Maps as Rhetorical Tools of Colonial Power and Alternative Cartographies: The Americas’ Cartographic Invention

Abstract

This essay focuses on two historical maps as rhetorical artifacts: The Piri Reis Map of 1513 produced by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513, the Reis map, and the Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories produced by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, the de la Torre map. The Reis map demonstrates the colonial logic of Americas’ cartographic invention while the de la Torre Map is an alternative cartographic artifact disrupting the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and the settler-colonial legacy of the world heritage memory.

Maps are one of the most rhetorically powerful visual artifacts that tell stories about our geographies, informing how we experiences the spaces of our physical environments (Propen, “Visual Communication”).¹ Thus, the storytelling power of maps have historically been utilized for constructing public and world heritage memory (Özyeşilpınar and Beltran). As visual-rhetorical artifacts, maps have been used in the service of advancing and materializing settler-colonial and imperial power relations and violence (Hayes; Na’puti). Furthermore, maps have also been used for constructing alternative stories that expose the epistemic violence inflicted by settler-colonial and imperial cartographic projects and practices, offering ways to envision anti-colonial and decolonial visions for socio-spatial and environmental justice and resistance (Eichberger; Greene and Kuswa; Na’puti; Butts and Jones).

In this essay, I focus on the cartographic stories of two historical maps in the social-cultural-political contexts of their discourses within the lager setting of the world heritage memory: (1) The Piri Reis Map of 1513 by the Ottoman-Turkish admiral-cartographer, Piri Reis, which will be referred to as the Reis Map, and (2) The Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, which will be referred to as the de la Torre map. My interest in these two maps is due to their shared connection to the so-called discovery of the Americas, and Christopher Columbus’s voyages. Both maps tell the story of Columbus, yet they differ in their evocation of narrating this story, which informs contemporary discourses and in turn, the receptions of these maps.

My analysis of these two maps and their contemporary discourses is informed by rhetoric and writing studies and technical communication scholarship on space-place, critical-cultural geography, and cartographic literacy. This scholarship offers critical interventions into maps/mapping, coloniality, visual rhetoric and information design (Barton and Barton; Hayes; Propen, Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics). In this context, I analyse the visual, textual, and linguistic elements of these maps.Through my analysis, I show that the Reis map is celebrated on a global scale because its cartographic story affirms and glorifies the so-called discovery of the Americas by Columbus. The de la Torre map, however, does not enjoy the same level of global recognition. I argue that the de la Torre map functions as an alternative cartographic story that disrupts, destabilizes, and challenges the story of the Reis map and its celebratory discourse.

Space-Place, Critical-Cultural Geography, and Cartographic Literacy: Conversations in Rhetoric and Writing Studies and Technical Communication

The growing body of spatially oriented scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies and technical communication has established space as rhetorical and rhetoric as spatial (Ackerman), emphasized the importance of cultivating critical spatial rhetorical perspectives (Hurley) to engage with how knowledge is produced and practiced in relation to space-place, materiality, and embodiment (Blair; Ríos). Scholars have directed attention to understanding writing as a spatial praxis (Reynolds), offered enriching insights about place-based composition (Keller and Weisser), place-conscious teaching of rhetoric and writing (Brooke and Mcintosh), and geocomposition (Rivers). Furthermore, this scholarship has had significant implications focusing on public rhetoric and memory via investigating the material-visual arrangement and rhetorical (re)configurations of public memory sites, and their material consequences on the embodied subjects (Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki; Dickinson, Blair, and Ott; Sanchez and Moore), in addition to making critical spatial interventions with digital rhetoric (Morey; Jones and Greene) and challenging settler-colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal narratives of public and national memory through critical approaches and lenses such as holographic rhetoric (Chevrette), and rhetorical-gendered geography of civil rights memory (Poirot).

This spatially oriented scholarship has further investigated these spatial concerns studying the rhetorical nature of maps as subjective documents (Harley) that deliver specific arguments about the physical world (Propen, Locating) through their selective practices of inclusions and exclusions enmeshed in ideology and/or serving to advance power relations that shape and are shaped by public and social discourses (Barton and Barton; Eichberger; Greene and Kuswa). Maps position people to occupy specific subject positions-ideologies that shape their impressions of different geographies and, in turn, peoples and cultures of these geographies (Barney; Brady; Piper). Thus, the role of identity and its critical spatial rhetorical construction is of importance to reimagining and rethinking cartographic inquiry and mapping for change and transformation in and beyond the social settings of education (Butler). Building on how cartographic inquiry can be used for social change, Joy Santee demonstrates how map composition assignments have students participate in rhetorical engagement with place-based civic issues while helping students to see how maps can be used to advocate for and create social change (“Cartographic Composition” and “Cartographic Literacy”).

