Abstract

URROZ KANAN, Raquel. A Cultural Geography in Construction. Mexico City in Los bandidos de Río Frío by Manuel Payno (1889-1891). Invest. Geog [online]. 2019, n.98, 00011. ISSN 2448-7279.  https://doi.org/10.14350/rig.59762.

Los bandidos de Río Frío, written between 1889 and 1891, is one of the first novels that propose to define Mexican identity by presenting a large social and manners picture written of the first half of the nineteenth century. From its reading arises the searching of the relationship between the cultural geography with literature in the context of the mexican nineteenth century; and the way these two areas come together in order to explore the gestation of nationalism to create new forms of spatial awareness. In fact, Los bandidos de Río Frío records a large number of places, landscapes and common routes that acquire symbolic meaning for the characters, so that through their spatial practices a cultural geography is articulated which it starts from the country’s own capital. The novel is also the result of the stylistic and rhetorical tools used by the author as part of the literature movement of his time. These narrative vehicles had the power to exercise in the reader a metaphorical sense of appropriation of the same space traveled and lived by its author. It is proposed to read the urban landscape of Mexico City and decipher a spatial system based on a key concept of cultural geography: the geosymbol, defined by the french geographer Jöel Bonnemaison, as the spatial units that structure and animate the territory. In the end, the different levels of spatial perception analyzed add up to a cultural geography that not only orders Payno’s narrative world, but also helped to create the social scenario and collective identity that was beginning to be forged in the first decades of independent Mexico.

Keywords : Cultural geography; geosymbol; Payno; identity; Mexico City.

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