MARIE SALDAÑA
I explore the borderlands of history, data, and design.
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MIER: EVOLUTION OF A FRONTIER TOWN, 1743-1782
2026
Mier, Tamaulipas was the cradle of many of the families who settled in the Nueces Strip. This story visualizes and narrates demographic information for the residents of Mier in its early years. The aim of this work is to show the early roots and connections among families who later setted in the Nueces Strip in what is today South Texas.
To connect people to each other and with their land, network graphs are merged with the geographic distribution of ranches and tracts. People and places are hyperlinked with the main database which contains more detailed information.
With these visualizations, I seek to answer the questions: What factors influenced ranchers who moved to the remote and exposed frontier north of the Rio Grande? How did they cooperate among themselves and how did these social ties evolve? What trends can we observe from the demographic data related to race, class, and gender in the community? How and when were outsiders accepted into this tightly-knit network?
This is a work in progress. The project will continue to track these networks as they evolved into the 19th century.
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