In 1912, Mexican riders and ropers performed at Calgary’s first Stampede—a detail that challenges the idea that the city’s Latin American community is new. That history now has a place on a brightly illustrated map, alongside 28 other sites that tell stories of belonging, culture and change.
El Mapa Latinoamericano, the newest addition to the Calgary Atlas Project, was launched on October 8, 2026, during Latin American Heritage Month. Canada has formally recognized the month since 2018. The map was created by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (CIH) in partnership with Centro Latino and SpanicArts. It charts places with cultural, social or historical meaning to Calgary’s Latin American community, including festivals, restaurants, churches, consulates and sites of political resistance.
The launch brought together the map’s writers, researchers and artists to discuss how they made it. CIH Director Jim Ellis said the atlas project helps communities tell their own stories through geography: the places they value can offer a different way to see the city. El Mapa Latinoamericano is the 15th map in the series, which is sold in independent bookstores around Calgary. Calgary-Klein MLA Lizette Tejada also spoke at the event.
Researcher Dr. Pablo Policzer said the map traces a Latin American presence in Calgary back at least to the 1912 Stampede. Since then, people from across Latin America have settled in the city, building a diverse community linked by shared experiences, culture and social ties.
Policzer and researcher Valentina Gasca Castro spent the summer of 2024 visiting community events, including Mexifest, to gather stories. Their research combined archival records with conversations. They asked people to mark places on maps and explain what those locations meant to them, paying special attention to “third spaces”—places where people connect outside home and work. Francisco Alaniz Uribe said these community-made maps helped shape the final design. He described it not as a complete record, but as a picture of the community at one point in time, with more stories still to uncover.
Artists Josee La Güita and Bianca Palacio, who work together as Xemelas, built the design around the image of an altar: a place to gather stories and connect with family and tradition across the diaspora. They used colours found in Latin American flags and chose images and patterns meant to help people from every country see themselves in the map. At its centre, a woman wears a garment filled with stories woven and stitched into its fabric. A hummingbird, presented as a messenger, points toward the future as well as the past.
Some places shown on the map no longer exist. The artists said that makes the work of building community all the more active: people can create spaces for one another now, rather than only remember what has disappeared. The map cannot hold every story, its creators acknowledged, but it offers a starting point—and invites residents to keep adding to how Calgary is understood.