El Álbum mexicano was one of the publishing enterprises led by the famous printer Ignacio Cumplido. The young Mexican republic needed to build up a story of itself and its citizens, and El Album was a privileged space in the illustrated press. Biographies of characters, descriptions of monuments and landscapes, customs texts and so on would seek to create a collection of images that would allow readers of the publication to participate in a national unity. This paper analyses the importance of travel literature published in the newspaper in this process, as well as the culture mediation and transfer strategies that it articulated.