his life ebbing away, a group of Indians comes upon them and saves them from certain death: “Upon seeing the disaster we had suffered, our misery and misfortune, the Indians sat down with us and began to weep out of compassion for our misfortune. For more than a half an hour they wept so loudly and so sincerely that it could be heard far away” (CV, 32).
This act of compassion saves Cabeza de Vaca’s life in more ways than one, spiritually as much as physically. His old life and person dies and something else is born in its place like a renascent tree in the spring. Through this display of Indian kindness and affection, Cabeza de Vaca gradually comes to recognize what escaped him as a Spanish soldier, the shared humanity of native and Spaniard alike. In this naked, totally vulnerable condition, Cabeza de Vaca was stripped bare of his Spanish code of honor, of any titles and past achievements, and, above all, of his feeling of European cultural superiority. Only in this wasteland experience of Cabeza de Vaca, in this abject and wretched setting, does he recognize his solidarity with native peoples: “I spent six years in this country, alone with them and as naked as they were” (CV, 43).
Clothes were surely an important mark of status and class throughout European history, and for the Spanish they would have represented certain levels of civilization. To be naked, then, represented a fall of sorts, a diminishment and debasement of civilization that brought one to the level of the uncivilized and barbaric. Nakedness, in the words of Paul Schneider, “was a symbolic turning point, after which the Spaniards could no longer differentiate themselves from those whom they had come to conqueror.”26 Or take Ilan Stavans’s thoughtful assessment of the issue: “[The word] naked . . . signifies bewilderment, even embarrassment on the part of the voyager, and is also used to indicate an uncontaminated, natural disposition toward the environment by the natives.”27
The metaphor of nakedness appears in many New World chronicles, but one of the most intriguing cases is the account of another shipwrecked Spaniard, Gonzalo Guerrero, who “went native” after being shipwrecked off the coast of the Yucatan in 1511. Though the historical record on Gonzalo is scarce and contradictory, the narratives told about him (by Andrés de Cereceda, Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and others) emphasize his renunciation of European civilization and his embrace of native ways. Like Cabeza de Vaca, this renunciation leaves him indistinguishable from the natives. In the words of Cereceda, “This Gonzalo has gone about naked, his body tattooed and in the garb of an Indian.”28 And for Bernal Díaz, in taking on this new denuded identity and in marrying an Indian woman, Gonzalo, “the Warrior,” is the father of the mestizo.29
Whether Gonzalo was a flesh and blood person is unclear, but we do know how many chroniclers perceived and interpreted his intimate relationship with native peoples. For some, he is an apostate and traitor, for others he represents the beginning of American miscegenation. As the legends about Gonzalo were developing (Gómara published his version in 1552), there must have been a renewed interest in the reports of Cabeza de Vaca (published in 1542 and then republished in 1555, with the title of Naufragios). How fascinating these tales of wandering, lost, naked Spaniards must have appeared to Europeans. Especially to those disturbed by the reports of violence and abuse in the New World, the cases of these men were refreshingly different. Instead of triumphal narratives of war and plunder, these legends gave us examples like Cabeza de Vaca, men who adopted nakedness and dispossession above the will to power. They gave us individuals far less certain and self-assured, but infinitely more capable of tenderness and compassion than their conquistador counterparts. William Pilkington thinks it was the suffering and debasement that Cabeza de Vaca endured that made him the extraordinary person he was: “The knowledge of human suffering and its psychological, if not physical, alleviation seemed to expand and alter his vision of life; it chastened him, taught him humility, and encouraged his spiritual growth—growth which paralleled . . . his geographic progress.”30
His life, then, comes to mirror his geographic wandering, and his spirituality adopts the look of desert ecologies—barren, arid, empty, unadorned. Even his skin color must have changed hues to resemble the brownness of desert dwellers, of people burned by the sun and darkened by suffering. He must have begun to look a lot like so many migrants and refugees of our own age, wandering through the deserts of the modern U.S.-Mexico border in search of water and promised lands, like the biblical Hagar and her son, Ishmael—themselves exiles—frantically searching for springs of life.
If there wasn’t enough drama and suspense in the narrative thus far, when Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions (a North African slave, Estevanico; Andres Dorantes; and Alonso de Castillo Maldonado) finally are reunited with their countrymen, it is with a group of Spaniards hunting for slaves. Though we would expect a moment of elation at this point—like a child being reunited with his mother—Cabeza de Vaca is suddenly tentative and he is not at all clear where he belongs, whether he is one of the hunters or the hunted. He has a hard time recognizing himself in the rapacious acts of his countrymen and tells us in no uncertain terms how much sorrow it caused him to witness the devastation the slave raids were having on the Indian communities (led by Nuño de Guzmán and Diego de Alcaraz). He comes across villages once full of life and now deserted, the people in exile and hiding in the mountains. He saw with his own naked eye villages that were depopulated and set on fire by these slavers, a “scorched earth” campaign:
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
