from fear to wisdom, cabeza de vaca.pdf

"From Fear to Wisdom": Augustinian Semiotics and Self-Fashioningin Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion

Liparulo, Steven P.

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory,Volume 62, Number 2, Summer 2006, pp. 1-25 (Article)

Published by University of ArizonaDOI: 10.1353/arq.2006.0009

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“From Fear to Wisdom”: Augustinian Semiotics and

Self-Fashioning in Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación

In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen . . . in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.

—2 Corinthians 11:26–27

In the penultimate chapter (37) of his Relación, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca gives inordinate narrative emphasis to what

might seem a rather unimportant episode in his 1537 return to Spain after his eight-year sojourn in the New World.1 He depicts himself aboard a vessel halfway through its homeward Atlantic crossing, men-aced by ships that turn out to be French and rescued by what turn out to be Portuguese ships, initially seen at such a distance their sails can’t be read. Since the episode ends with no damage done, we have to wonder why this anecdote dominates the chapter—what work is it doing? In this paper I will suggest that this episode epitomizes Cabeza de Vaca’s textual self-image as well as his place in cultural and literary history, and also enacts the vital human processes of truth-seeking, improvising, misreading, and revising: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca floats ambigu-ously between Old and New Worlds, between the Kingdom of Spain and the Kingdom of God, between medieval and Renaissance, con-quest and compassion. Cabeza de Vaca stands as an exemplar of the

Arizona Quarterly Volume 62, Number 2, Summer 2006Copyright © 2006 by Arizona Board of Regents

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steven p. liparulo

Jonathan Simpson

muse

2 Steven P. Liparulo

go-between, a heterodox whose simultaneity and acts of revision seem to render unstable and incoherent multiple systems of signification and identity. I will also portray Cabeza de Vaca as reader and writer operat-ing within multiple semiotic systems and elaborate on how sign-reading and revision are as much a part of the Relación as a whole as they are of this episode, which fittingly seeks to assure its own truth through the ritual affixing of the author’s personal sign (his signature) at the end of the chapter. I will propose an interpretive strategy for the peculiarities of Cabeza de Vaca and the stories that he tells, established through a dialogue between several recent critical works and Saint Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, as it describes a process of interpretation and revision.

In his Premio Plural award-winning essay, Juan Bruce-Novoa identifies Cabeza de Vaca as a founder of Chicano literature, and as a character “marked with the sign of Americanness” (17), a go-between “ever traveling between solid zones.” This phrasing represents Cabeza de Vaca’s liminal character with more sophistication than did Morris Bishop half a century before, when he wrote that “his country was enter-ing upon the difficult Renaissance, the puberty of the modern world” (10). Anthony Pagden further refines the description of both Cabeza de Vaca and America as “in-between.” The sheer presence of America, Pagden writes,

provided a marker between epochs, a convenient date with which to begin a distinctively modern period in European his-tory, a period in which the vision of human time as the steady unfolding of a divine plan—Saint Augustine’s ordo saecula-rum—was replaced by the image of a constant process of per-fection, the evolution of purely human objectives. (European Encounters 11–12)

Following Bruce-Novoa, numerous critics have dealt with hetero-doxies of both the Relación and Cabeza de Vaca himself, including Bea-triz Pastor, Maureen Ahern, and Ann Ortiz. In making such claims, however, these scholars tend to view religion as something inciden-tal or subordinate, considered of value according to some other scale than a religious one. To some extent, this stands as reasonable post-Enlightenment skepticism towards the potential for tyranny inher-ent in acknowledging and empowering a “transcendent signifier” in a

Cabeza de Vaca's Relación 3

discourse of religion. But this skepticism in turn causes a problem for interpretation. Bruce-Novoa describes the critical tendency to reduc-tively impose upon Cabeza de Vaca “the structural mark of a binary polarity: one is this or that; the space in between the two poles becomes forbidden, condemned in its ‘incongruity’ and ‘peculiarity,’ at least from the perspective of European logic” (9). Critical interpretations by their nature often seek to reduce heterodoxies to “unified meanings,” a tradi-tion we can trace back to Aristotle and the basic notion or structure of the “excluded middle.” The problem is, however, that such reductive practice often does a form of interpretive violence to the lived experi-ence to which we are seeking access through texts. Meta-critical theo-ries such as New Historicism, emphasizing tension and circulation and dialectic, aim at addressing this problem, but when the subject of the heterodoxy is religion, the tendency recently has been to reduce the religious experience to a singular meaning, usually as an instrumentality for some form of worldly power. Alan J. Silva calls Christianity a “tool” for Cabeza de Vaca (143), and we’ll also see this sort of instrumentalist reduction in the work of Pastor, Rolena Adorno, and Kun Jong Lee. We may be tracing in these reductions the tendency of the capitalist mono-culture to reduce all values to the economic—reason enough to refute this practice.2 But even further, I’d like to argue along different lines against an instrumentalist approach: while religion is often critically conceived of as a strategy employed in pursuit of political victory, isn’t Christianity also, always and already, even primarily, about dealing with defeat and suffering? Can’t we salvage that sense? In the contemporary polarized political atmosphere, which is often dominated by unreflec-tive and literalist Christian triumphalism offering to simplify a compli-cated world, such a recovery project seems particularly pointed.