As the current disciplinary conversations demonstrate, maps “come already embedded in discourses about the politics of life; they arrive as proof and evidence of certain arguments, ideologies, and attitudes. As rhetorical artifacts, maps impose order, produce knowledge, and erase other ways of knowing” (Casas 169-70). In this context, I pay close attention to how a map “visually constructs a way of understanding a place and thus makes a deliberative argument” (Propen, “Visual Communication” 240). As tools of rhetoric (Kimball), maps have been critical “weapons of imperialism” (Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” 282) and were used in colonial projects as an extension of the imperial body and its power (Biggs).

I respond to this scholarship through my focus on how maps serve as storytelling tools that can be used to affirm or disrupt the settler-colonial logic and legacy of the world heritage memory discourse. I first uncover the settler-colonial logic of the Reis map’s celebratory discourse. This discourse praises the Reis map as an invaluable contribution to the world heritage memory as recognized by UNESCO, while glossing over the colonial legacy of the map’s story and thus the colonial-epistemic violence of the world heritage memory. Then, I turn to the de la Torre map as an alternative cartographic story that disrupts settler-colonial logic of the Reis map’s celebratory discourse. The disruption that the de la Torre Map creates destabilizes how UNESCO constructs the narrative of world heritage memory by laying bare the settler-colonial logic of this memory.

The Cartographic Process of Inventing the Americas

There is no question that maps were used strategically to invent the Americas to justify its colonial occupation. Edmundo O’Gorman articulates that America was not discovered but invented “in the image of its inventor” (140), which “is a cartographic process that began with the first naming ‘America’ on a map and has continued ever since with the cartographic projection of America in map publications” (Brückner 28). Enrique Dussel’s critique brings attention to the Eurocentric nature of O’Gorman’s invention thesis because O’Gorman perceives the invention of America “in the image and likeness of Europe since America could not actualize in itself any other form of becoming human [than the European]” (qtd. in Dussel, The Invention 32). As Mario Sáenz writes: “For Dussel, the denial of the Otherness of the American Indian lies not in the creation of a being that is like the European but less civilized or mature” (427). In this process of invention, maps were “tools with which Europe could impose its own image, values, and aspirations on the newly discovered world” (Butzer 361). The colonial maps of the Americas transformed the geographical space “sufficiently so as no longer to appear foreign to the imperial eye” by denying and covering over the humanity of the indigenous peoples (Said, Culture and Imperialism 226). This act of dehumanization invented the Americas as “the first identity of modernity” (Quijano and Ennis 533) which formed the basis for the doctrine of discovery that “predicated conferral of dominion on both the inability and the unwillingness of Europeans to recognize or respect indigenous spatialities” (Barnd 14). Therefore, the invention of the Americas was a cartographic process that relied on and silenced-erased Indigenous bodies, relationships with, and spatial knowledge of the land to chart its routes and resources (Cobos 80) and thus, invented the Americas as a space where “people without history” are located (Mignolo, “Delinking” 471).

In the colonial context of the Americas’ cartographic invention, I perceive the cartographic narrative of the Reis map (see Figure 1) as a space of colonial difference “where coloniality of power is enacted” (Mignolo, Local Histories 35). Tiara R. Na’puti introduces her term “colonial cartographic violence to engage the textual, linguistic, visual, and material dynamics of constructing and registering places as exclusively for colonization and militarization” (6). Through Na’puti’s term, I read the cartographic story of the Reis map as a site where the epistemic violence of colonial cartography dehumanizes and silences Indigenous bodies, cultures, and spatial epistemologies of the Americas from the map, and thus reinvents the land exclusively for colonial occupation and ownership. The contemporary receptions and interpretations of this site of colonial cartographic violence form what I call the celebratory discourse of this map. I argue that this celebratory discourse is rooted in the rhetoric of modernity and reproduces the logic of coloniality by reifying and capitalizing on the map’s connection to Columbus and the discovery myth of the Americas. I engage Walter Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience and lay bare the colonial cartographic violence that shapes the story of the Reis map (“Epistemic Disobedience”). Through this practice, I demonstrate how the maps’ celebratory discourse not only hides but also praises the colonial violence present in the cartographic story of the Reis map as an invaluable part of the world heritage memory.

