Cabeza de Vaca

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Cabeza de Vaca

• The Literary Legacy of CDVs Adventures in the
  Unknown Interior of America

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Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación

• One of the earliest examples of a captivity
  narrative
• What qualities does the Relación share with
  Rowlandsons Narrative?
• 2. What other genres (types of writing) does
  Cabeza de Vacas account borrow from?
• Refer to the preface.

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Conventions of the Captivity Narrative

• Movement
• Everything gets put back in place
• Adaptation of captive to captors
• Captive often survives by grace of God but
  through clever means too
• Anxiety of captive relating to captors (going
  native)
• Allegory

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Allegory

• Def An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose
  or verse, in which the agents and actions, and
  sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by
  the author to make coherent sense of the
  literal, or primary, level of signification,
  and at the same time to signify a second,
  correlated order of signification
• (Journeys are often allegories.)

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American Themes

• Physical and emotional struggle for accomodation
  between races
• Spiritual allegory In general, European
  literature, fiction in particular, excels in the
  recounting of the minutiae of life, in depicting
  manners, social and political, whereas American
  books are often concerned with ultimateswith a
  persons relationships to God, to the universe,
  and to his own soul William C. Pilkington
• Voyage of exploration (physical and emotional
  discovery)

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Contact Zone

• Def social spaces where disparate cultures meet,
  clash and grapple with each other, often in
  highly asymmetrical relations of domination and
  subordinationlike colonialism, slavery, or their
  aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe
  today

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Spanish Imperialism

• Spanish come as conquerors (not colonists)
• Spanish exploited laboronly established
  themselves where land was already populated by
  Indians
• Encomienda systemquasi-slavery of American
  Indians

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Transculturation

• Def term to describe how subordinated or
  marginal groups select and invent from materials
  submitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan
  culture and vice versa
• (i.e. the exchange of culture between the
  different groups in a contact zone)
• What transculturation do you see taking place in
  Cabeza de Vacas adventures so far?

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CDVs transformation

• Beatriz Pastor argues that CDV goes through a
  transformation
• Project ??reality (p.45, no tools)
• Conqueror/merchant?ethnographer/missionary
• (Ch. 22, p. 61 The Malhado Way of Life is a good
  example of ethnography)

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CDVs transformation, contd

• Ch. 11
• weapons are turned into nails in order to build
  ships
• Horses are eaten
• Transformation of an imperial, warlike order
• (Soon after, Narvaez abandons his command)

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CDVs transformation, contd

• p. 57 the last shipwreck
• the survivors escaped as naked as they were
  born, with the loss of everything we had. That
  was not much, but valuable to us in that bitter
  November cold, our bodies so emaciated we could
  easily count every bone and looked the very
  picture of death.

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Spiritual Death and Rebirth

• CDV and his fellow travelers must learn to adapt
  to their environment and act more like the
  natives.
• What are some examples of going native in this
  adaptation?

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Apprenticeship

• According to Pastor,
• CDV goes through a prolonged apprenticeship
• 1)From state of limbo to slavery
• 2)From slave to merchant
• 3)From merchant to miracle-working doctor
• 4)From miracle-working doctor to

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