(Beyond) the Vara: Mexican Land Measures over Time

How can changing representations and measures of land over time help to illustrate the long conceptual transformations of what is today Mexico? The Spanish conquistadors who in the 16th century arrived in Mesoamerica encountered there a vast array of cultural groups, each with their own relationship to space, territory, and measurement. An early illustration of such contact is a late sixteenth-century map of San Pedro Teozacoalco, in present-day Oaxaca, which represents the notable spatial and environmental features of a Mixtec community.

Of immediate interest in this pictorial manuscript is its iconography, which forefronts Indigenous styles of artistic representation. Pay particular attention to the boundaries of the circular shape. These are place names, represented using glyphs. Note also the depictions of various natural features and boundary markers of the municipality, as well as the detailed dynastic history written on the manuscript’s left side. At the same time, present are multiple signs of European influence. There include horseshoe prints, for example, as well as an array of Christian churches that dot the landscape. The map is painted on sheets of European paper that have been joined to one another at the edges. It emerged from a wave of documentation produced in association with the Relaciones geográficas, which compiled manuscript and artistic portrayals of local geography in response to a questionnaire distributed by the Spanish Crown in the late 1570s. Use of the vara would become commonplace and widespread throughout New Spain. Often overlooked, however, is the enduring role of the vara centuries later, as a state-sanctioned surveying unit in Texas.

Following the US annexation of vast southwestern territories following the Mexican-American war, the Spanish vara nonetheless continued to serve as a de facto surveying unit in the former Mexican territories. This 1884 map of Cameron County, Texas, offers one such example. It overlays the boundaries of land grants and zones of land ownership, including the vara in its scale: 1:131,960; or 4,000 varas to the inch. It is attributed to J. J. Cocke, who was the county’s supervisor at the time. In 1919, Texas officially established the vara at 33⅓ inches. Here hand-colored elements again play a prominent role, albeit in a geometrically-ordered spatial representation that prioritizes a definitive representation of land ownership claims in a clearly bounded area. Note, however, that the Gulf of Mexico does not receive a color of its own — in this case, shading is largely reserved for land. Also of note is the combination of multiple measurement units in the map’s scale. What other visual elements serve to distinguish this mode of cartographic representation from that seen in the Map of Teozacoalco?

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