[April isn’t
just National Poetry Month; it’s also National
Arab American Heritage Month. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the
many compelling Arab American stories & figures I feature in the final
chapter of my book
We the People, leading up to a
weekend post on contemporary Arab American writers!]
On the enslaved
explorer who helps us revise our understanding of the earliest American
histories.
One of the historical
figures about whom I’ve thought the most consistently and deeply over the last
decade is Alvar
Nuñez
Cabeza de Vaca, the early 16th century Spanish explorer who
ended up wandering across North America for nearly a decade and became in the
process something quite different, a multi-cultural identity and perspective
that I called in my book Redefining American
Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (2011) one of the first
truly American identities. Beginning with that book I’ve continued to think and
write a good deal about, and likewise teach quite frequently, excerpts from Cabeza
de Vaca’s Narrative, but I’m
ashamed to admit that it was only while writing about Cabeza de Vaca for a
chapter in We the People that I
started to think more fully about (and ultimately include in a separate chapter
in that book) one of the three companions who accompanied him throughout his
journey: Estevanico
(also known as Estebanico, Esteban the Moor, and Mustafa Azemmouri, his many
names themselves reflecting the fraught question of investigating his life and
experiences), an enslaved Moroccan man who became through those experiences a
prominent explorer in his own right. (I was greatly aided in that thinking by a
wonderful recent historical novel about Estevanico, Laili
Lalami’s The Moor’s Account
[2015].)
The start of
Estevanico’s story was all too typical in the age of exploration: in his early
20s he was kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders and sold into slavery in the
Moroccan coastal town of Azemmour; and he ended up enslaved to a Spanish
nobleman, Andrés
Dorantes de Carranza. De Carranza brought Estevanico with him on the
ill-fated 1527 Narváez expedition to Florida, and after that expedition’s
shipwreck and collapse Estevanico ended up with Cabeza de Vaca, de Carranza,
and another man (“the fourth,” de Vaca writes, “is Estevanico, an Arab Negro
from Azamor”). The decade that followed changed Estevanico’s life and fate just
as fully as it did de Vaca’s; while de Vaca returned to Spain after the men
finally encountered another Spanish expedition on the continent’s west coast,
Estevanico remained in the Americas and continued his explorations, serving as
an enslaved guide for both Antonio
de Mendoza (the first viceroy of New Spain) and Friar
Marcos de Niza. While leading de Niza’s 1539 expedition among the Zuni tribe in present-day New Mexico,
Estevanico disappeared—he might have been killed by the Zuni but also might
have chosen to escape to freedom and join their community (among other
potential fates), one more telling ambiguity in the life of this unique contact
era figure.
I’ve written a
good bit (including in Redefining
American Identity, but also
in this space) about how Cabeza de Vaca helps us reframe
that era of initial contact between European and Native cultures, but to be
honest Estevenico does so even more potently. For one thing, he (like another
striking contact era figure, Tisquantum)
helps us recognize the central presence of slavery, and of individuals and
cultures affected by it, at and after every moment of contact. And for another,
related thing, Estevanico makes clear that both Arab and Muslim Americans were
part of this evolving place and identity from its earliest moments—often in direct
relationship to the system and experiences of slavery, but also and in any
case as a set of figures, communities, and cultures that contributed
significantly to the origin and development of America. I’ll highlight a few
more such figures in my next posts in this series, but there are none who were
present earlier or more foundationally than Estevanico.
Next Arab
American story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Arab American figures or stories you’d highlight?
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