"Cabeza de Vaca"

Among the movies I've been watching is this really interesting 1991 Mexican drama concerning the eight-year long journey (1528 - 1536) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked and enslaved by Indians, but who found a career as an itinerant Indian shaman, and eventually, after an endless journey through swamp and desert, ultimately found his way back to Spanish civilization. Cabeza de Vaca's few travelling companions, most notably the Moor Estebanico, helped fuel rumors of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, which led directly to the 1540 Coronado expedition and the first Spanish encounters with the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca's story is one the greatest personal survival tales in world history, and it made him one of the very, very few people who could fully appreciate the tragedy of Spain's conquest of the peoples of the Americas. From Wikipedia:

As treasurer, and hence one of the chief officers, of the Narváez expedition, Cabeza de Vaca and three others were the only survivors of the party of 300 men who landed near Tampa Bay, Florida in the spring of 1528. Over the course of eight years, various members of the expedition succumbed to disease, starvation, exposure, and the attacks of various Native American groups as they slowly made their way west, toward Mexico, where they knew there were other Spaniards. Others among them simply gave up the effort and "went native." For a few years, the survivors were enslaved by various Native American tribes of the upper Gulf coast (including the Hans and the Capoques of Galveston Island, which the explorers termed Malhado, or Island of Doom). Only the final four--Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and a Moroccan Berber named Esteban (who was later called Estevanico)--ultimately escaped and eventually reached Mexico City.

Traveling mostly in this small group, Cabeza de Vaca explored what is now the U.S. state of Texas, and possibly smaller portions of New Mexico and Arizona. He traveled on foot along the Texas coast and up the Rio Grande and then down the Pacific Coast to Sinaloa, Mexico, over a period of roughly eight years, during which time he lived in conditions of abject poverty and, occasionally, in slavery. During his wanderings, passing from tribe to tribe, he developed sympathies for the indigenous population. He eventually became a trader, which allowed him freedom to travel among the tribes. Cabeza de Vaca claims to have learned to heal the sick, and to have gained such notoriety as a healer that he and his companions gathered a large following of natives who regarded them as "children of the sun" endowed with the power to both heal and destroy, and who accompanied them in their journey across what is now the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Eventually, after returning to the colonized reaches of New Spain and encountering a group of fellow Spaniards in the vicinity of modern-day Culiacán, he went on to Mexico City and returned to Europe in 1537. Cabeza de Vaca wrote about his experiences in a report for Charles V. It was later published in 1542, under the title La Relación (The Report), and is considered a classic of colonial literature. Cabeza de Vaca desired to succeed Pánfilo de Narváez (whose supposed ineptitude is commonly credited with causing the deaths of most of the party) as governor of Florida and return there, but Charles V had already appointed Hernando De Soto to lead the next expedition. Cabeza de Vaca declined to travel with the expedition as second in command. His apparent reluctance to provide his countrymen with sufficient information about the uncharted territory may have been due to his jealousy over De Soto's appointment.

Instead, in 1540 he was appointed governor of Río de la Plata, in what is now Paraguay, Argentina and their surroundings. As in North America, he was unusually sensitive and benevolent towards the Native peoples. He was the first European to behold the Iguazu Falls, among the most spectacular in the world. Political intrigue against him caused his arrest in Asunción and return to Spain in chains, in around 1545. He was eventually exonerated and wrote an extensive report on South America, which bound with his earlier La Relación and published under the title Comentarios (Commentary).

The movie is in Spanish with English subtitles, but there is actually little Spanish at all, since Cabeza de Vaca is often alone or isolated, with no one to speak to. He is just as lost as the audience, in a world of Indian dialects.

The director Nicolás Echevarría greatly simplified, even over-simplified, Cabeza de Vaca's journey. The movie suggests the shipwreck was in Florida, but that was actually the journey's first bloody stopping point. The final shipwreck occurred somewhere west of the Mississippi Delta, and Cabeza de Vaca's enslavement likely occurred somewhere near Galveston, Texas. Why leave that part out? Well, it's complicated, and ultimately for director Nicolás Echevarría may have been unimportant. Echevarría had something else in mind. The important part was that Cabeza de Vaca was thrown into a hallucinatory world of abasement and privation. Cabeza de Vaca carried a Christian cross, and his initial captors decided he should be sent to a shaman who also wore a cross, and be put to work tending the needs of a spoiled armless gnome [Update: Upon a second-viewing, there is the chance I've misinterpreted the role of the cross in the movie - the cross instead may have been seized from Cabeza de Baca and presented to the captor, but the film's editing seems to prevent one from establishing for sure what happened, or what the meaning may have been].

What a horrible existence! The hallucinatory quality is reminiscent of the magical realism pioneered by author Gabriel García Márquez and subsequently used by directors like Mel Gibson in "Apocalypto". Cabeza de Vaca's real existence may have been as a turtle-egg collector on the Texas beach, but instead the movie shows him apprenticing the shaman craft with his captors. Cabeza de Vaca's vision-laden emergence as a successful healer is the movie's best moment.

The transition from swamp to desert is very abrupt, indicating that Echevarría wasn't much bothered by notions of continuity. Indeed, he had only two Mexican filming locations: the desert (in Coahuila) and the swamp (in Nayarit). As far as I could tell, the Indians were less like the real Indians of the northern Gulf of Mexico coast, and more like the Indians of Mexico. Then I remembered my history of Mexico ("Mexico" by Michael D. Coe, third edition, p. 146):

Into this uneasy political situation stepped the last barbaric tribe to arrive in the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs, the 'people whose face nobody knows'. They said that they came from a place called 'Aztlan' in the west of Mexico, believed by some authorities to be the state of Nayarit, and had wandered about guided by the image of their tribal god, Huitzilopochtli ('Hummingbird-on-the left'), who was borne on the shoulders of four priests. .... We next see the Aztecs following a hand-to-mouth existence in the marshes of the great lake, or 'Lake of the Moon'. On they wandered, loved by none, until they reached some swampy, unoccupied islands, covered by rushes, near the western shore; it was claimed that there the tribal prophecy, to build a city where an eagle was sitting on a cactus, holding a snake in its mouth, was fulfilled.

The director suggests discreetly, by his choice of filming location in the Nayarit swamps, through simplification and also perhaps by conflation of the Texas Indians with Aztecs, and by using a dash of magical realism, that Cabeza de Vaca's real story is about the tragedy of Mexico's conquest by Spain. And Cabeza de Vaca's story is about that, partly at any rate. The film is a meditation about Mexico's tortured birth as a Spanish colony. A powerful film and well-worth watching!