Figure 1. Piri Reis, Cartographer. The Piri Reis Map of 1513. Library of Topkapi Palace Museum, No. H 1824. Map. 1513. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Piri_reis_world_map_01.jpg

Figure 2. José María De La Torre, Cartographer. Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories, 1841, Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2021668556/

I read the de la Torre map, on the other hand, as a space of colonial difference “where border thinking is emerging…where local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, the space in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored” (Mignolo, Local Histories 35). In the cartographic story of the de la Torre map, the experiences of Columbus, the place names given by him, and the Indigenous histories, experiences, embodied spatialities and place names are illustrated together, side by side, in a dialogical situation. This multilayered storying of the land speaks to a critical point Casas makes about the colonial legacy of the map stating that “it may not be possible to fully escape the colonial legacy of maps, it is possible to work within the knowledge that maps don’t necessarily need to extend the visual culture in which they operate. They can also critique it and retrofit their visual language to actually address cartographic distortions” (180). The cartographic story of the de la Torre map does what Casas addresses. Therefore, I consider the de la Torre map an example of what Jordan Engel calls alternative cartographies which “challenge our relationships with the environment and the dominant culture” (qtd. in Casas 180). I perceive the de la the Torre map’s multilayered story as a possible form of remapping (Na’puri), which practices border thinking and in turn, destabilizes the celebratory discourse of the Reis map and its cartographic story.

Celebratory Discourse of the Reis Map

Let’s start with some facts about the Reis map. It was produced as a portolan style chart by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513 during the reign of the Ottoman Empire and was found in 1929 at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The map shows the coasts and islands of South America, Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, the Bahamas, Central America, West Africa, and Europe, and it is only the surviving western portion of a larger world map, the remaining parts are lost today (McIntosh, The Piri Reis Map of 1513; Pinto; Soucek). The visual content of the map is accompanied by twenty-nine marginal map-inscriptions in which Piri Reis describes the various map-sources he used in composing his map, the Iberian discoveries in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and provides information about the peoples, cultures, and environment of the Americas (McIntosh; Pinto; Soucek). The map is famously known for inscription number five, which the longest inscription on the map “located in the South American landmass in the approximate present day region of Peru, Bolivia, and the interior of Brazil” (Pinto 68). In this inscription, Piri Reis “tells how these shores and also these islands were found … It is reported that a Genoese infidel named Qulūnbū [Colonbo; i.e. Columbus] discovered these places” (McIntosh 70). The rest of the inscription provides a detailed account of Columbus’s perceptions of the flora, fauna, and the peoples of these shores and islands, which is a combined representation of Columbus’s first, second, and third voyages (McIntosh, The Piri Reis Map of 1513 71). The inscription ends with Piri Reis explaining how he drew the shores and islands of the Americas by copying a map Reis believed to be made by Columbus, which did not survive to today.

The content of inscription five affirms the accounts of many sixteenth-century chroniclers about Columbus’s voyages (McIntosh 69), which attributed global recognition to the Reis map because the map displays “not only … a copy of Columbus’s map, but also … it documents some of the era’s evolving ideas about the geography of the New World” (McIntosh, “The Piri Reis Map of 1513 is Important Because” 134). Furthermore, considering that none of Columbus’s maps are extant today, for many scholars, especially the scholars of Colombian expeditions, the possibility of retrieving a representation of Columbus’s early cartographic depiction of the Americas was an opportunity for “better understanding the sources of Columbus’ missing map … to see what Columbus saw” (Pinto 68- 69). The desire to see what Columbus saw and situating the map as an invaluable resource providing important insights on the emerging ideas about the Americas appear to form the basis of the celebratory discourse that surrounds this map, not only in a global setting but also in the context of Türkiye’s national history.

One of the earliest and most representative examples of the Turkish national narrative about Piri Reis and his map is evident in Prof. Dr. Afet İnan’s book, The Oldest Map of America Drawn by Piri Reis. Marking the 400^th anniversary of the admiral Reis’s death, İnan introduces this map as “one of the oldest and yet most perfect maps of America, drawn by a Turkish admiral” (4). İnan highlights that Piri Reis had a map of Columbus to construct his own map and thus, “handed down to us the oldest map of America and informed us about various aspects of the most important phase in the history of the discoveries” (40). The emphasis on the map’s connection to Columbus, his maps, and the discovery myth of the Americas appears of vital importance to situating the Reis map in the country’s national history, which has been fundamental for Türkiye to claim itself a place within the history of the world memory heritage.

