Pedro de Mendoza

Pedro de Mendoza was the Spanish leader of the 1534 expedition that founded Buenos Aires, an early colonial venture whose failure exposes a central premise of Spanish expansion: settlers sought wealth and coerced labor rather than intending to cultivate the land themselves. The settlement was abandoned within four years when the local peoples resisted Spanish demands and the hoped-for riches proved absent.

Expedition and Founding

In 1534, Spain sent a mission of settlers under Mendoza’s leadership to the Río de la Plata. They established a town at the site of Buenos Aires, whose name means “good airs” and whose temperate climate seemed hospitable. But climate was not the expedition’s principal concern. The Spanish wanted resources to extract and people they could compel to work.

The Charrúas and Querandí did not meet those expectations. They refused to provide food and would not work when captured, and they attacked the settlement with bows and arrows. The Spanish, who had not planned to feed themselves, faced hunger. The area contained no silver or gold to exploit; the silver associated with the river had come from the Inca state far to the west.

Abandonment and the Search for a More Profitable Colony

The settlers responded to their difficulties by sending expeditions in search of richer territory and populations easier to coerce. In 1537, an expedition led by Juan de Ayolas traveled up the Paraná River, seeking a route to the Incas, and encountered the Guaraní, an agricultural people who lived in settled communities and cultivated maize and cassava. After a brief conflict, the Spanish overcame Guaraní resistance and founded Asunción. They took control of existing systems of forced labor and tribute, placing themselves at the head of the local hierarchy.

Within four years of Buenos Aires’s founding, the Spanish settlers had moved to the new town, and Buenos Aires was abandoned. It was not resettled until 1580. Mendoza’s settlement thus appears in the account not as a lasting colonial center, but as an early attempt that gave way when its inhabitants could not secure the food, labor, and riches they sought.

Significance in the History of Colonization

The contrast between the abandonment of Buenos Aires and the Spanish takeover of Guaraní labor and tribute illustrates the priorities that the book attributes to European colonization in the Americas. Early Spanish and English colonists, it argues, were generally not seeking to till the soil themselves: they wanted others to do the work and hoped to seize gold and silver. Buenos Aires’s failure made the limits of that strategy visible where local people resisted and extractable wealth was lacking.

Mendoza’s expedition also belonged to a larger wave of Spanish expansion. Following Columbus’s 1492 sighting of an island in the Bahamas, Spanish colonization gained momentum with Hernán Cortés’s invasion of Mexico in 1519, Francisco Pizarro’s expedition to Peru, and Mendoza’s journey to the Río de la Plata two years later. Spain went on to conquer and colonize much of central, western, and southern South America, while Portugal claimed Brazil. In that broader history, the brief founding of Buenos Aires marks both the reach of Spanish ambition and the practical conditions on which its colonial projects depended.