Beatriz Pastor identifies these two elements, failure and suffering, as the essential characteristics of the demythifying narrative discourse Cabeza de Vaca helps initiate, yet in The Armature of Conquest she downplays the vital connection to religion. Religion is again conceived of as tactical, “turned into an instrument of healing and persuasion” (140), and we likewise see this reduction of the religious experience to something more thoroughly of the mortal world when she writes that “this spiritual journey [of Núñez] leads to the humanization of the con-quistador” (150). How might we avoid this seemingly reductive course and learn to read Cabeza de Vaca in terms of a religion that in the end


is not simply equated to either politics or humanism, a religion that is peculiarly religious? How do we tackle the interpretive problem of read-ing religion and reading religiously at an historical remove? Kun Jong Lee’s 1999 study of Pauline typology in the Relación provides us with a crucial opening move by identifying a heterodox transitional figure between Christ and Cabeza de Vaca.

improvisation and negotiation

Initially, Lee’s essay brings needed attention to the figure of Saint Paul and its function in Cabeza de Vaca’s improvisations in the New World encounter, shifting from the conventional view that Núñez casts himself in the Christ role. “The Naufragios has abundant evidence,” Lee writes, “which demonstrates that Cabeza de Vaca reconstructs his experience exactly in parallel with the major moments of Paul’s life and thereby represents himself as the Spanish Paul among American Gentiles” (242). The first of those parallels is the naming of Malhado in order to echo Paul’s shipwreck on Melita, the Mediterranean island as described in Acts 27–28 (243). Lee next examines the episode con-cerning the Bad Thing (Mala Cosa), concluding that it recalls Paul’s enumerating the activities of the Antichrist in 2 Thessalonians 2, with Lee claiming that “the Bad Thing is the very Antichrist figure, the false prophet who must precede the coming of the Son of Man” (247). Finally, Pauline typology is suggested in the congruence between the sufferings and humble works of Cabeza de Vaca and those of the Apostle, concerning which Lee claims that Cabeza de Vaca “finds that his sufferings have more than a personal and physical significance: they demonstrate the continuity of God’s salvation history” (248). At least in form, then, Cabeza de Vaca’s text resembles a document of spiritual revelation and revision, a variation on a type established by Paul, who was in his own heterodox way a go-between connecting and separating the worlds of Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Roman “metropo-lis” and colonial periphery (Alain Badiou terms him “ex-centered” in this regard [19]).

Lee describes the further Pauline parallel of Cabeza de Vaca’s heal-ings as an “example par excellence” of improvisation (250), a process of self-fashioning whose development he borrows from Stephen Green-blatt. In Renaissance Self Fashioning Greenblatt describes improvisation as “the ability both to capitalize on the unforeseen and to transform


given materials into one’s own scenario” (227). Greenblatt also com-ments on a sort of performative will-to-win the facile efficacy of which we should challenge when we apply the concepts of improvisation to Cabeza de Vaca: “What is essential is the Europeans’ ability again and again to insinuate themselves into the preexisting political, social, reli-gious, even psychic structures of the natives and to turn those struc-tures to their advantage.” Certainly Cabeza de Vaca gains advantages, food enough to keep from starving to death, for example, through the hybrid form of healing that he practices, although we’d have to concede they’re pretty meager advantages.

Lee’s conclusions, however, are worth reconsidering, in that they seem to lose the sense of simultaneity, the “who-is-fashioning-whom” dialectic important to Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning. Compar-ing Cabeza de Vaca to Paul, Lee terms both the adelantado from Jerez de la Frontera and the tentmaker from Tarsus “cultural war[riors]” only “superficially” engaged in the “mere rhetoric” of cross-cultural commu-nications, “interested not in the native ways of life per se but in their usefulness for the conquest of the natives’ souls” (252). This seems too reductive to me, however, too much like the arbitrary imposition of our own epistemological biases and skepticism toward religion onto a distance and different past.3 How can we imagine real religious tension in Cabeza de Vaca’s life? I would choose to let Lee’s study of Pauline typology suggest an intermediate agent whose theorizing might provide a productively contestable site from which to gain better access to the experience of Cabeza de Vaca: Saint Augustine.

In his treatise on the rhetorical processes of scriptural exegesis, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine works systematically to teach us how to perform a Christian reading, which is very much the project I want to advance in this essay. According to Anthony Pagden, Cabeza de Vaca and his contemporaries “depended upon the interpretation of a deter-mined body of texts: the Bible, the Church Fathers [Augustine foremost among them], and a regularly contested corpus of ancient writers” (New World 88). As we’ll see later, the problems and opportunities came in when Spaniards like Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas (who also fashions himself in his writings as parallel to Saint Paul) “went off the page” and encountered new reading situations in which established semiotics must either be adapted into an improvisation or dropped—a


virtual impossibility, if man is, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, the symbol-using animal. We can learn to read by following Augustine, we might say, yet there is enough of the conquest ideology manifest in Augus-tine’s work to keep our skepticism engaged: Pagden, for example, quotes Augustine to the effect that since the Egyptians “were sacrilegious and made ill-use of their gold” they could be dispossessed, an argument fre-quently applied to the Indians of North America in Cabeza de Vaca’s day (Spanish Imperialism 29). Though eventually made a saint, Augus-tine was certainly no liberal humanist.

On Christian Doctrine relies heavily upon the Pauline epistles, which are themselves tremendously heterodox texts, part prayer, part poem, and part doctrinal exposition. Like Saint Paul in his epistles, Augustine represents life as inescapably heterodox for the Christian, who is a wayfarer, shipwrecked in an alien place, living amongst things but seeking a life in the “elsewhere” of spirit, which life is pointed to by the signs/things of the world if one knows how to read them. In the Augustinian dialectic, confusion and mystification arise from mistaking use-value for enjoyment-value. This miserable potential for misreading is made evident early in Book One:

If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love. (9)

Perhaps the narrative discourse of failure that Beatriz Pastor develops so convincingly for Cabeza de Vaca can be seen within the Augustin-ian light of Christian semiotics, with failure predicated upon misun-derstanding the appropriate response to things (as signs), and with the “spiritual journey” of “failures” like Cabeza de Vaca now understood as movements through the process of revision and re-reading, the diligent scrutiny that eventually leads to proper, charitable readings of the world and one’s appropriate course of action in it. Charles Taylor points out how for Augustine the imperfect and problematic world has an impor-tant role to play in the unfolding plan and process of man’s discovering what it really means to see and understand, and it can’t be renounced or abandoned in solipsism. Taylor writes,


for Augustine, it is not reflexivity which is evil . . . . Evil is when this reflexivity is enclosed on itself. Healing comes when it is broken open, not in order to be abandoned, but in order to acknowledge its dependence on God. (139)