In its application to UNESCO for the organization to be associated with celebrating the 500^th anniversary of the Piri Reis Map of 1513, Türkiye’s argument was grounded in İnan’s description of the map’s importance and situated the map as “an invaluable piece of the world’s documentary heritage” because it “marks a significant event in the history of the country” and “provides insight on the history of its time” (“Turkey 500th anniversary of the Piri Reis World Map (1513)”). Türkiye’s rhetorical strategy was an effective one as UNESCO declared 2013 as the year of Piri Reis. In 2016, Türkiye applied for the Reis Map to be registered in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. In its application, Türkiye reiterated the map’s significance as “the earliest cartographic record of Columbus’s oceanic voyages … the oldest cartographic record of the New World discoveries. The fact that the Piri Reis map conveys place names in the New World as given by Columbus increases its historical value” (“Turkey-The Piri Reis World Map (1513) in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library” 5). UNESCO’s approved Türkiye’s application in 2017 and inscribed the Reis map to the Memory of the World Register.

Brian Harley brings attention to the canonical status of the earliest manuscript maps of the Americas and how they “have become reified signs that tend ways to say the same thing about the heroes of the great voyages (Morison 1971, 1974) or the achievements of the European colonization in the New World” (“Rereading the Maps” 522-23). The Reis map has also acquired this canonized status through its celebratory discourse. This discourse is constructed as if the history of world memory is a singular line of progression that originates from Europe signifying its rhetoric of modernity, “triumph of advancement and the collective march forward of humanity” (Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place” 177). This rhetoric is what “naturalizes ‘modernity’ as a universal global process and point of arrival [that] hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of ‘coloniality’” (Mignolo, “Delinking” 450).

Uncovering the Colonial Cartographic Violence of the Reis Map and Its Celebratory Discourse

The celebratory discourse of the Reis map, I argue, is rooted in the Eurocentric rhetoric of modernity and reproduces its colonial logic both in Türkiye’s national context and the global setting of the world heritage memory. This discourse highlights the map’s connection to the statement that “Columbus discovered America” since this discovery myth marks the birth of modernity from which the totality of the European subject and its global-universal history has emerged (Quijano; Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience”). I consider Türkiye capitalizing on the maps’ connection to Columbus as a case of a non-Western country internalizing the rhetoric of modernity and logic of coloniality. This internalization appears as an outcome of Türkiye wanting to carve itself a place in the memory of the so-called universal history that privileges Western epistemology. The celebratory discourse of the Reis map, both in its local and global settings, co-memorializes the Euro-centered totality of universal history, and in turn, glosses over how the cartographic story of the Reis map dehumanizes and devalues Indigenous bodies and cultures of the Americas, which is evident in the map’s inscription five:

The men and women shot arrows…and the whole population went naked and also very [illegible]… The Spaniards took the boat. They saw that inside of it was human flesh. It happened that these people were of the nation which went from island to island haunting men and eating them… Loading their ship with many logwood trees and taking two natives along, they took them within that year to the king of Spain. The said Qulūnbū not knowing the language of these people, traded with them by signs. After this trip, the king of Spain sent priests and barley. The Spaniards taught the natives how to sow and reap and converted them to their own religion. The natives had no religion of any sort. They walked naked and lay there like animals. (excerpt from inscription five, translation compiled by McIntosh, The Piri Reis Map of 1513 70)

