One thing to keep in mind is that there wasn't really much communication between the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. There's some scant evidence of trade, but the regions appeared to have operated as separate spheres, with Mesoamericans preferring to trade and politic to the North and South rather than out into the Caribbean. The arrival of Columbus at Hispaniola in 1492 and the subsequent transit of Spanish colonialists would have been information largely circumscribed to the Caribbean.

The very earliest contact between Europeans and mainland Americans is thought to have occurred a decade later, during Columbus' 4th (and final) Voyage. While off the coast of what is now Honduras, Columbus' son, Ferdinand, recorded meeting a large canoe "freighted with merchandise from the western regions around New Spain." This meeting has been interpreted as Columbus and his crew meeting a group of Maya traders active in the region, which was within the trading sphere of the Maya circum-Yucatan routes of the time.

This meeting, however, does not appear to have made a serious impact on either group. There's no record or depiction, or at least none surviving that I know of, in the Maya region conveying the event. Nor do the journals from the the 4th Voyage say more about the meeting than a couple brief sentences. It would be more than a decade before another expedition was mounted to the mainland. Worlds were not moved by this chance encounter.

And why should it have? It's only in retrospect that we interpret all the events of this time period as one of the most momentous pivot points of human history. At the time, though, this was simply a small group of explorers meeting a small group of merchants, in a land where they were both strangers.

When the Spanish on Cuba eventually did opt to mount another expedition to the mainland (not that they knew it as such at the time) it was 1517. This was the Cordoba Expedition, which was a disaster. After scouting along the coast of the Yucatan, the expedition attacked and defeated near Champoton, with roughly half of the ~100 Spanish killed and others, including Cordoba, dying of their wounds. Again, this was not an event that resonated throughout the Maya region, and the Spanish response was merely to plan for a larger expedition the following year.

Keep in mind that the Yucatan, at this time, was home to disunited Maya city-states. This acted as a barrier to information disseminating widely, though this also served to isolate various polities from later incursions by the Spanish, as we shall see.

It wasn't until the following year, with the 1518 Grijalva Expedition, that there was an irrevocable point when Spanish-Mesoamerican contact was no longer local and insignificant. Sailing up the coast of what is now the state of Veracruz, the Grijalva Expedition was met by emissaries of the Aztecs (probably calpixque, tribute-collectors), who exchanged gifts with the Spanish and identified themselves as the representatives of the ruler of the Mexica, Motecuhzoma. The Spanish then proceeded on their journey and the representatives:

when they had come to emerge on dry land, then they went direct to Mexico. Day by day, night by night they traveled in order to come to warn Moctezuma, in order to come to tell him exactly of its circumstances; they came to notify him.

Or so was written by Sahagun in the mid-16th Century, when these events were already being retrospectively interpreted as momentous. The reality was probably less dramatic, but it was from that point on that the state that dominated central Mexico and the encroaching Spanish officially became cognizant of each other. It was not word of mouth, in other words, that spread the news of the Aztecs to the Spanish and vice versa, but a chance encounter between their respective emissaries. At that point though, the information could be widely disseminated through official channels, with Sahagun noting that other calpixque were put on alert. When the Cortes Expedition arrived the next year, he was greeted by Aztec representatives unsurprised by his arrival and who sent depictions of Cortes and his compatriots back to Tenochtitlan.

In regions less unified, such as in the Yucatan and the Peten, information did not have a central hub to which to report and from which to flow. In such cases the less corporeal result of contact, disease, could and did arrive before the Spanish themselves. That was the case with the Kaqchikels, a Maya group in the Guatemalan highlands. Their annals record an outbreak epidemic, but it is only a few years later that the "Castilians" arrive. This sort of fractured political landscape would both help and hinder the Spanish in conquering the area -- with the last independent Maya state not falling until the end of the 17th Century -- as well as precluding the sort of immediate notification system that the Aztecs had.