Capturing the Landscape of New Spain ─ Baltasar Obregon and the 1564 Ibarra Expedition

The son of an encomendero, Baltasar Obregon was twenty years old when he joined the 1564 expedition led by the first governor of Nueva Vizcaya, Francisco de Ibarra. The purpose of the expedition was to establish mining settlements in the borderlands of New Spain and to suppress indigenous rebellions in the region.

Although Obregon’s role in the Ibarra expedition was that of soldier-explorer, and despite his lacking an advanced education, he would go on to compose Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva Espana twenty years later, expanding his narrative to include the years before and after his own firsthand experiences with Ibarra. Obregon depicts the storied landscape of the northern borderlands with vivid imagery, fusing setting and situation, constructing a new reality of what was, is, and should be, and presenting it as truth.

In Capturing the Landscape of New Spain, Rebecca A. Carte explains how landscape performs a primary role in Obregon’s retelling, emerging at times as protagonist and others as antagonist. Carte argues that Obregon’s textualization offers one of the first renderings of the region through the Occidental cultural lens, offering insight into Spanish cultural perceptions of landscape during a period of important social and political shifts.

By examining mapping and landscape discourse, Carte shows how history and geography, past and present, people and land, come together to fashion the landscape of northern New Spain.

Rebecca A. Carte is an assistant professor of Spanish at Cuyahoga Community College. Her work has appeared in Journal of the Southwest, Latin American Literary Review, and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture.