The Dissertation Committee for Judith L - The University of Texas at ...

“new cultural geography” offered critiques upon past methodologies that sought to
portray accurate landscape descriptions by merely compiling data and creating maps that
showed the diffusion of people and cultural items across land. These geographers realize
that a search for meaning must acknowledge the biases brought to the study by the
researcher and accurate descriptions in areal studies are difficult to achieve. 68 All these
works and new methodological approaches further helped geographers realize that
gender, social and economic class, the timeframe of the study, and use of language are
also important factors to consider when studying cultural groups and their attitudes
toward the environment. Thus, each group that comes to an area brings their own
experiences, desires, and understandings with them. These views and beliefs come out in
their descriptions of what they find and how they write about the land. This is all
certainly true in regards to the current area under study.
What about the views towards the land found in the study area? How did the
people who came to this area view the land and what can be learned from them? The first
written account describing the study area is the 1709 diary entry by the Espinosa-
Oliveres-Aquirre expedition that traveled through the area along the Spanish royal road
the El Camino Real looking for a shorter route from interior Mexico to the missions of
east Texas. 69 Their brief entry mentioned no encounter of another human group as they
68
See James Duncan and David Ley’s compilation of articles in Place/Culture/Representation (New York:
Routledge, 1993) for the critiques offered by the “new cultural geographers.” Especially useful is the first
article in the work, “Introduction: Representing the Place of Culture,” by James Duncan and David Ley.
Their discussion of Postmodernism, Hermeneutics, Re-Presenting Cultural Geography give clear
differences between these newer methodological approaches in the field of cultural geography.
69
El Camino Real was the main route used by the Spanish when traveling from interior Mexico to get to
other areas in and around Texas and was especially used by visitors who wanted to get to the Spanish
missions located in eastern Texas.
35