Augustine’s semiotic is at first glance reductive. Derrida or Lacan might say that he assures the coherence of signification through cen-tering all interpretations in God, the transcendent signifier that guar-antees things will make sense:4 “the truth of valid inference was not instituted by men; rather it was observed by men and set down that they might learn or teach it. For it is perpetually instituted by God in the reasonable order of things” (68). The rule of charity also seems to reflect this reductive centering: “what is read should be subjected to diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced” (93). But Augustine was not born sanctified or enlightened, he became so through a process of change—as did Paul, for whom, Badiou likewise claims, “truth is a process” (15)—and so there’s more to making meaning than that: the world is made up of things and signs, but signs are things themselves, and things are also signs and should be read, interpreted, and revised. The rule of charity strongly indicates a recursive process of re-reading, a generous and productive interpretive mode as opposed to the exploitative and reductive process that would be driven by the contrary rule of cupidity. Therefore, what Augustine says about reading and understanding Scripture can also be applied in a general sense to the very activity of living in between things and signs, substance and spirit. What Augustine says about understanding Scrip-ture also includes a sense of openness and play among signs: “we must not think it to be prescribed that what a thing signifies by similitude in one place must always be signified by that thing” (99–100). It also emphasizes the simultaneity and heterodoxy inherent in the nature of things/signs: see, for example, the “principle of contraries” by which mankind was “trapped by the wisdom of the serpent; we are freed by foolishness of God” (15). As there is play within the system of signs, so life may be open to ambiguities, confusion, mistakes, and even the pre-dicament of “absolute play,” signification at the brink of an abyss. Paul accordingly exclaims to the Corinthians, “Why stand we in jeopardy every hour?” (1 Cor. 15.30). The Christian experience, at least in the Pauline epistles upon which Augustine relies so heavily, is often fraught


with existential crisis, marked by failure and suffering, as Kun Jong Lee’s study emphasizes. The lengthiest quotation by far in On Christian Doc-trine comes from 2 Corinthians 11 (used as the epigraph to this essay), what Lee calls “the incredible list of sufferings [Paul] survived during his missionary journeys,” sufferings that were valuable for their role in his revision of his sense of himself, “since they made him not trust in himself but rely on God” (248). This strong refutation to self-assured-ness is really another way to understand the centering of coherence in God, not man, and the centering of interpretations in charity, not in profit or victory.

On Christian Doctrine also defines utility and appropriation in ways that are important to understand in order to see Cabeza de Vaca in something like his own context—to see what he and other New World explorers were struggling both to use and to untangle themselves from. Alan J. Silva observes that “despite everything Cabeza de Vaca learns from the natives, he still maintains a certain ethnocentric and racist construction of ‘difference’ (Christian vs. Pagan)” (143); minus the contemporary terms of judgment, this could have come straight out of On Christian Doctrine, and should keep us wary about Augustine, who more than adequately proves himself medieval in some of his prejudices. In discussing the pagan philosophers, and especially the Platonists, Augustine writes that “what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use” (75). This can offer permission to Cabeza de Vaca when he takes up the native practice of healing and revises it with the addition of Christian symbolism, for as Augustine writes, “even some truths concerning the worship of one God are discovered among [the teachings of the pagans].” It might be a fine line, or no line at all, between what Augustine says and “ethnocen-trism” or “racism,” but it’s still worth emphasizing that the destination of such appropriation is not victory but charity, and it requires individu-als like the New World explorers to work through the process of finding the appropriate interpretation of charity. As Pagden writes, “Las Casas’s transformation into the ‘Apostle to the Indians’” might provide us with an object lesson analogous both to his contemporary and countryman Cabeza de Vaca and to Saint Paul:

Las Casas’s moment of illumination . . . was the consequence of an encounter with a text, Ecclesiasticus 34.21–22. . . . It


was God’s word that, in characteristically Augustinian terms, had restored through grace the eye’s capacity to see. (“Ius et Factum” 90)

It may well have taken New World explorers like Las Casas and Cabeza de Vaca to test and expand what charity can mean beyond the fron-tier, what it looks like and how to see it, and what they witnessed and proposed was not always popular, challenging the comfortably assured meanings of the past. With Augustine’s semiotic now outlined and chal-lenged, perhaps we can follow Cabeza de Vaca making his movement through revision and re-reading towards a charitable interpretation in his successive accounts of the American Indians in the narrative.

Cabeza de Vaca’s early response to the Indians is marked by fear, which also plays a vital role in the Augustinian semiotic. Fear is the starting point on the way to piety:5 “From fear to wisdom the way extends through these steps” (40). Anthony Pagden points out that such herme-neutic processes were the fundamental means of accessing knowledge for Cabeza de Vaca and his contemporaries (New World 88). Rolena Adorno identifies three different “negotiations of fear” in the Relación, the first of which is appropriate to cite here: the Spaniards’ dealing with “their own fear and terror of the aboriginal people” (“Negotiation” 52). In general, Adorno writes, “fear of the other was a weapon employed by both sides, the native Americans and the Europeans,” and in Chap-ter 12 we can see Cabeza de Vaca confronting what Adorno calls “the techniques of terror.” Naked and cold, the Spanish party has reached an impasse, and Cabeza de Vaca suggests asking the Indians to take them in. “And some of them who had been in New Spain replied that we should not even speak of it, because if they took us to their houses, they would sacrifice us to their idols” (Adorno and Pautz 101). But notice the degree to which Cabeza de Vaca’s approach to the natives is already divergent, his improvisational performance begun: he pays no atten-tion to this counsel of fear and proceeds with the negotiation, and “in the morning [the Indians] again gave us fish and roots and treated us so well that we were somewhat reassured, and we lost some of our fear of being sacrificed” (103). This leads to a dramatic turn in how the Indians signify themselves to Cabeza de Vaca, as well as in how the Spaniard situates himself.

Cabeza de Vaca’s description of cannibalism in Chapter 14 radi-


cally disrupts the casting of roles in the conventional encounter narra-tive: here the “civilized” Europeans, whom Cabeza de Vaca pointedly calls “Christians” [christianos], resort to cannibalism, not the “savage” natives, as in the standard representational trope in which cannibal-ism signifies inhumanity and justifies oppression and slaughter.6 We might imagine the importance of this disastrous episode in deconstruc-tive terms: it is as if, among those defined by their “civilizing” ritual of Communion (the eating of the symbolic and transfigured body), the transgression ostensibly prohibited by the controlling ritual (the eating of the literal body) emerges in the absence of the representative of the Law (a priest, the Governor).7 Here then is a crisis of faith, a moment threatening descent into the abyss of absolute play. At the very least, this is a truly terrible episode of misreading the figurative as if it were literal. And the effect is to invert the cultural hierarchy, as the Indians take up the moral high ground, “very upset” (alteraron tanto) and scan-dalized by this inhumanity (107). Immediately following this recogni-tion of signs of piety among the natives, Cabeza de Vaca begins to see “the people” as markedly human: they “love their children more and treat them better than any other people in the world,” they mourn their dead, and they have recognizable marriages (109). Cabeza de Vaca’s perception and interpretation of the Indians is clearly turning towards the charitable version that Augustine’s semiotic entails. Fear has led to crisis, crisis to revision.

In order to understand more clearly how Cabeza de Vaca contributes to the reign of charity in this new world, we must try to see what he saw, a proliferation of initially ambiguous signs: the Indians belong to recog-nizably different groups with complicated social and political relation-ships including trade and war, established and ongoing. In Chapter 18, for example, Cabeza de Vaca distinguishes between the Mariames and the Yguazes, bringing them into the text with the specificity of proper names, and in Chapter 22 he describes the warring groups, the Atayos and the Susolas. Here, we might say, is a field of action for charitable intervention, perhaps an opportunity undreamt by Augustine. Adorno interprets the benefits of Cabeza de Vaca’s improvisations regarding the healing practices in political terms that also countenance the dialectic of self-fashioning. “Cabeza de Vaca recognized the deceptions perpe-trated by the natives (and enhanced by him and his companions) as a way of achieving a greater good: the making of peace among all the war-


ring groups” (“Negotiation” 65). Maureen Ahern similarly comments: “In the case of Cabeza de Vaca, the appropriation of signs became a bridge for cultural mediation” (216), a phrase that could be translated to Augustinian terms as “Cabeza de Vaca re-read and even re-wrote the signs, cycling hermeneutically in order to contribute to the reign of charity.” I think it is just as important, however, to consider the dualism of kingdoms that Cabeza de Vaca claims to serve in his conclusion in Chapter 32 that “to be drawn to become Christians and to obedience to the Imperial Majesty, [all these people] must be given good treat-ment” (Adorno and Pautz 106). The parallel phrase does not conflate identities, instrumentally reducing religion to a “tool for imperialism,” but instead recognizes the simultaneous but different trajectories of reli-gious conversion and colonial conquest.

And we should not forget that his “charitable” approach to the treatment of American Indians made Cabeza de Vaca a controversial figure when he returned to the Old World. Adorno writes that “in the dynamic of Cabeza de Vaca’s own narrative, as well as in [Fernández de] Oviedo’s, the most dramatic confrontation was that which took place between countrymen, between Cabeza de Vaca’s group and the Spanish slave hunters,” the party led by Nuño de Guzmán (“Peaceful Conquest” 80). The Relación became a contrasting approach to New World expe-ditions once it was published, substituting “acts of pacification” for the brutal acts of conquest from men like Guzmán and supporting the more charitable approach of men like Bartolomé Las Casas (84), who fre-quently used Augustine’s work for his rhetorical models in his campaign for humane treatment (Pagden, European Encounters 78).8

Beatriz Pastor argues that the Relación’s political importance arose

from the fact that it provided crucial support for a current of critical thinking, headed by Las Casas, that had been actively challenging and undermining the imperialistic approach that had shaped the conquest and exploitation of the New World. (145)

In light of this more sophisticated politics of New World encounter, then, Kun Jong Lee’s assertion that, like Gerónimo de Aguilar and Juan Ortiz, who “kept their European selves and ultimately worked for Span-ish colonialist interest against the natives” (253), “Cabeza de Vaca in fact infantilizes the natives” (255), reads as a reductive judgment that


privileges a contemporary instrumentalist way of seeing cultural encoun-ters over the perceptions of which Cabeza de Vaca was most likely capa-ble. The instrumentalist reduction is a way of reading Cabeza de Vaca, in other words, as if the past were not a radically different place, and as if Cabeza de Vaca were not inscribed within a very different order of sig-nifying and significance, and indeed one in tension between medieval and early-modern modes of cross-cultural perception.

When Lee reads Cabeza de Vaca against Paul’s epistle to the Romans, with its distinction between partaking in spiritual things and ministering in carnal things (15:27), as “clearly colonialist in its impli-cations,” the effect is to collapse the distinction: it is as if the heterodox must be reduced to one or the other of the terms, creating the sort of univocal assurance contemporary criticism often claims to eschew. There are spiritual things and there are material things in Paul’s way of seeing and writing, and in Cabeza de Vaca’s as well, but for many con-temporary critics, the spiritual is “clearly” only another name for the material, or only to be read in instrumental reference to the material. Is it impossible for us to go between the present and the past without overwriting the text of one with the other? Is it possible for us to read without conquest? I’m trying to direct back onto these critical inter-pretations the New Historicist claim that all texts, including critical interpretations, share some degree of complicity with the dominant ide-ology of their times. I’d like to offer the possibility of an epistemological refutation to the contemporary ideological construct that sees religion as an instrumentality of political and economic power—not that it isn’t so, in many cases, but we might want to consider that it is not always or necessarily so, and especially that we shouldn’t project it as so onto figures and texts from the past, at least not with any air of certainty. Just as we should rightly challenge blithe claims of Christian triumphalism, so should we aim our skepticism at secular humanism when it results in unwanted interpretive reduction. I’d like to consider that Cabeza de Vaca may have written as a man of true faith, as much a truth-seeker as an improviser, and that his faith may have provided the means for his seeing, his re-seeing and representing his two worlds, old and new, as he did. Cabeza de Vaca moves from fear through piety towards knowledge, a hunger for justice, and wisdom in changing his view of the natives he encounters. This is the semiotic process that Augustine describes in Chapter VII, Book Two of On Christian Doctrine, grown up now


and put into practice in a complex early modern world that Augustine wasn’t equipped to imagine in his distorted cosmology, through which he thought he saw, for example, that the world was much smaller than it turned out to be and that therefore the existence of the New World was impossible.

