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 St. Dominic, they would wander like rolling stones forever on the move, seeking stillness in and through movement, contemplation through action. This itinerant lifestyle was a parable of exile and perpetual displacement on this earth. The betrayal of this nomadic virtue—for these Dominicans, the impulse to settle down and take possession—represented the victory of the “City of Man” over the “City of God.” For the reform-minded Dominicans of the age of Conquest, this victory was almost total and absolute in the New World, so much, in fact, that the “City of Man” had achieved totalitarian authority. Those homesick pilgrims that belonged to the “City of God” were, by contrast, few and far between, like revolutionaries on the verge of defeat, disunited and routed. The Dominicans, however, would try to rally them.
Las Casas would never forget one mendicant preacher in particular, the Dominican friar Antonio Montesinos. Las Casas sat calmly in the church pews as Montesinos mounted the pulpit and began his tirade. In opening his mouth, a dam broke and a flood of accusations and denunciations accosted the congregation like volcanic lava burning up everything in its path. The biblical text for the sermon was the passage relating the ministry of John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert. Montesinos went on to describe himself as a “voice of Christ in the desert of this island”:
You are all in mortal sin! You live in it and you die in it! Why? Because of the cruelty and tyranny you use with these innocent people. Tell me, with what right, with what justice, do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars on these people? . . . Are they not human beings? Have they no rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand this? Do you not grasp this? How is it that you sleep so soundly, so lethargically? (LC, HI, 141)
Montesinos’s thunderous words rained on the audience with fury. On that day, Montesinos channeled the best of the Hebrew prophets.
Needless to say, Montesinos caused an uproar. His congregation wanted sweet and sentimental sermons, not this fury that thickened like the dark clouds of a hurricane. Montesinos’s superior in Hispaniola, Pedro de Cordoba, supported his sermon, and himself turns to the king to tell him what is happening in the New World. The colonists are “depopulating” rather than populating the lands. The Indians have the appearance of “painted corpses” rather than living human beings. The cruelties and servitude in the New World are worse than those committed by the Pharaoh and the Egyptians.35
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