Hello all,

I am a linguist working primarily on New Mexican Spanish dialect. I am also a mountaineer and long-distance backpacker. One of my research interests is local place naming tradition in the mountain range known locally as La Sierra Nevada or simply La Sierra, but more widely known by its English Name as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains or Sangres for short. To my knowledge, the English name first appeared in tourism brochures in the early 20th century and derives from the name El Rito de la Sangre de Cristo (which applied to a creek).

My research points to the fact that about three quarters of the names depicted on government maps produced by the USGS and USFS are in English. Most of those names are anglicizations or translations of traditional New Mexican Spanish names. Besides being unnecessary, these adaptations of the traditional names are often in error and erase local knowledge of the environment. In addition, many Spanish names in local use are left off the maps entirely. This is primarily a result of incomplete collection by fieldworkers who were 1) not versed in the local Spanish dialect, and 2) viewed unfavorably by locals who associated them with the US Forest Service that had taken away much of their communal lands. In my own ongoing fieldwork I have collected many corrections and additions to the officially recognized place name inventory for the area.

I have come to the point where I feel I can start making what I call Manito Maps of the area (Manito being an autonym of the local New Mexican Hispano community). I am already doing this using existing maps that show the officially recognized names, and this is great for comparative purposes. However, I would also like to create maps using only the Spanish language place names. Which brings me to why I created a profile on this website. I was hoping somebody here would be able to point me to a resource where I could find unannotated, bare topographical maps for the US. I need 1/25,000 scale maps with no toponymic annotation.

Pleased to meet you all,
Len