absolute play: the go-between

Continuing with the process of revising our own reading of Cabeza de Vaca, we might seek to create with Kun Jong Lee a dialogue of self-fashioning concepts applied to the Relación. Yes, Cabeza de Vaca improvises within the semiotics of the native, but so too is he improvised upon by the natives. Alan J. Silva writes that he “has been radically altered into a partial repetition of the native self ” (131), as he stumbles into the middle of an impressive complete politics between Ameri-can Indian groups that includes trade, wars, conflicts, and alliances. Adorno and Pautz likewise note that Cabeza de Vaca would have been witness to the 1533 battle between the Deaguanes and the Quevenes near Matagorda Bay, for example, proof of powerful levels of social and political organization among the natives (183). The process of being fashioned by the natives may render Cabeza de Vaca the “object” and the Other instead of the Subject in certain instances. Silva notes that “no longer does he have his status as colonizer, or even as a merchant or shaman; he becomes an object as much as he is a subject” (132). Rolena Adorno describes how Cabeza de Vaca and his party sometimes served as a convenient “catalyst” for negotiations between marauding groups of Indians and their victims: “the role the Spanish party played was not unlike that of the sacred gourds whose use they had taken up; the four strange men lent authority to the native groups just as the gourds had lent authority to the Spaniards” (“Negotiation” 67). The Spaniards were used, in this case, like symbolic things, in Augustinian terms, instead of acting as the tool-users, as so many critics want to depict them. Maureen Ahern writes that a “form or signifier of Indian religion is appropriated and transmitted back to its original bearers in order to convey a Spanish message or signifier, which pacifies them and converts them to Christianity” (225). This dialectic of improvisations is not unique to Cabeza de Vaca, either, if we consider the degree to which Cortés became a signifier in the Aztecs’ mythology as much as he translated their mythologies to Christian symbolism.


We can also add substantially to the self-fashioning dialogue con-cerning Cabeza de Vaca by imagining the traveler thrust into the pre-dicament of absolute play, which Greenblatt calls “play on the brink of an abyss,” a sort of supple and dynamic exertion of the “will to play” in the face of devastating evidence of alterability, which he develops as the paradigm for the dramatic characters of Christopher Marlowe (Renaissance 220). Greenblatt describes the defamiliarizing and even decentering effects of New World encounters upon European conscious-ness: “Renaissance Europeans were daily confronting evidence that their accustomed reality was only one solution, among many others, of perennial human problems” (219). In most cases, of course, the Europe-ans had all kinds of authoritative “props” for sustaining the illusion that at least their solution was “right,” but for Cabeza de Vaca, witness to abundant evidence that European solutions often failed, the situation is rather different. As Anthony Pagden writes, “the discovery of America also intersected with another powerful tradition in European thought. This was the dependence of all knowledge upon textual interpretation and exegesis” (European Encounters 12). New World explorers could not escape the challenges to the established assurances of stable mean-ing and had to venture in unfamiliar interpretive and improvisational territory.

Consider the predicament described in the Relación, which is also often called the Naufragios (shipwrecks), a title applied by later editors as if to index how to read the narrative’s emphasis upon breakdowns. Cabeza de Vaca writes a scene in which the authorities that he relied upon to render his world coherent have ceased to function effectively in this new setting—as Alan J. Silva sees it, “he can no longer view his own imperial authority without ambivalence” (131). Here’s why: The Governor, representing the King, fails from the start to lead effectively, giving over his command to a cacophonous diversity of individual interpretations, decisions, and actions (Chapter 10).9 The normative and regulating power of Christian faith among men is rendered deeply problematic by the other Spaniards’ resort to cannibalism. And here’s the rub for the modern reader: how can we imagine the leap of faith that Cabeza de Vaca has to make to sustain his belief when reason seems to have nothing to contribute? Perhaps we have to imagine faith itself as performative—we act as if we believe, and from our action our works embody faith? While Cabeza de Vaca may not lose faith in his


“center” in God, the relative position of the King becomes invisible or unreadable during his time in the “wilderness” and his own posi-tion as a Catholic Spaniard has been rendered unstable and open to new configurations, so the improvisations he enacts might be seen as a working out of a performative self. Silva describes this crisis in terms of Victor Turner’s discussion of the “liminal phase . . . when the ‘self is split up the middle,’” signaling a change of status (132), but this may also be an opportunity as much as a crisis. “His Christian self has been modified by the experience of captivity” (134); in my terms, Cabeza de Vaca responds to the crisis of absolute play by revision and perfor-mance, radical leaps of faith and wondrous feats of self-fashioning. Still a Christian, but now beyond the normal frontiers of his semiotic and no longer assured of its certainty, Cabeza de Vaca represents a self in Pau-line jeopardy, in something like absolute play relative to his previously reliable center. The role that sustains him and that he finally comes to occupy most successfully is that of the go-between, the negotiator and trader and crosser of boundaries.

The role of the go-between is elaborated in Greenblatt’s 1991 work Marvelous Possessions as the one “who passes from one representational form to another, who mediates between systems, who inhabits the inbe-tween” (139). It’s important for us to understand his paradigmatic figure in all of her complexity in order to understand the possible extent of Cabeza de Vaca’s absolute play. In studying the dynamics of the encoun-ter between Cortés and Montezuma, Greenblatt writes:

Object of exchange, agent of communication, model of con-version, the only figure who appears to understand the two cul-tures, the only person in whom they meet—Doña Marina is a crucial figure in The Conquest of New Spain. (143)

