We traveled through much land and we found all of it deserted, because the inhabitants of it went fleeing through the sierras without daring to keep houses or work the land for fear of the Christians. It was a thing that gave us great sorrow, seeing the land very fertile and very beautiful and very full of waterways and rivers, and seeing the places deserted and burned and the people so emaciated and sick, all of them having fled and in hiding. And since they did not sow, with so much hunger they maintained themselves on the bark of trees and roots. We had a share of this hunger along the road, because only poorly could they provide for us, being so displaced from their natural homeland that it seemed that they wished to die. . . . They brought us blankets, which they had been concealing from the Christians, and gave them to us, and told us how the Christians had come into the country before and had destroyed and burned the villages, taking with them half the men and all the women and children. (CV, 90)
“We had a share of this hunger along the road”: Cabeza de Vaca’s comment here again represents the new direction his life had taken. His own experience of desperation and hunger was the condition that made possible this expression of sorrow that he feels for the fate of these communities. This passage is filled with pathos and it is an exact, vivid, poignant, and moving description of native dislocation and destitution. In the face of the threat of “the Christians,” Cabeza de Vaca swears to the Indians that he will not allow them to kill any of them or abduct them as slaves. Eventually, when Cabeza de Vaca and his companions reach the Spaniards a standoff ensues between Cabeza de Vaca and the leaders. One of the slavers, Diego de Alcaraz, was insistent that Cabeza de Vaca use his influence with the Indians to get them to come down from the mountains, out of hiding. Cabeza de Vaca relents and proceeds to call for the Indians, expecting peaceful cooperation. It soon becomes clear, however, that the Spanish have no intentions of letting the Indians be: “Thereupon we had many and bitter quarrels with the Christians, for they wanted to make slaves of our Indians, and we grew so angry at it that at our departure we forgot to take along many bows, pouches, and arrows, as well as the five emeralds, so they were left and lost to us” (CV, 95).
Cabeza de Vaca tells us, at this point, that Alcaraz had also attempted to discredit Cabeza de Vaca and his companions by saying to the Indians that they were disloyal renegades and people of little heart. The Indian response to Alcaraz demonstrates how far Cabeza de Vaca had gone in becoming American: “The Indians paid little attention to this talk. They talked among themselves, saying that the Christians lied, for we had come from sunrise, while they had come from where the sun sets; that we cured the sick, while they had killed those who were healthy; that we went naked and barefoot, whereas they wore clothes and went on horseback and carried lances. Also, we asked for nothing, but gave away all we were presented with, while they seemed to have no other aim than to steal what they could, and never gave anything to anybody” (CV, 96).31 In his role as a wandering beggar, Cabeza de Vaca has become one with the natives in dress and disposition. His complete dispossession—as I’ve been saying, his nakedness—is a visible indication of his faithfulness to native peoples. His body wears the signs of a wanderer on the earth, a desert pilgrim. His nakedness is an icon of his newfound American identity. This is particularly evident in the episode where the Spanish slave raiders first catch sight of Cabeza de Vaca. Their response to him is one of pure wonder: “The next morning I came upon four Christians on horseback who, seeing me in such strange attire and in the company of Indians, were greatly surprised. They stared at me for quite a while, speechless. Their surprise was so great that they could not find words to ask me anything” (CV, 93).
To these Spaniards, Cabeza de Vaca had become the greatest wonder of all, surpassing anything they imagined about the New World. In his exile in the Americas, Cabeza de Vaca had succeeded in becoming a strange and wondrous being, not only a voice of the dispossessed but one of them. I repeat, he has become brown like them, a savage and impure mixture of European and American cultures, brown as Richard Rodriguez sees it: “I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity.”32
Cabeza de Vaca is brown like this, an impure product of an accident—a shipwreck to be precise—that was both his ruin and his salvation. And in response to this sudden brownness, the “Christians” respond with stupefaction and incomprehensibility. His person causes them to marvel because he himself has become something strange and fantastic, as wild as anything they would encounter in this New World. In speaking of the New World Baroque, Octavio Paz describes well the fascination that this new creature would cause: “In the seventeenth century the aesthetics of the strange expressed with rapture the strangeness of the criollo. . . . The criollo breathed naturally in a world of strangeness because he was, and knew himself to be, a strange being” (OP, 58–59). Cabeza de Vaca is this kind of strange creation, a criollo or mestizo avant la lettre.
Cabeza de Vaca’s real and direct knowledge of native peoples is nothing like the romantic and prejudicial versions of Columbus. He knew the Indians to be people of great compassion and tenderness as well as cruelty and violence. They were, in short, very much like him. And yet, through his wandering and living among them, he learned that there is a great diversity of human beings and that he himself is as strange and wondrous to his fellow Indians as they are to him. It is Cabeza de Vaca’s experience of abject failure and disaster that allowed him to see himself on the same human plane as the Indians: as a vulnerable, mortal, and wondrous being. The great Dominican friar Las Casas, a reader of Cabeza de Vaca, would be undeniably impressed with this message and would himself come to a similar conclusion about the Indians and about himself.
Bartolomé de Las Casas
When Columbus first returns to Seville from the New World, he carries with him a group of Indians in chains. As a young man in Seville, Las Casas was said to have been there for the epic event. This young man would later build a theological defense of the Indians around this principle of “being there,” of witnessing firsthand the events and circumstances of the Conquest of the Indies. Las Casas would eventually take his place in a long line of historians and prophets—the two blend into each other for Las Casas—who were chroniclers of the victims and oppressed of history. Las Casas arrives at this point, however, with more than his own personal experience of the New World. It took a revelation of a classical biblical nature to jolt him from his slumber. And it was the biblical prophets that brought him the message that would be crucial to his life: that God is on the side of the poor and dispossessed.
It is unquestionable that autobiography and personal testimony are cornerstones of Las Casas’s intellectual life. Any consideration of dispossession in Las Casas should begin with his own story, at the moment when he renounces his life as a slaveholder and encomendero after witnessing a massacre of Taíno Indians in Cuba (1514).
Las Casas went to the Antilles as early as 1502 (at eighteen years of age), where he helped manage his father’s encomienda on the island of Hispaniola (granted to Las Casas’s father for traveling with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493). Later, for taking part in the conquest of Cuba under Diego Velásquez and Pánfilo de Narváez, Las Casas had been granted a large encomienda. Privileges like this come at a heavy price, gained at the expense of innumerable individuals and communities. This fact would not be lost on all Europeans in the New World. Already at this early stage in the Conquest there were friars and priests in Cuba and Hispaniola who were protesting the bloodshed and atrocities. Several Dominicans, in particular, would heavily influence Las Casas. In one case, a Dominican friar—possibly Pedro de Cordoba, the leader of the Dominican community in Hispaniola—refused Las Casas absolution for being an encomendero and possessing Indians. Las Casas once remarked that his attitude toward this Dominican at the time was one of respect, “but as to giving up his Indians, he was not healed of his opinion.”33
Pedro de Cordoba was the superior of a group of Dominicans from the Convent of St. Stephen in Salamanca intent on reforming the Order and recovering the original spirit of contemplation and poverty.34 The Dominicans are mendicants, after all, a word from the Latin verb suggesting “to beg.” When faithful to