Travelers from the nineteenth century: forging the mexican landscape mindset

Abstract

The landscape is understood as a cultural production, a way of seeing and representing the surrounding world. From this perspective, this article aims to explore the representations of the landscape that helped to forge the image of the nineteenth-century Mexico. Taking into account the above, texts written by travelers, ranging from specialists such as Humboldt, to amateurs, were selected. In these texts, aspects such as the role of religion in the landscape, the representation of Mexico as the horn of abundance, the incipient scientific perspective, the representation of tropicality, and the aesthetic production of the Mexican landscape, were addressed. The representations of the landscape, presented in this article, correspond to the perspective of the West, which did not take into account other cultural models. These representations gave rise to the Mexican landscape, which was no longer American or European, and served in the construction of the Mexican nationalism.