In other words, the model for the go-between is the Indian woman, and as Greenblatt emphasizes, the role sits uneasily within culture and history: Doña Marina “has continued to function in our own time as a resonant, deeply ambivalent symbol, half-divinity, half-whore, the savior and the betrayer.” Bruce-Novoa would certainly recognize her in this description as the despised heterodox—that which so many, of old as well as of late, seek to efface. What transformation could horrify an early-modern culture more than the loss of privileged masculine status,


and yet that’s just what we should consider in the case of Cabeza de Vaca. Mariah Wade, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, takes up the possibility of Cabeza de Vaca’s decentering in gender: “Cabeza de Vaca is compelled to perform native women’s chores, and later is allowed to become a trader,” another role filled by women (333). Wade also underlines how thoroughly heterodox Cabeza de Vaca must have appeared to the natives: he “is Other but not enemy; he is disassociated; he is useless as a warrior; and he is not female” (336). While Rolena Adorno tells us much about Cabeza de Vaca’s practice of negotiation, the author himself tells us from whom he learned it, as for example in Chapter 24: “the women of the ones who were called Quevenes came and negotiated between [the warring groups] and made them friends” (Adorno and Pautz 183). The go-between, in this new American con-text, is a role markedly feminine.10

As we consider the degree to which the alien Cabeza de Vaca has become a sign in play, self-fashioned by the Indians, we can see that he has been resituated—revised—within the three most important catego-ries of identity. In terms of race, he becomes virtually unrecognizable to his “fellow” Spaniards, so changed that he evokes in them the charac-teristic affect of the New World encounter, according to Greenblatt—wonder, wordless astonishment (Adorno and Pautz 245). Bruce-Novoa more emphatically evokes the racial implications of Cabeza de Vaca’s alterations: The other Spaniards “were horrified at the sudden vision of the possibility of transforming themselves not only into the Other but into the hated Other, despised and dehumanized: the Indian” (19). And we might imagine, too, that such a transformation could have played upon Cabeza de Vaca’s thoughts, with roles reversed, as he watched Christian Spaniards turn into cannibals despised by the Indians—what terrible thing is it possible for us to become, or in Pauline terms, how profoundly in jeopardy are we? In terms of class, Cabeza de Vaca under-goes demotion from ship’s officer first to slave and then to “middle class” trader: he works, first for survival and then to “gain advantage,” digging up roots until his hands bleed prior to taking up the peripatetic business of trade. And in terms of gender, he takes up women’s work within the native culture, as we have already seen.

At the risk of a certain degree of cultural relativism, we might con-sider the Relación in comparison to works in the canon of the Puritan captivity narrative in order to mark clearly the caliber of the identity


work going on here. While John Williams’ account is full of masculine and competitive theological debates with French Jesuits and American Indians alike, he never depicts himself as either engaging in religious practices with the natives or working. Mary Rowlandson, on the other hand, works her way into the domestic economies of the Indian groups who hold her captive, making a shirt, for example, in exchange for a knife (48). Cabeza de Vaca, in contrast to both, merges his religious practices with those of the natives and takes up work within their econ-omies. Not just as a “naked” man who has shed his skin has Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca undergone profound transformations, but, indeed, as a human ideological construct, as the proud product of centuries of Euro-pean category-maintenance work, emerging now from years of ordeal and trial in the American wilderness as a heterodox in gender, class, ethnicity, and religion.

Given what we have already suggested about the destabilization of the authority of the King and the practice of religion, and adding this triple-category revision of self, it seems to me that we can understand Cabeza de Vaca as keeping his faith by improvising a performative self on the brink of an abyss of identity collapse.11 And I would argue that an appropriate response to this predicament of absolute play would be compassion emerging from some degree of identification. If the past is a foreign place, and Cabeza de Vaca an alien resident there, we still can identify with him as he confronts the most “modern” of problems—the incoherence of identity. And if his reading of the Native Americans is based upon a foundering medieval theology of certainty and inflected with the conquest ideology some might say is inherent in Paul’s epistles and Augustine’s Christian semiotic, so too our reading of Cabeza de Vaca is potentially shaped beyond our wishes by the ideology of anti-religious materialism underwriting much of contemporary scholarship. We run the risk, as critics, of “Othering” Cabeza de Vaca, recognizing him only on “our” terms and not simultaneously on his. Adorno, for example, finds it necessary to give a social-psychology “solution” to the problem of Cabeza de Vaca’s faith-healing performances, reducing the mystery of these incidents to this singularizing formula: “it is not that they [Cabeza de Vaca’s group] became great shamans because they per-formed cures but rather that they performed cures because they were perceived to be great shamans” (“Negotiation” 58). We might in pass-


ing note that this interpretation, based upon the work of Levi-Strauss, seems to deny the beliefs of both Indians and Christians alike, and dem-onstrates that tendency that Bruce-Novoa observed in interpretations of Cabeza de Vaca, the reduction of a heterodox to a single term or sig-nifying system. This is an all-too familiar critical move: Moreno-Nuño alludes to the “placebo effect” and the investment of power in selected leaders in interpreting this episode (592); Ann Ortiz asks us to look to “modern anthropological theory of the dynamics of social organization in preliterate societies” to explain Cabeza de Vaca’s shaman function (121). Have we gone imaginatively bankrupt to the point of denial, or can we imagine with real tension, peril, and play: what is it like to believe beyond reason, and to act upon that belief? Is that the sort of interior resource upon which a “naked man” sustains himself years in the wilderness?

critically afloat: christian wayfarer

What can we do, then, to preserve the “peculiarity” that makes Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca such a vexing problem for interpretation? I suggest that we read his text, imagine him as much an unreliable nar-rator as any other writer fashioning an identity in text, in particular by returning to the anecdote with which this paper began, Cabeza de Vaca afloat and homeward bound (Chapter 37).12 Rather perilously afloat, we should emphasize: even on this last leg of his long journey, Cabeza de Vaca seems plagued by bad luck, the first ship he set out on having sunk in early 1537, and his current vessel sailing alone after its two mates drop out upon taking on water. Some conqueror he is—he has had to scrounge about for available transport. The perils continue once under-way, with another storm and, more significantly, his ship being pursued and closed upon by a French vessel. Old World meets Old World and can’t get along. This peril is intensified by the threatening distant pres-ence of ships that may turn out to be more of the hated French enemy. Even when it turns out that the nine sails in the distance, initially unreadable, belong to Portuguese ships closing in to rescue Cabeza de Vaca’s craft from the enemy, there’s something awfully antiheroic in the profane Portuguese captain’s condescending remarks about the Span-iards’ “very bad ship and very bad artillery” (Adorno and Pautz 271). What kind of conquest narrative is this where both the vehicles and the weapons are ridiculed?