The inscription five produces the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as the Other “situated in a space ethnocentrically conceived to have homogenous qualities” (Barton and Barton 62). The repeating images of savageness, illegibility, and barbarism describing the Indigenous peoples and their cultures constitute the main repertoire of inscription five. These images repress individual differences and paint a homogenized image of the so-called Indian savage trope that dehumanizes and demonizes the Indigenous peoples of the Americas while presuming them as “lacking proper spatiality” (Barnd 14). The cartographic story of the Reis map practices this form of colonial cartographic violence in inscription five by designating Columbus as the great explorer who named and made the islands and coasts of the Americas known for the rest of the world: “Now these regions have been opened to all and have become well known. The names which mark the places on the said islands and coasts were given by Qulūnbū that these places may be known by them” (translation from McIntosh, The Piri Reis Map of 1513 71). This statement suppresses Indigenous spatialities and ways of knowing while reproducing the land as empty and available for colonial occupation by imposing the place names given by Columbus over already existing Indigenous place names that “carry stories of deep connections across ancestry, place, and belonging” (Na’puri 7). The celebratory discourse of the Reis map harnesses the rhetorical power of this statement from inscription five and situates the Reis map as an invaluable cartographic artifact of world heritage memory. This rhetorical strategy works “to purify the legend of conquest reaffirming intervention and colonialism as positive elements to be celebrated” (Merced 30). Thus, today, through its celebratory discourse, the cartographic story of the Reis map delineates the invention of the Americas as a space of colonial difference by reproducing the colonial logic of what Dussel calls non-European alterity, which denies the historical legacy and contemporary presence of Indigenous cultural-spatial epistemologies (The Invention of the Americas).

Finding the de la Torre Map

I found the de la Torre map on the World Digital Library (WDL) project’s webpage. This project was supported by the Library of Congress (LOC) in partnership with UNESCO, and the original project site is archived in the Library of Congress web archives. The original WDL webpage included a paragraph-long description that accompanies the digitized version of this printed map which can now be found on LOC’s page for the map. This paragraph describes the content and importance of this cartographic work from a historical a geographical point of view: “It [the de la Torre map] describes in detail the itineraries of the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas. The map shows the routes of each of Columbus’s three voyages, giving the dates on which he reached various places. It provides original place-names as well as the names that Columbus gave to the different islands. Also shown is the distribution of the pre-Columbian cultures at the time of Columbus’s first voyage, as understood by José María de la Torre” (The Library of Congress).

What grabbed my attention in this description was the map’s connection to Columbus and how this connection was displayed through a multilayered design that affirms the presence of Indigenous cultures and spatial epistemologies. The de la Torre map is recognized as an important cartographic artifact because of “its evocation of the aboriginal past, which at the time it was made, helped to reaffirm the culture of the [N]ative peoples of the Americas” (The Library of Congress). Despite its significance, I had a challenging time finding more information about the de la Torre map. While some information was available across different online spaces (for example, antique map collector sites), they were short descriptions that did not move beyond the paragraph about the map available on the WDL site. I also was not able to find any available translation of the map itself. As a result, I started working with Rebecca Muñoz, director of the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC) at the City of El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department. When I started working with Muñoz, she was a doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Muñoz conducted further research about Cuban cartography of the nineteenth century, José María de la Torre and his cartographic works, and most importantly, translated José María de la Torre’s 1841 map.

Alternative Cartographic Story of the de la Torre Map

In Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, Mary Pat Brady offers otherwise stories that destabilize dominant Anglo colonial narratives that unmade the Mexican identity with an unreal and mythical past by uncovering ignored and silenced layers of history (15; 24). I am particularly interested in Brady’s use of destabilization as I consider instances of destabilization, whether intentional or unintentional, as spaces of border thinking from where otherwise epistemologies emerge: the very possibility of decolonial options (Mignolo “Delinking”). I approach the de la Torre map as an alternative cartographic story that practices destabilization and in turn, border thinking. This border thinking is evident through how the map’s story engages in remapping. I integrate Na’puri’s remapping which, “as theorized by Native and Indigenous Studies scholars, offers practices that address colonial mappings of lands, bodies, and lives” while remapping embodied Indigenous social, cultural, and spatial practices and knowledges by responding to current needs (5). The de la Torre map engages in remapping by affirming the presence of Indigenous cultures and spatial epistemologies while demonstrating historical accounts of Indigenous resistance against colonialism, which responds to the historical and ongoing need of destabilizing and disrupting the settler-colonial narrative of the discovery myth and its cartographic colonial violence. I consider this remapping as border thinking which involves several destabilization strategies.

