Esteban

The African Slave Who Explored America

Dennis Herrick

• Editorial: University of New Mexico Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780826359827
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Sklaverei

When Pueblo Indians say, "The first white man our people saw was a black man, " they are referring to Esteban, who came to New Mexico in 1539. After centuries of negative portrayals, this book highlights Esteban's importance in America's early history. Books about the history of the American West have ignored Esteban or belittled his importance, often using his slave nickname, Estebanico. What little we know about Esteban comes from Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and other Spanish chroniclers, whose condescension toward the African slave has carried over into most history books. In this work Herrick dispels the myths and outright lies about Esteban. His biography emphasizes Esteban rather than the Spaniards whose exploits are often exaggerated and jingoistic in the sixteenth-century chronicles. He gives Esteban full credit for his courage and his skill as a linguist and cultural intermediary who was trusted and respected by Indians from many tribes across the continent.

CHAPTER 1

A Man of Mysteries

BOOKS ABOUT THE history of the American Southwest have ignored him or, even worse, attacked his character and belittled his importance. Spanish conquistadors said one reason they went to Arizona and New Mexico was to investigate what happened to him. The only public spaces honoring him are two small Arizona parks in Tucson and Phoenix, although he never visited the site of either city. He’s known best by his condescending slave nickname. He is almost erased from America’s historical record.

Nevertheless, the African slave Esteban was the first person from the Old World of Europe, Africa, and Asia to travel across the North American continent and also explore the American Southwest in the 1500s.

The remarkable story of Esteban is almost always told from the viewpoint of the Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, with whom he traveled across the continent in 1528–1536 after a failed Spanish invasion of Florida.

In bringing Esteban out of the background and into the foreground, this biography remains true to facts that historians have come to agree upon, points out those still contested, and challenges numerous errors and myths about Esteban.

Nearly all writers maintain that Zuni warriors killed him in 1539 in the present state of New Mexico. If so, there is conjecture on why they killed him. Some speculate that his gourd rattle from another tribe or owl feathers he carried angered Zuni religious leaders. Others claim he demanded gifts and favors, or that his never-before-seen skin color startled the Zunis. None of these reasons to kill him seems serious enough for a tribe characterized as being inclined toward peace.¹

The most persistent reason stated in book after book is that he was killed because he made advances toward Zuni women. However, Mexican Indians who accompanied Esteban reported that Zunis did not allow him to enter the village. Therefore, Esteban most likely never saw any Zuni women. The conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado wrote the next year that Zunis kept women so protected that even he saw only two elderly ones.²

Zuni historian Edmund J. Ladd described Esteban as “a man either ignored or avoided by history, who is a very important Southwestern historical personality.”³ He wrote that the reason his ancestors would have killed Esteban was if they concluded he was a spy. They feared he would show the location of Zuni villages to slave-raiding Spaniards that trade-route Indians warned them about.⁴

But they allowed the Indians with him to escape with that same knowledge. So there’s a possibility Zunis did not kill Esteban despite almost all accounts declaring they did, those accounts being rooted in comments by sixteenth-century Spaniards who never witnessed what happened.

What Really Did Happen?

This biography will present a series of counterarguments to the traditionalist views and analyze both possibilities of whether Zunis killed Esteban. It also will describe how slave-owning Spaniards in the 1500s created a negative attitude toward Esteban, which successive writers have built upon with fictionalized scenarios and exaggerations that have attacked Esteban’s character despite lack of proof.

Esteban had earlier survived an escape from a Spanish expedition’s invasion of Florida and traveled almost the width of the North American continent in 1528–1536 with three Spanish aristocrats on a journey that took almost eight years. Beginning with the invasion, that incredible feat is described starting in chapter 7.

Three years after Esteban’s return, the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City chose Esteban to guide Spain’s first expedition north of Mexico in 1539.⁵ The slave was at last able to live as a free man, even if briefly.

This biography primarily will examine Esteban the man and the times he lived in so there can be a better understanding of what he accomplished and why he’s been ignored.

His Spanish name, Esteban, is often spelled as Estevan because Spaniards pronounce the letters b and v nearly the same. The name translates into English as Stephen. In sixteenth-century Castilian Spanish, his name would be pronounced as es-STAY-bahn. In the United States, the usual Anglicized pronunciation is ESS-tuh-bahn.⁶

When reported on, he is almost always referred to as Estebanico or Estevanico, either of which translate to a nickname, “Little Stephen,” or even “Stevie.”⁷ Spaniards of his day used that diminutive for a child—or, in Esteban’s case, to convey condescension toward him because he spent most of at least his adult life as a slave.

The original disrespect of the nickname continues today in some history books, which still refer to him as Estebanico or Estevanico instead of his actual Spanish name. The reason for this is that is how he is referred to in most Spanish chronicles, the nickname being used at that time to demean and marginalize him. This book will use his actual Spanish name of Esteban.

