Place-names, conquest, and empire: Spanish and Amerindian conceptions of place in the New World

This research corrects the one-sided historiography of toponyms in the New World, which focus only on the European imposition of place-names, viewed by many postmodernist scholars as a way to oppress and suppress the native Indians. Instead this transatlantic dissertation recognizes that the Spanish brought patterns of place-naming created in the Old World over to the New World. The naming of the New World was not a unilateral Spanish undertaking. The Spanish did create new toponyms in the Americas. They described the land, honored their Catholic faith and their nobility, and they transferred Old World place-names to the New World---but this only accounts for a portion of the toponyms used in the Spanish New World. Amerindians continued using their own place-names and contributed many of them to the Spanish, who adopted and adapted them. A number of the toponyms in the New World, as demonstrated both by contemporary Spanish chronicles and maps, were in fact syncretized place-names. For every Spanish "Vera Cruz" there was an Indian "Oaxaca" and a creolized "San Juan Evangelista Culhuacan." The syncretized toponyms of the Spanish New World are best understood in the wider context of the transtlantic encounter.