Mercantilism and Cultural Difference in Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion

The story of the failed conquest that led to his eventual captivity by the Native Americans of southern Texas and northern Florida, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación¹ has long held a unique position in the literary annals of sixteenth-century Spain. Singled out for its unusually realistic and sympathetic descriptions of indigenous life, the Relación has been hailed by scholars as a kind of counternarrative to the stories of brute force and the claims of cultural superiority that characterize the Spanish colonial period and the literary genres of its chroniclers. Beatriz Pastor, for example, argues that La Relación is "a discourse of failure" that "subvert[s] the established order" (qtd. in Bauer 32). Because his subject position is so much more malleable than that of any other conquistador—he is alternately slave and ruler, Spaniard and native, Christian and pagan—Cabeza de Vaca has been associated with the figure of the "hybrid" self that, in Homi Bhabha's words, "resist[s] the binary opposition of racial and cultural groups" (207).² And because his narrative dwells so accurately and familiarly on the lives and manners of his captors, the Relación has been hailed as one of the earliest modern ethnographies (Campbell and Campbell). But if both claims make visible much that is extraordinary about Cabeza's de Vaca's text, they also do it an injustice, rendering its uniqueness in terms that are historically inaccurate and misleading. Sympathetic though he is to the needs and desires of his captors, the author of the Relación remains throughout his narrative divided by the binary of Self and Other, a far cry from the later, nineteenth-century colonial subject that inspired Bhabha's understanding of hybridity. Nor are his descriptions of the natives' manners and customs, compelling though they are, plausible examples of ethnography—a science that had its origins centuries after Cabeza de Vaca's time.³

If many scholars have chosen to read the Relación as a protomodern text, however, others have rallied to restore it to its original context. An early scholar of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative, Enrique Pupo-Walker has paid particular attention to the Relación's literary dimensions, placing its series of shipwrecks and rescues in the context of Renaissance literature as a whole (xxix). Similarly, Rolena Adorno has recently read Cabeza de Vaca's preference for peaceful settlement strategies against the backdrop of contemporary laws that required a more stringent justification for the use of violent tactics against the natives (Adorno, "Peaceful Conquest"). Even more recently, José Rabasa and Ralph Bauer have each argued that the Relación should be read not as a precursor of twentieth-century cultural relativism but as an example of the turn in the sixteenth-century theory of conquest from violence to pacification. Although Rabasa regards this turn toward pacification more skeptically than does Bauer, both scholars locate the source of the Relación's vision in the context of ideologies contemporary to its author. In particular, Bauer links Cabeza de Vaca's gentler, more sympathetic approach to the natives in terms of an imperial and, more important for my purposes, mercantilist viewpoint that was prevalent in sixteenth-century Spain.

But if Bauer's study invokes mercantilism—a complex set of economic prescriptions that focused on markets and their potential for developing trade—it is only one of the many influences he associates with the Relación. Central to Bauer's analysis is the empire's political, not economic, transformation from the neofeudal relations urged by famously ethnocentric conquistadors like Hernando Cortés to the more centralizing strategies adopted by the emperor. My own argument, by contrast, takes a more sustained look at the link between mercantilist policies and the Relación's unusual account of its colonial subjects, highlighting the importance of commercial structures in the formation of both Spanish and Native American culture. That commercial structures have always been important to an understanding of the fabric of society is a given, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ways...