Monumentalizing Landscapes: Ontologies of Scale and Guatemalan National Consolidation

ABSTRACT: In 1905, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, one of Guatemala's most infamous dictators, inaugurates a gargantuan relief map, one of Latin American's most dramatic cartographic projects of the time. In 1882, the nation had relinquished vast regions of its territory to Mexico. This exemplified the region's fragility in the face of continuous Central American civil wars and a commercial weakness that rendered Guatemala vulnerable to foreign intervention, both political and economic. In this context, Guatemalan was faced with foundational narrative voids and a lack of any semblance of national identity. In this essay I contend that the state turned to the nation's volcanic geography as a solution: its dramatic landscapes could serve as both settings and protagonists for an alternative spatial narrative. I argue that the relief map can be read as an ideal fossilized artifact capturing these symbolic operations imposed by Guatemala's creole liberal elite within the complex global and national spatial dynamics of the time. In its monumentality, the map attempted to symbolically tap into and domesticate the power of the nation's landscape for the sake of national consolidation: a case of the natural sublime turned cultural/political sublime. In the process, and underlying these symbolic spatial operations, the State inflicted unprecedented violence on nature and rendered invisible entire sections of the population. The project ultimately fails, however, because the semantic power of a volcanic landscape is predicated on a chaotic and volatile land that had seeped into popular and political imagination through a long history of natural disasters and corresponding social turmoil.