Laying Claim to the Literary Borderlands: The Contested Grounds of Hispanism in the US

We Came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca across North America. By Alex Krieger. University of Texas Press,2002

The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. By Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Edited and translated by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz University of Nebraska Press, 2003

Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States. Edited by Richard Kagan. University of Illinois Press, 2002

Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. By Kirsten Gruesz. Princeton University Press, 2002

The formation of a British empire in the New World from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, like the expansion of the US during the nineteenth, was largely a project of appropriating borderland territories that had formerly been claimed by Spain. In the context of interimperial rivalry, a "British-American," as well as an "American," historical discourse formed, in part dialogically, in the process of translating, editorializing, and recontextualizing the Spanish chronicles about the New World, in the course of which certain Spanish texts and historical figures, such as Christopher Columbus or Bartolomé de Las Casas, were appropriated for its own historical genealogy and ideology, while others, such as Ferdinand of Aragon or Hernando Cortés, were ascribed to the so-called Black Legend, a particularly Protestant ideology disparaging Catholic Spain for alleged medieval backwardness and cruelty. Perhaps no other figure of the Hispanic borderlands of North America has been more contested in the construction of modern national identities than Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the sixteenth century Spaniard from Jérez de la Frontera, whose account relates his experiences during the landing of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition at Tampa Bay in 1528 with the aim to "conquer and govern" La Florida (Adorno and Pautz 48); the Spaniards' repulsion by Floridian Native Americans; the wreck of their hastily constructed rafts off the Texas Gulf coast; and four survivors' eight- year odyssey along the Gulf coast, inland across the North American continent to the Gulf of California, and finally back to Mexico City in 1536. Thus, Cabeza de Vaca has been claimed as a "first" by Latin Americanists in search for the colonial roots of modern Latin- American narrative; by Chicano literary critics in pursuit of the precursors of the twentieth-century "Latino/a" literary tradition in the US; by American multiculturalists and regional historians for the literary history of the US at large or for a "Western," New Mexican, or Texan (literary) history; and by anthropologists as America's "first ethnographer."

The latest attempt to lay claim to Cabeza de Vaca comes from a new book published by the University of Texas Press entitled We Came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca across North America, in which Cabeza de Vaca's account is hailed, yet again, as "the first ethnography of native peoples of North America" (5). The book presents research based on a 1951 dissertation by the late anthropologist Alex Krieger (1911-1991), in which he attempted definitively to establish the route that the four survivors of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition took across the North American continent to the Gulf of California once they left the Texas Gulf coast. His point was to prove that Cabeza de Vaca's party did not take the "northern route" into central Texas and New Mexico, as some previous scholars had assumed (that is, before the 1950s) but rather went further south, into what is today southern Texas and northern Mexico. Lest the reader wonder whether such an argument should warrant an entire book or be more appropriately dealt with in an article (an article that Krieger already published in 1961), Krieger's 150-page narrative of the four survivors' journey is supplemented by two appendices that present his own English translations of his two main sources— Cabeza de Vaca's Relación (1555) and Gonzalo...