This dissertation analyzes the practice of making indigenous maps and their circulation in Oaxaca from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Indian maps functioned as visual aids to distribute land for agriculture, ranching, subsistence farming, and mining, they served as legal titles to property, and they participated in large-scale royal projects including aqueducts and assessments of human and natural resources. Map production is examined from four distinct vantage points including social networks, materials and technology, authentication, and reproduction. In each case, maestros pintores--native master painters--collaborated with a host of individuals including Spanish officials, scribes, merchants, ranchers, farmers, town councils, caciques and lesser lords, and legal professionals to visually describe the region's geographical environment. Indigenous mapping practices fostered the development of a new epistemology that combined European and Mesoamerican worldviews to negotiate the allocation of natural resources among the region's Spanish, Amerindian, and mixed-race communities. This work stresses the role of Indian painters in the formation of early modern empires highlighting the way mapmakers challenged Spanish ideals of visual representation instead re-envisioning spatial relations according to local and regional concerns.