We could read it as a Pauline narrative of Christian wayfaring, redeeming Kun Jong Lee’s argument by taking seriously its paral-lel between the Apostle and Cabeza de Vaca. “For Paul,” Lee writes, “his sufferings were not to be deplored but to be celebrated, since the sufferings for the sake of the church were nothing less than to share Jesus’ Passion and to continue Christ’s legacy” (248, referring to Rom. 8.16–18; 2 Cor. 1.5). It would not be suitably Pauline and Christian for Cabeza de Vaca’s voyage home to unfold without peril or jeopardy, in other words. His life or his text or both are compelled to approximate certain metanarratives. But for all of Lee’s emphasis upon both Cabeza de Vaca and Paul as “cultural warriors,” we must also recall that Christ’s legacy includes failure, resignation, and betrayal, and that humility is a Christian virtue. The voyage home, we might say, recapitulates in min-iature all the problems and ambiguities of Cabeza de Vaca’s long way-faring on land, and in specifically Christian terms. While it might be easy to imagine Cabeza de Vaca, as Lee does, as writing in the Relación a “private memoir on the success of a self-ordained saint’s missionary pilgrimage” (241), we might also (not instead) consider the degree to which this seafaring anecdote demonstrates Cabeza de Vaca’s height-ened awareness of the ever-present potential for failure. And failure is as much a “deep structure” of the Christian “ideological” metanarra-tive as colonization: consider Christ betrayed by his Apostles or Paul himself imprisoned by the Romans. Christian and especially Catholic iconography centers on the painful death and not the victorious life, as Morris Bishop somewhat luridly reminds us in trying to tell Cabeza de Vaca’s tale: The Spaniard’s “cruelty was entangled with religion, and induced certain morbid sequels of meditation on the cross and the vari-eties of martyrdom” (13).

We might read Cabeza de Vaca’s penultimate anecdote in Augus-tinian terms, as a matter of the ambiguities, misreadings, manipula-tions, and interpretations of signs. The sea journey itself, of course, is a standard representational trope or literary sign for the spiritual voyage, whether in the “pagan” tradition that Augustine is seeking to re-possess, for example Homer’s Odyssey, or in the Christian tradition that encom-passes Saint Paul’s shipwreck. Augustine himself uses the trope early in On Christian Doctrine to represent the predicament of the Christian wayfarer and the temptations and confusions of sign and thing, use and


enjoyment: “Suppose we were wanderers who could not live in blessed-ness except at home, miserable in our wandering and desiring to end it and to return to our native country” (9). This might sound a lot like Cabeza de Vaca in his miserable wanderings through Florida and Texas, but Augustine eventually makes his point: if we misread the vehicles as the enjoyable things, instead of as the things we should use,

we should become alienated from our country, whose sweet-ness would make us blessed. Thus in this mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it. (10)

We must appropriately respond to things and signs, in other words, and that will require diligent scrutiny and frequent revision. But what do signs signify, and how can we possibly read the signs in Cabeza de Vaca’s anecdote with anything approaching certainty?

Let’s look below decks. One of the Portuguese ships carries a “cargo of black people” (cargada de negros), presumably slaves, while the ship aboard which Cabeza de Vaca sails carries silver and gold (Adorno and Pautz 269–71). He is afloat, we might say, on a sea of possible futures: should the riches of the earth, and the stolen labor of slaves, be treated as things to enjoy (a future envisioned by conquerors like Cortés or Nuño de Guzmán), or can we mortal wanderers learn to properly form relationships in which a greater good like charity is served—the future Cabeza de Vaca (as well as Las Casas) will struggle to see and make seen in his later life? The perils of sea travel so emphatically foregrounded in this chapter serve as reminders of the dangers of alienation attendant upon misreading and misusing the things of this world (a risk not only for the Egyptians Augustine censured, but for all), striking again upon a thematic note early in the Relación that the shipwrecks and wayfaring were providential in the New World, “the land in which our sins had placed us” (73). For the Christian wayfarer the journey towards blessing is difficult and fraught and the signs he reads are ambiguous and often changing.

We might, finally, also consider this anecdote of Cabeza de Vaca afloat with a particularly literal sense of place: in representing these sea maneuvers as occurring in the vicinity of the Azores, Cabeza de Vaca locates himself more or less half way between Europe and America. While he literally appears to be sailing towards Spain and some last


vestige of the Middle Ages, he is perhaps also on his way to becoming American and an early modern. Juan Bruce-Novoa presents this pro-vocative thesis:

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca also represents what is quintes-sentially American in the sense that he proved that once he dedicated himself to the American process [of a life forever remaking itself through adventure], living it in his own flesh as any other American, the immigrant ceased to be a foreigner and was never able to return to his place of origin. (17)

Bruce-Novoa’s way of reading Cabeza de Vaca as proto-Chicano also brings us back to the critical problem of Cabeza de Vaca as despised heterodox who must be rewritten in order to reduce his threat to the coherence of the critic’s system of significance. Concerning this par-ticular cultural heterodox, Bruce-Novoa observes that “it is impossible for the above two groups—Mexicans and more distanced critics—to see Chicanos from our own perspective because it implies the destruction of their binary system of relations” (19). For Mexicans, the Chicano represents the same horror that Cabeza de Vaca may have represented to the Spaniards (and that the converted Saint Paul must have to the Jewish sect he renounced)—the possibility of transformation into the Other. For instrumentally-minded critics, it seems, Cabeza de Vaca rep-resents something intolerable, too, something both Christian and con-queror, possessed of both compassion and strategy, acting in the service of both the reign of charity and the reign of Charles I of Spain (who was, suitably enough, simultaneously Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire). The critical response, as we’ve shown repeatedly, has often been to neutralize religion as a heterodox force of its own by rendering it instead an instrumentality of some secular power.

