Rebellious Maps José Joaquim Da Rocha and the Proto-Independence Movement in Colonial Brazil

This chapter focuses on a plot of rebellion in the captaincy of Minas Gerais. Upon its discovery, Portuguese commissioners named one of their star cartographers, Jose Joaquim da Rocha, as one of the possible instigators of a nascent independence movement. Rocha became a suspect after several co-conspirators had declared his maps to be a practical guide for coordinating the movement's plans. For Rocha's maps to be thus accused came as a surprise to the political establishment and the Brazilian mapmaking community. It was only a decade previously, in 1778, that Rocha had produced, to much official acclaim, five maps of the Minas Gerais region. Using the same scientific protocols that informed imperial land surveys and map publications sponsored by Spain, France, or England, these maps transposed local knowledge into a global archive in which Portuguese names, geographic coordinates, and topographical symbols reified Minas Gerais as a Portuguese possession while making, to use the words of Bruno Latour, “domination at a distance feasible.”

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