Representaciones geográficas de un territorio de frontera: el centro occidente colombiano, 1850-1905

Abstract

The construction of territory has multiple aspects. Not only does it include having imaginary divisions or the appointment of officials with different tasks to be done, but they imply also the elaboration of mathematical measurements and registrations that interact with the memories of land use that the inhabitants of those areas have about practical solutions to overcome the obstacles of nature, to name the places that give meaning to the area that these societies inhabit, use and transform. In that context, the present work takes a historical tour of the different ways in which news of the current Colombian mid-western area have been represented and created, and it analyzes how those representations are important to find out more information on the societies that inhabit the region, on the origins of the names given to different locations, and how they established political and administrative limits in a scenario prior to the emergence of the coffee market in this area as an articulator of the economy, and on the connection of this area to the process of the construction of the national State of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.