Madalena: The Entangled History of One Indigenous Floridian Woman in the Atlantic World

In 1549, after 11 years of slavery, and exile, an indigenous woman made it home to her people. In the time of her captivity, she became one of the most geopolitically important and well-traveled indigenous women in the Spanish Empire. Her name—or the name Spanish society gave her—was Madalena, and she returned home to Tocobaga, in what is now Tampa Bay. From bondage in Havana, she was taken to be the translator for a missionary expedition that sought to peacefully convert her people into citizens of the imagined Spanish colony of Florida.¹ That mission, like every other European attempt to settle the region up to the nineteenth century, would fail, but this latest failure of Spanish colonialism meant that Madalena could return to life among her own people, unlike most indigenous slaves of the sixteenth century.

Figure 1.

Madalena greeting Cáncer in a 1950s Catholic tract (Color online)

Source: Brother Kurt and Brother Antoninus, Friar Among Savages: Father Luis Cáncer (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1958), 55.

Madalena entered the Spanish colonial world, and the documentary record, as the captive of another failed conquest: the 1539 expedition of Hernando de Soto, who wandered from Tampa to Arkansas only to die on the banks of the Mississippi River. Madalena, spared that arduous journey, went from what is now the Florida Panhandle to become a slave in the home of Soto's wife, Isabel de Bobadilla. There she scrubbed pans, fetched water, and did whatever else was needed from a slave or servant living in that household.² As Bobadilla's criada (servant), Madalena traveled with the young widow to Seville, where her mistress pursued a lawsuit to save her dowry from her deceased husband's business partner. After the widow's death, Madalena drifted back to Havana, perhaps in the company of a fellow servant from the same household. There she drew the attention of the Dominican friar Luis Cáncer, a close collaborator of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the leader of the mission that would bring her home. Madalena knew Cáncer for only a brief time, but he placed a great deal of his hope for his mission on her. She taught him basic phrases in her language and made the world of local politics legible to him. After he helped her lead her own Christian ritual on a Florida beach, she disappeared from the written record.³

Despite her feats of survival, her crucial role in the mission, and her miraculous homecoming, Madalena has no memorial, unlike the people who controlled her labor. Doña Isabel de Bobadilla is portrayed in the statue of the Giraldilla in the Castillo de la Real Fuerza in Havana, which is reproduced on bottles of Havana Club rum across the world.⁴ A small plaque on the Catholic parish of Espiritu Santo in Safety Harbor, Florida, near Madalena's former village, commemorates the martyrdom of fray Luis Cáncer. Madalena's only memorial is her appearance as a secondary figure in a line drawing on the pulpy pages of a 1950s tract about Cáncer's martyrdom.

This is not a story about the vagaries of historical celebrity, nor, really, is it about Soto, Bobadilla, or Cáncer, except to the extent that they defined the trajectory and boundaries of Madalena's life, and that the documents generated in their historical wake help show us her experience. Just as a statue can be imagined by looking at the mold from which it was cast, I have drawn on these records and others to build a world around Madalena, a context that lets us see the historically invisible woman at the center of this story. In recounting her story, from her perspective, I argue that she and history's other displaced and enslaved indigenous people and their lifeways disrupt our conventional narrative of the so-called "Conquest Period" of Latin American history. They entangle connections between places long thought separate, shift our focus away from supposed centers of historical...