Heading East
After a wonderful visit with family in LA and Garden Grove, California — and a spontaneous trip to Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico — I’m U-turning East, following the trail of 16th-century Spanish explorer/conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Backwards.
Cabeza de Vaca? What’s with that name?
I’d always heard that Cabeza de Vaca (yes polyglots, his last name is Head of the Cow) had an ancestor, a lowly shepherd, was honored with the name after he placed the heads of cows along a mountain path to guide Spanish soldiers during the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). Yesterday I read that this is apocryphal. Damn. Love that story.*
Anyway, Alvar Nunez sailed the Atlantic in 1527 as second in command of a 600-person gang bent on colonizing La Florida for Spain, by which they meant subjugating any native peoples they came across, and claiming all their gold. Spoiler alert: No gold.
After much futzing about in the Caribbean islands, the gang lands in Tampa Bay in 1528. Cabeza de Vaca’s group, led by the apparently incompetent Panfilo de Narvaez, ended up losing 85 percent of its crew to mutiny (150 refused to go farther than Hispaniola), disease, native attacks, and starvation. Long story short, Cabeza de Vaca arrived on Galveston Island with a crew of 80, which eventually dwindled to four. This doughty company, having tramped or rafted along the Florida panhandle and through what are now Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and present-day Mexico, where they met up with some Spanish missionaries and sailed from Mexico City to Spain —- nine years later!
Now, the Spanish government had spent metric shitloads of escudos to send 600 men (and a few women) to La Florida. Cabeza de Vaca, had had plenty of years to envision the King’s ire when he returned with barely a shirt, let alone buckets of gold. Thus was born La Relacion de Cabeza de Vaca, an incredible account of his life with the many nations of Native people he met, lived with, traded for, and was sometimes enslaved by, along with descriptions of indigenous plant and animals species, many theretofore unknown in Europe. As often happens, his increasing understanding of and kinship with indigenous nations led to his horror at their murder and enslavement by Spaniards. By contemporary standards, however, he was far from woke. He thought “peaceful” colonization was a grand idea. His Relacion is of course sieved through the course filter of this contradictory perspective. Still, it’s our only guide to the lives and customs of the Southwestern indigenous tribes. Many of these tribes are unknown today: did they change their names? Did Cabeza de Vaca get the names wrong? Were they wiped out by the Spanish? Did new groups move into those lands? Still, some, like the Karankawa of Galveston Island, were eventually identified.
My goal in re-traveling de Vaca’s route is weave some of what de Vaca encountered into what I saw in 2021. Let’s see how it goes.
This is according to Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, editors of The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Annoyingly, they don’t offer an alternative explanation — or a better story. Here’s their lame “rebuttal:” “Fernan Ruiz Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicled participation in the Christian conquest of Cordoba in 1236 … links the Cabeza de Vaca name with one of the major military offensives of its era” (3). Harumph.
