("Between our nation and its neighbor exists no boundary except a simple mathematical line … God save the Republic!")
-Antonio García Cubas, Diccionario geográfico, histórico y biográfico de los Estado Unidos Mexicanos, 1898.
Antonio García Cubas’s Carta General was the first national, published map of Mexico made in Mexico by a Mexican cartographer. But instead of one northern border, it has two! After the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the US and Mexico agreed on different borders in treaties signed within six years. Both treaties forced Mexico to cede much of its territory, but they differed in whether the dividing line should follow the Gila River. In the quotation above, written toward the end of his career, García Cubas expressed his concern over the lack of a clear, natural geographic border between Mexico and a land-hungry United States to the north that resulted from these treaties. Can you find where the two borders diverge on the western third of the map?