Writers also refer to him to as an Arab Moor more often than as a black African because he was acquired as a slave in Morocco, and his possible Berber connection is almost invisible. The next chapter will examine this ethnic controversy.

Esteban remains an intriguing historical figure. His reputation remains under repeated disparagement despite his accomplishments, courage, and abilities.

Pueblo Tribes Remember

Ironically, the Zuni Indians who most writers accuse of killing Esteban are the ones who keep his memory alive in their oral history and through their ancient, traditional religion of kivas and katsinas.⁸

Esteban first entered the Pueblo world when he arrived at the hilltop Zuni village of Hawikku in today’s western New Mexico in the spring of 1539. The encounter will be examined in chapters 16 and 17. But first, a reference to what might be Esteban from 1885.

Most researchers usually conclude that Smithsonian ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing must have been talking about Esteban when he regaled an audience at the Geographic Society of Boston in 1885 with what he called “the Zuni legend of the Black Mexican.”⁹ Cushing said Zuni elders told him a story from “eleven men’s ages” ago about being attacked by black Mexicans and Indians from “the Land of Everlasting Summer.”¹⁰ Zuni historian Edmund Ladd, however, did not think the story was about Esteban and called it “poetic license” by Cushing.¹¹ Ladd said the so-called legend was not credible, citing reasons that include Cushing using English terms not in the Zuni vocabulary.¹² In addition, the legend involves “many” black Mexicans, not just one, and Cushing recalled the Zunis told him “one of the black Mexicans” was killed at the village of Kyaki:ma.¹³ That village is at the base of Dowa Yalanne mesa, which is thirteen miles from Hawikku, the pueblo that most historians believe Esteban visited.¹⁴ Was the legend based on Esteban, or did the term “black Mexican” refer to something other than an African?¹⁵ And how long ago would eleven men’s ages calculate to?¹⁶ Also, what should one make of the event taking place at Kyaki:ma instead of at Hawikku? In addition, Cushing’s tale has the Mexican Indians attacking the Zunis, in contrast to the usual version given about Esteban’s arrival.

Regardless of whether Cushing’s story is about Esteban or whether it tells of an actual event, or when, historians agree that Esteban walked up from Mexico accompanied by Mexican Indians, and most believe he arrived at the southwesternmost Zuni village named Hawikku, often Anglicized to Hawikuh.

A memory of Esteban continues in the pueblos’ traditional religion featuring men wearing regalia and elaborate covers over their heads, often cylinder-shaped, to represent spirit-beings. Such figures are katsinas, often Anglicized to kachinas.¹⁷

A katsina can be the spirit of an ancestor, animal, bird, another tribe, or even a crop, depending on the ceremony.¹⁸ Although sometimes referred to as Pueblo gods, they are not. They would be closer to the concept of Catholic saints, but even that is not an appropriate comparison.

“Borrowing the bodies of living men,” writer Paul Coze explains, “[katsinas] visit the villages . . . to receive prayers to [the Creator]. He who wears the mask of a kachina believes he loses his personal identity and assumes that of the spirit.”¹⁹ This would be similar to religious leaders of any belief feeling a sense of spiritual ennoblement when putting on their religion’s clergical vestments.²⁰

Figure 1. The author carved, painted, and clothed this four-inch figure to illustrate an approximation of the Chákwaina katsina, named for Esteban, the African slave who was the first non-Indian to find Zuni. This figure is not authentic because it was created by a non-Puebloan. It’s intended to give an idea of a katsina without a photograph of one, which some Puebloans would consider sacrilegious to their ancient religion. Wood carving and photo by Dennis Herrick.

American culture routinely refers to the head coverings as masks. But many Puebloans, especially Hopis, consider that term offensive. They prefer to call the head cover a “friend” that unites the impersonator with the spirit of the katsina.²¹

Small carved representations of katsina figures, more properly katsintithu but commonly called “dolls,” are still created in the Hopi pueblos as religion teaching aids, not toys, to instruct children in the ancient culture.²²

Several anthropologists and historians believe the Hopi, Zuni, and some Rio Grande pueblos memorialized Esteban’s arrival by creating a katsina spirit-being called Chákwaina (Tsa’kwaina, in Hopi).²³ It was always painted black and referred to as “the black katsina.”²⁴

Zunis tell often conflicting versions about Esteban’s fate, depending on who is asked. For example, although early researchers were told that Esteban’s arrival inspired creation of the Chákwaina katsina, several Zuni elders told one researcher a few years ago that Chákwaina existed as a demon katsina painted black long before they ever met their first black human in Esteban.²⁵

Regardless, Chákwaina would emerge as a symbol of the ruinous Spanish conquest that Esteban’s appearance at Hawikku foreshadowed.²⁶ As a portent of the event that so altered the life, religion, and culture of all Puebloans, they vilified Esteban as a monster katsina through Chákwaina with pointed teeth and dangling tongue.

Chákwaina is usually represented with a long, black goatee, a Puebloan kilt called a dance kir...