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Mexico at War: Mapping Sovereignty and Empire brings together war maps documenting Mexico’s conflicts during the 19th century, a period marked by invasions, and the ongoing struggle to define the nation’s borders and sovereignty. This curated selection highlights maps created by the Mexican Department of War alongside those produced by French and American military cartographers, illustrating disparities in how territory and conflict were represented. A few maps from other European sources, such as Germany, were excluded due to falling outside the scope of the design and thematic criteria for this showing.

The exhibit is organized around two themes: national sovereignty and self-determination, and imperial ambition and foreign intervention. The first explores how Mexican officials and mapmakers tried to portray a unified nation amid wars of independence and resistance. The second explores how both the United States and France portrayed Mexico in their plays for regional influence, from the U.S. highlighting casualty figures and military victories even within regional maps of Mexico to French maps portraying Mexico as a vulnerable state primed for military intervention due to the United States’ nascent status as an increasing military power.

This digital exhibition was developed using the UT Libraries’ Spotlight platform, which allows the integration of high-resolution images, metadata, and texts that contextualize the map’s historical and cultural significance. As students, our goal is to contribute to the UT Libraries’ growing digital collections and to share materials that show how the way in which data is designed and mapped can have a considerable impact on how historical facts are perceived. While we recognize that our understanding is shaped by limited experience and incomplete sources, like a lack of materials from the Guerra de Reforma, we hope this exhibition encourages others to explore how mapping both reflects and shaped historical narratives. Moreover, we hope the framework created in this exhibit can be expanded in the future to reflect other territorial ambitions after the wars, like the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, as well as with maps in the collection that describe the construction of road and rail networks across Mexico, showing a different perspective of Mexican officials asserting their power for nation-building and economic growth in the shadows of competing imperial interests.