-century mapmaker, and brought to print by the Mexico City chromolithography firm of Víctor Debray y Compañía, a house whose multi-stone color work rivaled what was then coming out of Germany, Britain, New York and San Francisco. García y Cubas worked as much as an artist as a geographer, and this sheet is considered the fullest expression of his visual style, with mountains and waterways rendered through orography, the branch of physical geography dealing with relief, rather than through flat outline alone. The map covers Mexico together with much of the southern and southwestern United States, Texas rendered in unusually complete detail, at a moment deep in the Porfiriato when Mexico's government was pouring resources into railroads and steamship lines to modernize the country's transport network.

Transportation dominates the sheet's content, with steamship routes and railroad lines given particular emphasis throughout, reflecting the era's preoccupation with linking Mexico's interior to its ports and to markets across the northern border. In the lower left corner sits a separate inset map, titled Plano Orográfico de la Zona Recorrida por el Ferro-Carril Mexicano de Veracruz a México, tracing the specific route of the Mexican Railway between the port of Veracruz and the capital, one of the country's most consequential nineteenth-century infrastructure projects. Texas appears rendered almost completely, and attractively, on the main sheet despite lying outside García y Cubas's home country, evidence of how closely Mexican cartographers were tracking developments across the Rio Grande. The pairing of the orographic wall map with the detailed Veracruz-to-Mexico-City rail inset makes this as much an infrastructure document as a portrait of the national landscape.

This is a fine choice for a collector of Mexican cartography or for anyone with ties to Mexico City, Veracruz or the borderlands of Texas that the map so carefully renders. Only three editions of this monumental García y Cubas wall map are known to survive, from 1878, 1879 and this 1893 printing, making any example a genuine rarity rather than a common reissue; this later edition is distinguished from the earlier states by its refined orographic detail and the added Veracruz railway inset. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes to suit any collector's wall.