Over the past quarter century, numerous studies have analyzed Indigenous mapmaking during the first century of Spanish colonial rule in Mesoamerica. Researchers have shown how Native painter-scribes (tlacuiloque) merged European mapping conventions with regional styles developed long before Spanish arrival to represent sacred landscapes and recount community histories.

Pulido Rull's work builds on this tradition and corpus to address new questions. Whereas most studies have sought to identify cultural meanings embedded in maps, the author instead considers the use of maps to affect changes in the region's legal geography and land-use patterns. Via an analysis of dozens of Native-authored land grant maps (mapas de mercedes de tierras) held at Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación alongside voluminous case files regarding the adjudication of land grant requests, Pulido Rull shows how mapmaking enabled Native painters and nobles to participate in discussions of land distribution.

The book's five chapters balance the broader legal context and the particularities of specific cases that produced land-grant maps. The first two chapters reveal how the centrality of visual evidence in Mesoamerican legal traditions intersected with new Spanish ordinances governing land distribution to make drawn maps a requirement for colonial land-grant proceedings. Taking the reader through each step of these proceedings, Pulido Rull demonstrates how the maps worked in conjunction with visual inspections, witness testimonials, and off-the-record negotiations to produce a final decision and case file that local magistrates would send to New Spain's viceroy and Real Audiencia. The remaining chapters provide a nuanced view of three types of land-grant proceedings: when Native nobles requested land, when Native community leaders opposed Spaniards’ land-grant petitions, and when community leaders negotiated the terms of particular Spaniards’ petitions. In each instance, Pulido Rull provides a close reading of the nuances of a written case file alongside a multifaceted analysis of the visual and textual forms of the accompanying maps.

This work's close attention to the legal landscape enables us to see maps not only as visual artifacts that encoded cultural meaning, but also as valuable tools for Native people attempting to mitigate land loss and environmental degradation amid expanding ranching economies. As Pulido Rull clearly demonstrates, this sociolegal context ultimately filtered what items appeared in a given map and the form in which it was drawn. Unlike the well-known maps of the relaciones geográficas, land-grant maps rarely identified sacred spaces or narrated community histories (99–104, 185, 196–97); yet, they sought to preserve such spaces by emphasizing community occupation and use in terms legible to colonial judges and magistrates. Native painters skillfully merged Mesoamerican mapping forms, including the cartographic rectangle (30–31), pictorial elements (50–54), and features oriented toward different sides of the map (86–87), with European perspective design to make compelling arguments about the acceptability or impermissibility of requested land grants. Some also redacted and transformed their maps in accordance with changes in the proceedings, outside pressure, or off-the-record negotiations between Spanish petitioners and Native nobles, as revealed by Pulido Rull's analysis of palimpsests (120–24).

Though ostensibly oriented toward Mesoamerican ethnohistorical scholarship and histories of cartography, this work will be of interest to a variety of audiences. Pulido Rull rightfully points to the regional uniqueness of Native-authored land grant maps (3, 48–49, 193–96), yet the persistence of Indigenous spatial imaginaries, engagement with colonial legal geographies, and defense of land claims occurred throughout the Americas. Likewise, future studies may build upon this work to consider community-level power dynamics. Were Native nobles who petitioned for lands defending community interests, expanding personal enterprises, encroaching on neighboring towns, or perhaps pursuing all of these objectives?

Source materials may not provide definitive answers, but the case-specific nuance offered in this work is a valuable step in addressing them. Lastly, Pulido Rull's clear prose and thoughtful visual presentation of the maps in question make this work accessible to a wide range of readers.