CROSSING THE CONTINENT 1527-1540

Speculative life of the African slave who traveled with Cabeza de Vaca across the unknown deserts of Texas and Mexico.

The known facts about Esteban—Estevanico or Estebanico, in much of the literature—are few. That does not keep British scholar Goodwin from insisting that he was “almost certainly Negroid and of sub-Saharan ancestry,” even though Esteban’s contemporaries referred to him as el Moro, “the Moor,” or morisco, “Moorish,” which could have meant that he was a Berber, Moor or Taureg, if not black. Goodwin soon allows that the interpretations are many, but asserts that it could “be racist to make [any ethnic] distinction.” Against common usage, too, he insists that Esteban should be considered African-American because…well, he was an African in America. Objections aside, Esteban lived an indisputably adventurous if star-crossed life; he was shipwrecked with Cabeza de Vaca and some 300 other Spaniards off the coast of Texas and was one of four to survive an overland crossing to Mexico. Goodwin inclines to the hagiographic on that near-miraculous survival, by virtue of which Esteban “was now a revered shaman.” Though the author faults Cabeza de Vaca (“[his] own account in Shipwrecks is hardly convincing”), who told the shaman tale in the first place, he is comfortable in assigning a fairly specific geography and chronology to events and places over which generations of scholars have argued. Goodwin also offers a conspiracy-tinged hint of Esteban’s end, though he makes the good point that it arrived after Esteban had decided to release himself from slavery on his own authority.

Students of Southwestern and Spanish colonial history will want to have a look, if only to argue. General readers will find more firmly grounded accounts in Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey (2006) and Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange (2007).