Emilio Cueto notes that even though map printing did not arrive in Cuba until the late eighteenth-century, the nineteenth-century Cuban cartographic activity was rich and dynamic and was “very fruitful in terms of indigenous cartographic endeavors” (18). It is also important to note that Spanish authorities became highly interested in these Indigenous cartographic endeavors, especially after “the so-called Ten Years War 1868. Clearly the Spaniards realized that without accurate maps they could not retain control of the island” (18). Spanish authorities were only interested in Indigenous cultures’ cartographic knowledge and spatial epistemologies to protect and maintain colonial power and control over the island. In this historical context, I approach the nature of de la Torre’s cartographic endeavor as a practice of border thinking which is a fractured enunciation “from the subaltern perspective as a response to the hegemonic discourse and perspective” (Mignolo, Local Histories 37). Through its border thinking practice, the de la Torre map uses destabilization strategies to tell an alternative cartographic story that marks sites with historical importance to the island and demonstrates the distribution of Indigenous place names.

The de la Torre map contains four main historical markings:

1. The detailed illustration of Columbus’ voyages

2. Representation of Diego Velásquez’s expedition

3. Marking of the site where Bartholomé de las Casas lived

4. Marking of the site where Caique Hatuey, Taíno chief from Hispanolia, died.

I argue that when put together, these markings form a historical narrative that destabilizes the discovery myth hence the first destabilization strategy of the map.

The first part of the map’s historical narrative focuses on Columbus’s voyages and the colonial legacy of the island. On the lower left side of the de la Torre map is a map legend explaining the meanings of the symbols used on a map. The first three lines of the legend represent Columbus’s first three voyages. On the upper right corner of the map, there is a copy of a drawing attributed to Columbus with another historical label that marks Columbus’s arrival during his first voyage and shows the route Columbus followed. Following this cartographic narration of Columbus’s voyages, the last line on the legend marks the expedition of Diego Velásquez, Spanish conquistador and first governor of Cuba, at the end of November 1511, which demonstrates the history of colonization of Cuba through Velásquez’s legacy.²

The map’s historical narrative unfolds in a direction that destabilizes the discovery myth and the colonial narrative introduced in the first half of the map’s storyline. This unfolding happens with the marking of the Province of Canareo as where Fray Bartholomé de las Casas lived in 1514, who worked “to expose the oppression of indigenous peoples by Europeans in the Americas and to call for the abolition of slavery there” (Dussel “Bartolomé de Las Casas”). This way, the map’s story sets the context for sharing the legacy of Indigenous resistance against colonization, the story of Caique Hatuey.

Figure 3 is a screenshot of the site marked as “1513 Aqui murio Hatuei” (1513 Hatuei died here). In her translation notes, Muñoz emphasizes the importance of marking this site as memorializing the death of the Taíno Caique Hatuey. Caique Hatuey fled to Cuba during the Spanish conquest led by Diego Velázquez and organized a group of Natives to fight against the Spanish conquistadors (Castanha). Caique Hatuey is today known as the first Indigenous fighter against colonialism. The story of de la Torre map memorializes his death and signifies “[t]he rebellion of Hatuey [which] constitutes the first manifestation of the fight of the aboriginal struggle of Cuba against the exploitation,” dehumanization, and colonization of Indigenous peoples of the Americas (“Rebellion of Hatuey”). The de la Torre map tells the story of Indigenous resistance against European colonialism hence how the map destabilizes the colonial narrative of discovery.

Figure 3. Marking of the site where Caique Hatuey died

The second destabilization strategy of the de la Torre map is the distribution of Indigenous place names. The use of the colonial and Indigenous place names in the de la Torre map also appears as what Barton and Barton recognize as a denaturalizing practice, which valorises Indigenous spatial knowledge to rupture the hegemonic-colonial repression of Indigenous relationships with the land base. The de la Torre map presents the majority of the place names in pairs, consisting of the Indigenous place names and the place names given by Columbus. These pairs are connected with the Spanish word “hoy,” such as R. Onicajinal hoy Mayabeque. Muñoz was not sure how to translate hoy because, depending on the context of its use in a sentence, hoy could mean now or today. Eventually, Muñoz decided to use today and translated, for example, R. Onicajinal hoy Mayabeque as R. (Rio/River) Onicajinal today Mayabeque.

The de la Torre map’s distribution of the Indigenous place names unveils “underlying and ongoing indigenous presence” at the time of the map’s production (Barnd 110). As Powell addresses, “[f]or three hundred years, evidence of indigenous “civilization” had simply been erased, unseen, and explained away as inconsequential to the project of empire” (“Stories Take Place” 400). The white settlers, as Powell continues, ignored, unsee, and covered over every sign and “clear implication that this land belonged to other people, who, in fact, had highly sophisticated ideas about what to do with it!” (400). The placement of Indigenous and colonial place names together destabilizes the colonial narrative and recognizes the intellectual integrity of Indigenous cultural and spatial epistemology.

