Place Names and Power: José de Escandón, Indians, and the Naming of Nuevo Santander

Over centuries of Spanish exploration, conquest, and rule over parts of the New World, the Spanish named many features of the American landscape.  Scholars have generally viewed this process as a form of European conquest over the Amerindian, an imposition of names on the native landscape and people.  Such a stance, however, places inordinate emphasis on transplanted Spanish toponyms and ignores Indian place-names that survived the Columbian encounter.  While historians have long noted that the transatlantic contact between Spaniards and Amerindians led to a process whereby both exchanged cultures, creating new hybridized cultural forms through the encounter and blending of peoples, discussions of toponyms have ignored this syncretization.  The Spanish did indeed transfer Old World names to the New World, but they adopted and adapted native ones as well.  Giving names to the colonial landscape was not an exercise of unbridled Spanish power, as Spanish explorers and colonizers had to confront and accommodate Amerindians and their toponyms.            

The province of Nuevo Santander offers the rare opportunity to analyze the exploration, settlement, and naming of a province and its settlements.  It was the last province settled in New Spain (in the eighteenth century) and one man undertook its subjugation (José de Escandón).  Escandón could only name places as he wanted because he had first cleared them of undesirable Indians (chichimeca); when he had to deal with settled, Hispanisized Indians along the new province’s southern edges the settlements he founded or re-founded carried Indian or blended Spanish-Indian names.  Analysis of Escandón’s settlement of Nuevo Santander, the names of the towns he founded, and the maps he created, illustrate the method in which the Spanish dealt with Indians, named the land, and mapped their empire.