Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez (review)

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols. By ROLENA ADORNO and PATRICK CHARLES PAUTZ. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Vol. 1: Illustrations. Maps. Figures. xxiv, 413 pp. Vol. 2: Illustrations. Maps. Tables. xxii, 428 pp. Vol. 3: Illustrations. Maps. Table. Bibliography. Index. 476 pp. Cloth, $275.00.

This work by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz is not just a new edition of the 1542 first-published account of the Narváez expedition by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; it is a historiographical tour de force, a model for the kind of detailed textual criticism that is made possible by the investigation of the intertextual connections and reception of the text itself. This reader's first reaction was to think that it is too bad that the impetus of the Columbus quincentenary did not give rise to many more such careful new studies of fundamental texts of Spanish exploration and conquest.

If the edition consisted of nothing else than the careful transcription of the text in Spanish with an English translation on facing pages, including marginal notation of variations from the 1555 text and explanatory notes to the translation, it would be of great value to anyone who has little hope of obtaining access to any one of the four copies of the original still certainly extant. This is especially true if the reader is satisfied with the authors' arguments that the 1542 account is a different work with a different emphasis and purpose than the frequently edited and translated 1555 version. One can also appreciate the rhetorical grace in placing the edition first, before the interpretive study, in that the reader has the option to consider the text virtually unencumbered and to judge the translation for herself.

With all that said, however, I must expose my prejudices by complaining of the commonly accepted practice of stating editorial principles of resolving abbreviations and updating spellings--and then carrying them out silently throughout the text. In this day and age it would have been nice to find a CD in a pocket at the back of the book containing an unemended transcription with a hypertext apparatus including images of the actual pages of the original. I was also rather disappointed with a few citations in the footnotes--to Claude Lévi-Strauss on shamanism and Paul Radin on the trickster figure in Native American myth--that adumbrated a familiar problem of interdisciplinary efforts, where the outdated "normal science" literature of the foreign discipline (in this case, anthropology) is used instead of more recent scholarship. This is a special problem here with the older "trickster" literature, which is based upon nineteenth-century magpie collections of "myths" to which meaning is laboriously given by scholars who lack access to the language in which the traditions were originally couched. This underlying practice is so foreign to what Adorno and Pautz are doing with their textual analysis here that such citations have a very jarring effect.

The first volume also includes a detailed account of the life of Cabeza de Vaca that places him in time, space, and social milieu and sets the stage for the detailed commentary of the work that follows. This important segment of the work begins to construct a picture, from the standpoint of Cabeza de Vaca's story, of the corporate strivings of the really small number of families involved in the establishment of Spain's power both as a nation-state and as a colonial empire. Adorno and Pautz foreground the overlooked work of older genealogical scholarship--Pellicer's in 1652 and Sancho de Sopranis's in the 1940s--to establish the context of what they refer to as the "incalculable factors of honor and prestige" (1:413) that marked...