Book Reviews: New National Atlas of Mexico

Summary

This review analyzes the *Nuevo Atlas Nacional de México* (2007), a comprehensive cartographic and textual compendium edited by Atlántida Coll-Hurtado and produced by the Instituto de Geografía at UNAM. The review examines the atlas’s structure, coverage, and scholarly contributions across its five thematic sections—general reference, history, society, economy, and environment. The atlas integrates the work of over 150 specialists to present 726 maps, 353 tables and diagrams, and interpretive texts that juxtapose diverse datasets. The review highlights the atlas’s thorough treatment of Mexico’s territorial evolution, internal and international migration, regional inequalities in access to services and consumer goods, and the spatial restructuring of the economy under neoliberal policies and NAFTA. Special attention is given to the economy section, which documents agricultural decline, the hyperconcentration of manufacturing, the explosive growth of maquiladoras, and the dominance of the service and informal sectors. The environment section is praised for mapping soil degradation, water contamination, and aquifer depletion. The reviewer commends the atlas for making visible the connections between economic processes and social and environmental outcomes, though notes that stronger explicit linkages between the economy and environment sections would have been beneficial. Gaps, such as the omission of narcotics trafficking and voting patterns, are acknowledged. The review concludes that despite minor unevenness, the atlas is an extraordinarily useful, well-organized reference tool for researchers and students across many disciplines, offering a data-rich portrait of Mexico in the early twenty-first century and serving as a necessary addition to Latin American collections.