Some elements of this article were taken from the introduction of our edited volume Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011). Hispanic American Historical Review 92:2 doi 10.1215/00182168-1545674 Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press Maps and the Teaching of Latin American History Jordana Dym and Karl Offen Sor Juana’s poetry, Simón Bolívar’s letters and speeches, Doña María’s oral history, salsa’s rhythms and lyrics, and Diego Rivera’s murals reflect the broad range of primary sources used to teach different aspects of Latin American his- tory. Why not also maps by Guaman Poma de Ayala, Antonio García Cubas, or Javier Pulgar Vidal? Guaman Poma de Ayala’s seventeenth-century “mapa- mundi” that adapts a European world map model to promote an Incan empire, Antonio García Cubas’s nineteenth-century national atlas of Mexico and board game map of Mexican independence, and Pulgar Vidal’s map of Peru’s eight “natural” regions could contribute to discussions of empire and indigenous elite cultures, national identity and historical memory, and natural science, among other themes. Graphic texts like these maps deserve a place in the col- lege classroom as primary sources. Yet unlike poetry, constitutions, song lyr- ics, and paintings, maps that describe colonial, national, or contemporary Latin America or are made there are not yet staples of sourcebooks or readers as docu- ments to be analyzed. They are, however, an abundant and increasingly acces- sible resource. Since the 1980s, a growing number of scholars have shown that — like other historical sources that particular people produced in particular places, at specific times, and for specific purposes — maps are graphic texts, objects that we can analyze and interpret to reveal something about not only the peoples, spaces, and times they portray, but also about the societies that create and consume them. For these writers, maps have the power to contribute to the transformation of the spaces they represent, whether they emphasize commer- cial development, national borders, soil conditions, or the location of human settlements. Historical maps thus provide an excellent primary source to help us better understand how Latin American spaces, from audiencias and countries