Capturing the Landscape of New Spain

Rebecca Carte's trim and elegant book presents an in-depth reading of Baltasar Obregón's account of the 1564 Ibarra expedition, whose stated purpose was to “establish mining settlements in the borderlands of New Spain and to suppress indigenous rebellions in the region” (p. 7). Obregón, the son of an encomendero, played the part of a soldier-explorer in the initial expedition. He sent his account to the Council of the Indies 20 years later to cement his own claims to lead another expedition to the region (p. 8). Though this attempt failed, Carte demonstrates that Obregón's Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva España (1584) also provides a sophisticated account of the history of New Spain, complete with a vivid approach to what she terms “landscape textualization” (p. 8). In Carte's reading, Obregón's Historia provides an account of the Spanish conquest in which landscape plays a leading role, “emerging at times as protagonist and others as antagonist, but always in vivid, life-like, and dramatic ways” (p. 8). As such, the landscape of New Spain as presented by Obregón, to paraphrase Carte, must be viewed as a process developed in dialogue with both the Spanish conquistadores and indigenous communities rather than as a setting or static backdrop.The book is organized into four chapters. The first two focus on the central purposes that Obregón identifies as animating his narrative. Chapter 1, “Taking Place,” provides an overview of the historical account of the Ibarra expedition. Carte notes that Obregón sought to situate the Ibarra expedition, and therefore the northern frontier of New Spain, within the broader landscape of the conquest, in effect attempting to construct “a historical framework in an otherwise ‘historiless’ landscape” (p. 33). Chapter 2, “‘Lo que hay en esta tierra,’” shifts to a consideration of itinerary and mapping information, crucial information for the relaciones, or reports, penned by each successive conquistador. As Carte observes, these forms were themselves undergoing marked changes by the late sixteenth century, in part because of shifting technology and in part because of shifting scientific and bureaucratic classification schemata. Obregón's narrative provides a possibility for intertextuality in the midst of a major paradigm shift. This perspective facilitates an analysis of Obregón's simultaneous “topophilia” and “topophobia,” in which the engagement with the topos—or place-based sensibility—of northern New Spain provides both joy and anxiety. This particularly marks Carte's analysis of Obregón's account of the Valle de Señora (Sonora), which is depicted as a “landscape of fear” or, alternately, a “failed landscape” that could potentially be overturned or redeemed through the civilizing actions of the Spanish empire (pp. 30, 71).It is this potential for the “failed landscape” to be transformed that Carte emphasizes in the book's latter chapters. These move away from Obregón's stated purposes to a more intertextual analysis of his narrative's consideration of Spanish policies' impact on the landscape, “in both natural and human terms . . . and ultimately the role of landscape as praxis in human endeavors” (p. 11). Chapter 3, “Multiple Landscapes, Multiple Frontiers,” focuses on the degree to which Obregón's narrative populates his account of New Spain by including accounts of everyday “humanscapes,” a term that Carte borrows from Maureen Ahern. This approach offered the possibility to redefine “nonplaces,” such as hard-to-traverse mountainous frontiers, as possible zones for further exploration precisely because of their distinct histories as populated and potentially historicized spaces. Carte's final chapter, “(Re)producing Social Space and Textualscapes,” on the other hand, begins to consider the imagined Spanish colonial future of limited emplacement. This includes an extended review of Obregón's consideration of the importance of Christian tenets to northern New Spain's transformation, on the one hand, and the reformulation of mining and agricultural concerns with Spanish directorship, on the other.In her concluding pages, and indeed throughout this slim volume, Carte engages the broader literature on landscape and visual culture in an accessible and substantive manner. As she notes, she has heeded influential visual culture studies theorist W. J. T. Mitchell's “call to consider ‘landscape’ as a verb” but asks “that we also recognize it as verbal” (p. 125).While Carte's monograph decidedly adds to the literature on landscape studies, the greatest value of this volume concerns its synthetic nature. Carte does an exemplary job of synthesizing multiple disciplinary foci on colonial narratives, incorporating perspectives from literary theory, the history of cartography, colonial and postcolonial studies, critical geography, and visual culture studies. These are all distilled and deployed in praxis; as such, this little book could be easily employed to introduce each of these subjects in courses from the intermediate undergraduate to the graduate level in history, literature, and geography programs hoping to encourage the kind of interdisciplinary methodology that Carte's approach exemplifies

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