Abstract

OLIVEIRA, Francisco Roque de. Orlando Ribeiro’s Mexico: field notebooks, photographs, and texts related to the Latin American Regional Conference of the International Geographical Union, 1966.Translated byGuadalupe Pinzón Ríos. Invest. Geog [online]. 2019, n.100, e60018.  Epub Feb 27, 2020. ISSN 2448-7279.  https://doi.org/10.14350/rig.60018.

The Portuguese geographer Orlando Ribeiro participated in the Latin American Regional Conference of the International Geographical Union (IGU) held in Mexico in 1966, for which he prepared a communication on comparative rural landscapes of America. His participation in the various activities and excursions programmed by the Conference, as well as the complementary trips he have made in this country, gave rise to a field notebook, which we present in this text. At the same time, we will synthesize the extensive photographic collection gathered during this trip, as well as the main subsequent works in which Ribeiro incorporated his learning of Mexican geography. These works focused both on the physiognomy of agricultural landscapes and on some of the fundamental characteristics of cities and urban planning in Ibero-American countries. This set of written and iconographic documents is a very relevant testimony of the "tropical geography" of the Vidalian paradigm carried out by the “Lisbon geographic school”, while at the same time representing an excellent example of the practice of a geography strongly grounded in fieldwork, as Orlando Ribeiro practiced from the model proposed by the French school of Geography. The reading of Ribeiro's Mexico field notebook, as well as the texts subsequent to this trip, are also fundamental evidence for the reconstitution of the main networks of scientific sociability of the Portuguese geographer, in which Brazil - and the Brazilian geographers - represent a key piece.

Keywords : Orlando Ribeiro; Mexico; fieldwork; tropical geography; Lisbon geographic school; International Geographic Union.

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