Antonio de Mendoza purchased Estevanico from Andrés Dorantes to act as a guide, being a “persona de razón” who had prior knowledge of northwestern New Spain.28 In 1539 Estevanico joined the expedition of Friar Marcos de Niza. The friar describes him as having perished alongside three hundred Indian allies near the legendary city of Cíbola, amidst the Zuni pueblos, although they most likely never made it beyond northern Sonora.29 A more contradictory and negative portrayal is provided by the 1540 report of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. He had written to Viceroy Mendoza that Estevanico was killed because “the Indians of Chichilticale said that he was a bad man, and not like the Christians who never kill women, and he killed them, and because he assaulted their women, whom the Indians love better than themselves.”30
Estevanico’s contradictory characterization as both a good Christian and “person of reason,” and as a violent and unpredictable man, lie in his liminal status in the colonial documentation as being labeled a negro alárabe. Alárabe was a loaded term in the period, which was associated with Islam and used by sixteenth-century writers to refer to the seminomadic peoples inhabiting North Africa.31 Regardless of Estevanico’s actual background, the mere association with alárabes would have raised concerns among his contemporaries. Estevanico and his supporters would have had to constantly justify his position and his behavior as a good Christian. For example, when Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza requested that the king grant encomiendas to the first conquerors of New Spain, and by extension their direct descendants, he portrayed his father’s slave Estevanico as a Christian martyr who was “shot through with arrows like a Saint Sebastian, in the service of His Majesty.”32
Estevanico is perhaps the best-known interpreter among this group of Arabic speakers in New Spain. Yet other enslaved North Africans and Moriscos learned indigenous languages upon their arrival in the Americas.33 Knowledge about captivity in the Muslim world played a role in everyday interactions between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the so-called frontier regions of Spanish America. During the 1530s, Spaniards brought interpreters to northern New Spain, and there were some who were Moriscos or North African Muslims conversant in Arabic dialects. Their perceived facility with languages made these individuals attractive candidates for becoming naguatatos, or translators of Nahuatl, the language spoken in much of central Mexico.34
Records from the earliest entradas into northern New Spain during the 1530s reveal the growing need for interpreters to translate between Spaniards and their Nahuatl speaking allies, and the new indigenous linguistic groups they encountered.35 Spanish incursions to conquer and subjugate the seminomadic peoples inhabiting Nueva Galicia dragged on for decades. These events took place during the term of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, a member of the influential Mendoza noble family from Granada. He traced his lineage to ancestors who fought in battles of the so-called Reconquista, and his father, Iñigo López de Mendoza, Count of Tendilla, acted as captain-general of the Christian forces conquering Granada. Historical memory of these earlier battles continued to hold meaning for elite Spanish families and continued to be mentioned in histories and genealogies composed on both sides of the Atlantic. Viceroy Mendoza’s brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, composed the Guerra de Granada, one of the more detailed and well-known accounts of the Alpujarras uprising.36 As can be seen through the Mendoza family, Christian-Muslim interactions on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean influenced many Spaniards who made their way to the Americas and guided their responses to the “new” lands. Imperial and local policies, perceptions of others, and strategies for self-fashioning were all bound up in peninsular interactions that were transformed during the course of new encounters and experiences in the Americas.
Antonio Tello’s Libro segundo de la cronica miscelanea en que se trata de la conquista espiritual y temporal de la Santa Provincia de Xalisco recounts the history of Jalisco to 1653. Tello’s depiction of the conquests of New Spain and Nueva Galicia develops gendered parallels between Spanish interactions with North African Muslims and Turks in the Mediterranean and with indigenous peoples in the Americas. Describing Cortés’s participation in a Spanish campaign to Algiers in 1541, Tello emphasized Cortés’s masculinity and the authority he gained from direct experience in the conquest of Mexico, in light of peninsular Spaniards’ skepticism: In Algiers, Cortés “served his majesty, and had some disagreements when he gave counsel concerning the winning of that city, because they told him that he thought that that war was with the naked Indians of New Spain. To this he replied, ‘It only takes one of those Indians to fight with six clothed Spaniards’.”37 Through Tello’s eyes we can envision how his readers might have imagined these parallels that were already being inscribed onto early accounts of conquest. Describing Spaniards battling indigenous groups in northern New Spain, Tello notes, “When they fight, they yelp and cry out like Muslims.”38 Nuño de Guzmán’s forces engaged peoples in feathered dress in Chiametla, whose bows were “so big they appeared Turkish.”39
As in Spain, St. James or Santiago reputedly assisted the conquerors during his “first apparition” in New Galicia. A shrine was built in his honor on the mountain ridge (cerro), and the adjacent settlement added Santiago to its name, becoming Santiago de Tonalán, thereby transforming the landscape to reflect Spanish devotions to Reconquest saints.40 After the fall of Granada, St. James, or Santiago Matamoros, had gained currency as the patron saint of Spain, as myths depicted his early arrival on the Peninsula, making it the first European nation to learn about Christ, thus bestowing preeminent status on Spain. Santiago had been invoked during Christian battles against Muslims in medieval Iberia, and he continued to be called upon during conquests in the Americas. Depictions of Santiago had become more prevalent in the changing political climate in Spain, especially as the Catholic monarchs’ personal devotions to him seeped into their political decisions.41 These images inhabited the mental worlds of the Spaniards as Estevanico was making his way with Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos de Niza as interpreter and as later generations reinterpreted these events in their written histories of the early conquests.
In 1535 Viceroy Mendoza sailed to New Spain to assume his fifteen-year post, which involved establishing Spanish control and jurisdiction over the recently explored and conquered territories of the viceroyalty, extending from La Florida and the Caribbean, to the area that is now the southwestern United States and Baja California. In Nueva Galicia, Spanish settlers were met with strong indigenous resistance in 1540, when native leaders formed alliances to oust the early settlements established under Nuño de Guzmán. Viceroy Mendoza quickly sent Spanish forces to suppress the mostly Cazcan-speaking “rebels” in the Juchipila Valley, in a two-year struggle that became known as the Mixton War.42 However, conflicts between Spaniards and indigenous groups in Nueva Galicia never completely died down after the Mixton War, setting the stage for the Guerra Chichimeca that broke out nearly ten years later in 1550.43 The Spaniards had left a profoundly transformed society in their wake, in both the emerging towns of Guadalajara, Purificación, San Miguel de Culiacán, and Compostela, and in settlements such as Jalisco, Etzatlan, and Juchipila, which had previously belonged to indigenous communities. In Nueva Galicia, the demographic balance shifted after the Mixton War to comprise a multiethnic society of Spaniards, Africans, and mixed-race peoples, as well as the native peoples whose population was dwindling due to the ravages of war and disease.44
By the 1541 Spanish campaigns against the peoples whom they labeled “Chichimeca,” Viceroy Mendoza had working for him a group of interpreters who were reputed to be Moriscos.45 The 1546–47 tour of inspection or visita that Francisco Tello de Sandoval carried out against Viceroy Mendoza and the Audiencia of Mexico provides ample information about the activities of these Morisco naguatatos.46 Through denunciations and complaints tying these men to Mendoza, it is also possible to glimpse attitudes toward Moriscos that would surface in later disputes over offices and encomiendas. It is hard to gain a sense of who these men were from the visita records, but read alongside other documents, it reveals the importance in early expeditions of Morisco interpreters, the need for them to fill certain niches in the emerging viceroyalties, and the opportunities for gaining status available to those who participated in the first
