Mexico

A capitalistic cartographic analysis of Mexico from Fortune Magazine.

At first glance this vivid map of Mexico, with its contrasting colors, pictorial relief, and decorative typefonts, provides a relatively upbeat image of the country. A legend at the lower right identifies towns by population, major transportation routes, and general land use purposes; while inset maps in the lower left show economic, industrial, climate and population information by region.

However, charged language in the accompanying text provides a harsher tone, stating “this is the proving ground of the most dramatic task afoot in the Western Hemisphere: the attempt to project the shoeless, bedless, plague-ridden 70 percent of Mexico’s 19,000,000 population into a producer-consumer industrialized economy.” Unsurprising, considering the map was drawn by Carlos Merida for a 1938 issue of Fortune magazine, a conservative economic publication that heavily promotes corporate capitalist agendas.