Disrupting of the Celebratory Discourse of the Reis Map through the de la Torre Map

Victor Villanueva states that “[w]e are so locked into the colonial mindset that we are turning to the excolonials of Europe to learn something about our own people of color” (659). Türkiye turned to the ex-colonial, Christopher Columbus, and enunciated Columbus’s knowledge of the Americas to situate the Reis map as an invaluable asset of the world heritage memory. This political and ideological locus of enunciation is at the centre of the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and delineates how the internalization of the modern/colonial world system normalizes colonial violence. The Turkish government harnessed the power of the map’s connection to Columbus and the discovery myth of the Americas, which speaks to Türkiye’s strong will of linking the country’s national-cultural heritage to the universal image and vision of the Euro-centric history of modernity.

As Cobos emphasizes, Villanueva calls to break precedent from this colonial mindset by “look[ing] to the Americas for ways to understand” the knowledge of the Americas (13). The de la Torre map’s cartographic narrative disrupts the dominant narrative line of colonial legacy by opening space for the story of the first Indigenous, Taíno, fighter against colonialism, Caique Hatuey. The de la Torre map marks Caique Hatuey “as a subject within it [colonial narrative], not just as a victim subject to it” (Powell “Rhetorics of Survivance” 425). This telling of an Indigenous resistance story destabilizes the colonial narrative line and, in effect, disrupts the celebratory discourse of the Reis map. The de la Torre map’s distribution of Indigenous place names alongside the names given by Columbus not only creates what Barnd calls an “ontological disturbance” in the cartographic visualization of the Reis map (6–7), and an epistemological disturbance in the celebratory discourse of the Reis map. Overall, the de la Torre map tells an alternative cartographic story shaped by the cartographer José María de la Torre’s spatial re-enactment of the local Cuban histories and geographies while being cognizant of the colonial-global design that invented the Americas.

Considering the critical role cartographic knowledge production played in the process of inventing the Americas, what I consider an essential way of moving forward is studying more alternative cartographic knowledge-making practices. This may be an obvious direction to suggest, yet it is still a highly significant route to take because of the amount of learning that needs to be done by studying alternative spatial epistemologies to see the world that surrounds us beyond the modernity’s colonial-global design. Another critical aspect to be cognizant of is the internalization of the modern/colonial world system in the contexts of local histories that remain outside, on the peripheries, of the West. The value of this awareness lies in its decolonial potential and speaks for the vision of the project of decoloniality in uncovering the roots of the modern/colonial system in what one might consider as unexpected spaces of epistemic violence that the logic of coloniality hides. Going into these unexpected spaces offers us new opportunities to explore and learn from other stories and deepens our understanding of the practices of border thinking, epistemic disobedience, and decoloniality.

Notes on Figures

Both maps, the Piri Reis map and the de la Torre map, are in the public domain and are free to use and reuse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eda Özyeşilpınar

Eda Özyeşilpınar is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English at Illinois State University where she researches and teaches border rhetorics, digital cultural rhetorics, and rhetorical theory and histories of rhetorics (rhetorics of and from non-Western and underrepresented groups). Her award-winning research appeared in Reflections, Review of Communication, The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric, Kairos, Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric's Change, and Immediacy. Contact: [email protected]

Notes

1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Madison Jones and Jaime Armin Mejía for their thoughtful feedback. This essay was initially part of an edited collection, Literacies of/from the Pluriversal: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Futures, edited by Ellen Cushman, Damián Baca, and Rome García, forthcoming University of Pittsburgh. I also would like to thank Cushman, Baca, and García and the blind reviewers of the University of Pittsburgh Press for their feedback on the earlier versions of this essay.

2 “Velázquez sailed to the New World in 1493 on the second voyage of Christopher Columbus. Columbus’ eldest son, Diego Columbus, later entrusted Velázquez with the conquest of Cuba under the title of adelantado (governor) and, with Hernán Cortés, Velázquez departed for Cuba in 1511. In the next four years he founded the settlements of Baracoa, Bayamo, Santiago de Cuba, and Havana (La Habana). After his conquests were completed about 1514, he encouraged colonization and became governor of Cuba” (Britannica).