Capturing the Landscape of New Spain

Baltasar Obregón’s Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva España (1584) has been published in two Spanish-language editions (1989, 1997) and one in English (1928) translated by George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey. Since the noted geographer of Mexico’s northwest, Carl O. Sauer, complained in 1932 that Obregón’s text was confused and lurid, no one has attempted a critical cultural reading of it until now. Rebecca A. Carte has used her cultural linguistic skills to undertake this task, providing us with a careful, theoretically informed reading of Obregón’s history of the “greater northwest” that reconciles his purposes and biases. Mexican-born, Obregón accompanied the expedition of Francisco de Ibarra in 1562–1563 and published his history twenty years later. She positions the writer socially and situates his work in the latter seventeenth-century transition that marked a shift from early chronicles and relaciones (reports of intrepid undertakings designed to curry favor with Spain) to accounts that advanced imperial ambitions, arguing that Obregón combines both tendencies but emphasizes the latter.

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