ABSTRACT
The colonization of the Americas expanded the concept of risk in narratives which described the novelties of a nature full of hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and indigenous people. A new narrative was born in the form of relaciones (accounts) and hojas volantes (flyers), telling events happened in a marvelous but dangerous nature. So, the risk, as an expanded narrative about the hazardous conditions of the New World, should be estimated as an antecedent of journalism and the modern narratives of risk. The early introduction of a press in Mexico in 1539 favored the publication of these flyers and accounts. Here are used several sources taken from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries which are referred to castaways, volcanoes, hurricanes and floods. This chapter is intended to analyze how risk moved from a single word to become the meaning of an expanded text, even in an early Spanish American literature.