Which of these readings, then, is the most productive or satisfying? Here we run up against Cabeza de Vaca’s peculiarity as a subject for criti-cal interpretation, and the best way I can answer this question is to sug-gest that these readings need to remain simultaneously held, alongside of and in dialogue with the readings of the other scholars I have cited. Just as it would be a naive mistake to unreflectively accept Cabeza de Vaca’s “self-ordained” sainthood, it would be something akin to a colo-nialist imposition of our own language to term Cabeza de Vaca “merely” a “cultural warrior.” I make this suggestion out of a deep suspicion that


at times critical discourse runs the risk of contradicting its own avowed politics of embracing difference, or of only embracing its own “autho-rized” differences, but I also advance it from a more personal and even moral obligation. Taking up a more contemporary critical language for a moment, aren’t we, as critics (and maybe as dreamers), also wayfarers venturing toward what Hélène Cixious calls the “elsewhere” of writing, a place “that is not economically and politically indebted to all the vile-ness and compromise . . . not obliged to reproduce the system” (72), and aren’t we as likely as not, in Augustine’s terms, to misread signs and use what we should enjoy and enjoy what we should use, or just use without any enjoyment at all (somehow the worst sin of all)? When we read a text and respond to it with all that we have learned (or in more capi-talistic terms, with all the learning that we have acquired and accumu-lated and intend to spend), in some ways we also speak ourselves, and it seems to me like simultaneously good form and good faith to try our best to speak with both skepticism and compassion, from our own historical perspective but also calling down the invested words of living pasts, in differentiation as well as in identification, when we encounter those strangely familiar figures from that foreign country called the past.

University of Houston Writing Center

notes

I am very grateful to Dr. Dorothy Z. Baker at the University of Houston for her generous mentorship of this project. I also acknowledge that while I can’t cite it in any particular place in the text, I could not have written this essay without the prolonged tutelage of Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” and the entire opus of Dr. Walker Percy. Finally, I acknowledge the general inspiration of David Paul, a mentor and a man of religious courage.

1. Three pages, around 1,200 words, in either the Spanish text or English translation (more than the entire Chapter 25, which contains the much-discussed “military intelligence” concerning the Indians he encounters). Carmen Moreno-Nuño also notes that the practical intelligence of the Relación lacks vital climate and geography data (591).

2. See for example Fredric Jameson: “a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced” (66).

3. Lee’s persistent use of reductive phrases such as “”What is really happening,” “a mere strategy,” “in short,” “in fact” “clearly,” and “a mere rhetorical strategy” could stylistically indicate a desire to reduce a troubling destabilizing of a binary system.


4. Moreno-Nuño, working with Cabeza de Vaca’s text in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotic, sees a similar kind of centering: “the Indians are confused because the One to whom they pray and offer sacrifices, Aguar, is an erratic name given to the only and True Christian God. Jesus Christ is the only ‘face’ that the only God may have” (594).

5. Never citing or acknowledging Augustine, Silva still sees the same thing: “Christianity has given [Cabeza de Vaca] the authority to validate or invalidate an interpretation. . . . As a result, he reduces yet controls the fears of the local tribe” (139).

6. See, for example, Greenblatt: “Europeans had long identified cannibalism as an emblem of extreme horror” (Marvelous Possessions 136).

7. Greenblatt notes something similar regarding Bernal Díaz and the Cortés party: “for a Spanish Catholic to recognize such a connection [between cannibal-ism and communion] might have seemed to acknowledge the force of the heretical Protestant attack on the mass as cannibalism” (Marvelous Possessions 136).

8. Moreno-Nuño similarly describes Cabeza de Vaca’s approach as “directly opposed to the military and warlike order proposed by Cortés” (590).

9. See also Silva on the “ambiguity about the role and function of colonial leadership” (142).

10. Ahern captures the heterodox and semiotic nature of the go-between role when she writes that Cabeza de Vaca’s “knowledge of two separate and apparently contradictory sign systems gave Cabeza de Vaca power over both” (225).

11. Moreno-Nuño, citing the work of Tzvetan Todorov, describes a “crisis of identity” (594).

12. In their “Introduction,” Adorno and Pautz emphasize that Cabeza de Vaca wrote the 1542 edition with an “urgent purpose,” that is, to write himself into the role of humanitarian governor under the emperor’s royal commission (xix).

works cited

Adorno, Rolena. “The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios.” New World Encounters. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 48–84.

———. “Peaceful Conquest and Law in the Relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.” Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin Amer-ica. Ed. Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau, et. al. Amherst: University of Mas-sachusetts Press, 1994. 75–86.

Adorno, Rolena and Patrick Charles Pautz. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. Vol. 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.


Ahern, Maureen. “The Cross and the Gourd: The Appropriation of Ritual Signs in the Relaciones of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Fray Marcos de Niza.” Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention. Ed. Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. 215–44.

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Bishop, Morris. The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Century, 1933.Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Shipwrecked in the Seas of Signification: Cabeza de Vaca’s

Relación and Chicano Literature.” Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest. Ed. Maria Herrera-Sobek. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. 3–23.

Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. Relación. 1542. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. Vol. 1. Ed. and Trans. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 1–291.

Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

———. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984): 53–92.

Lee, Kun Jong. “Pauline Typology in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios.” Early American Literature 34 (1999): 241–62.

Moreno-Nuño, Carmen. “Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación in Light of Deleuze and Guat-tari’s Semiotics and Theory of Language.” Romance Languages Annual VIII (1997): 589–96.

Ortiz, Ann M. “Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as Prophet and Mediator in the Nau-fragios.” MIFLC Review 7 (1997–98): 113–26.

Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World: from Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

———. “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas.” New World Encounters. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 85–100.

———. Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Pastor Bodmer, Beatriz. The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Rowlandson, Mary. “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.” 1682. Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 29–76.


Saint Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Robertson. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958.

Silva, Alan J. “Conquest, Conversion, and the Hybrid Self in Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación.” Post Identity 2.1 (1999): 123–46.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Wade, Mariah. “Go-Between: the Roles of Native American Women and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in Southern Texas in the 16th Century.” Journal of American Folklore 112 (1990): 332–42.

Williams, John. “The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.” 1707. Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 167–226.

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