The present thesis discusses, supports, and defends the importance of including La relación written by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in an introductory Spanish literature and Spanish American literature ...survey courses. At the same time, the available resources presented herein, support the instruction of said work as well as presenting a detailed analysis of the work itself. The introduction presents a general overview of this work where it is proposed that La relación offers a hybridism or plasticity which allows for multiple approaches to its analysis without losing its accessibility for the students. It is due to these qualities that it should be included in the curriculum of the stated courses previously mentioned. In the first chapter, biographical aspects of the author are discussed within the historical context in which he lived. The second chapter takes the route of exploring the development of the text from its first publishing through the editions presently available. The third chapter recommends audiovisual and electronic resources that complement an analytical study of the work. The fourth chapter argues that the author-protagonist reinvents his identity as a result of his experience. It can be concluded that the reinvention of his identity is due to his coming into contact with a different culture which is a key element when presenting the text to students who are more receptive to topics that explore the differences between races, cultures, and ethnicities.
The story of the failed conquest that led to his eventual captivity by the Native Americans of southern Texas and northern Florida, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion has long held a unique ...position in the literary annals of sixteenth-century Spain. Singled out for its unusually realistic and sympathetic descriptions of indigenous life, the Relacion has been hailed by scholars as a kind of counternarrative to the stories of brute force and the claims of cultural superiority that characterize the Spanish colonial period and the literary genres of its chroniclers. Goodman critiques Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion.
This doctoral study examines the short story production by three authors who have notably contributed to the evolution of Chicano/a literature: Sabine Reyes Ulibarrí (19191-2003), Jim Sagel ...(1949-1998) y Juan Estevan Arellano (n. 1947). They belong to a long literary history in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, home to several important historical events in the state. The literary works that have sprouted in Northern New Mexico, on one hand, symbolize resistance to the contradictions that Anglo-American culture has introduced under the guise of progress and, on the other, celebrate New Mexican collectivity and identity that, armed with humor as a strategy to soothe the communal spirit, has always endured in the face of threats against its well-being and historical continuity. Focusing on humor as a healing human expression, our critical method is founded on Albert Memmi's anti-colonial theory as well as internal colonialism in order to assess the New Mexican social condition and is reinforced, for the purpose of discourse analysis, with critical concepts taken from the carnavalesque by Mikhail Bakhtin, the rasquache by Tómas Ybarra-Frausto, and a carría—a popular humor form. The first chapter provides a historical background on Chicano Literature, emphasizing significant historical events that have given way to a literary discourse linked to New Mexico and the contributions by Manitos across all literary genres. In the second chapter, we design and develop the critical method based on the aforesaid colonial theories and key critical concepts, among them, a contestatory rhetoric in response to United States colonization as coded in the territorial newspapers, an oppositional relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, a situation of being internally colonized, a Manito or New Mexican resistance against a hegemonic society, a bakhtinian carnavalesque and the inversion of hierarchy, a rasquache picaresque position, and a carría satirical wit. Using the above critical method as a base, chapters III through V interpret the literary works of the previously mentioned authors whose literary style follows an established path forged by the early New Mexican authors who share a strong desire to their sacrosanct earth and provincial spirit.
This dissertation explores the empirical description and representation of nature as a cornerstone of historiographical authority and the treatment of social conflict in a broad selection of texts ...produced in Spanish-dominated regions of the New World during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the work of authors positioned within the relatively privileged military, bureaucratic, and ecclesiastical strata of early colonial society, it studies how the trope of American nature was soon appropriated, adapted, and exploited by those writing from increasingly marginalized or problematic sociopolitical positions throughout roughly the first century following the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. Chapter 1 studies the ways in which Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernardino de Sahagún, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo used the prologues to their respective histories to challenge the authority of classical authors and claim their personal experience of American nature as the foundation of their historiographical projects. Chapters 2 and 3 study accounts of politically volatile explorations of the Paraguay and Orinoco river regions in the work of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's scribe Pero Hernández and Sir Walter Raleigh, respectively. Each of these authors appropriates the empirical techniques employed by the authors studied in Chapter 1 to create deeply subjective representations of American nature in which the condition of the land directly reflects the moral authority of those controlling it. Chapter 4 considers Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's fusion of European and Nahua historiographical conventions to portray nature as a protagonist in a centuries-long struggle for power of the Nahuatl-speaking territories of Mesoamerica. While these experientially-grounded accounts of American nature contributed to the rise of empiricism in European thought and letters, they also provided the foundation of narratives ultimately aimed at legitimizing their authors' views regarding the political composition of the colonial world. By studying the nature trope in such a heterogenous body of texts, this dissertation demonstrates that authors of diverse social and ethnic backgrounds were participants in a single, far-reaching dispute concerning not only the writing of history and the nature of the New World, but the nature of knowledge and the organization of early modern societies.
During the early modern period, medical discourse and practice reflected the changing political and social climate of the emerging Spanish empire. Both political and literary authors employed these ...concepts as critical tools in examining the health of their society. The popular use of body imagery to refer to the State and its members allowed political writers to somatize the dangers of potentially "contagious" members of society such as women, Jews, Moors, recent converts, the newly conquered populations of the New World. These subaltern figures were viewed as physically deficient beings in an effort to legitimize their marginalization or expulsion from the empire. My thesis examines how authors of literature take a different view toward subaltern alterity through their allusions to contemporary medicine and through their creation of successful subaltern healer figures. As figures that could harm the political and medical good of the society, any subaltern who practiced medicine experienced difficulties in treating members outside of his/her race or gender. These practitioners were limited and policed by imperial legislation and the Royal Medical Tribunal, the Protomedicato. Furthermore, medical, political, and literary authors often likened these healers to agents of mobile contagion that could infect as many as they cured. In the dissertation, I argue that authors such as Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the anonymous author of the Viaje de Turquia, Francisco Delicado, and Miguel de Cervantes recognized the subversive potential of subaltern medical practitioners to diagnose and critique the Spanish Empire. By validating the illegitimate practices of subaltern healers both within the borders of the empire and in the territory of the Other, these authors questioned the very structure of the imperial hierarchies of power.
Nicolas Echevarria's award-winning film, "Cabeza de Vaca," portrays the experiences of the famous conquistador in the New World as a trip a la Carlos Castaneda, a journey in which a Christian ...undergoes a series of reversals and epiphanies that carry him further away from his cultural identity. Walter discusses the film in relation to the extent that sixteenth century Europeans would project their fears, fantasies, and religious visions onto the natives and the landscape of Europe.
The reading of Naufragios (1542) has produced different reactions within the scholastic circle. Some of them interpret Cabeza de Vaca's style of narration as a mere instrument used to obtain special ...favors from Charles V himself. Others consider it to be the first example of an understanding between two worlds: European and indigenous. The reading I suggest shows that, for Cabeza de Vaca, the New World did indeed became a new place. It was no longer the Garden of Eden that Christopher Columbus—for example—saw when he first arrived. Neither was this New World, that marvelous place full of mythological creatures, as according to the fantastic European geography of that time. For Cabeza de Vaca this New World was one of danger, hostile nature, solitude and hunger. When the invincible Spanish conquistador finds himself—after the shipwreck—deprived of every single element that symbolizes power (horses, clothing, European food, even language and religion), he begins a process of re-learning. He has to understand that this New World does not obey any European pre-conception. He has to learn new languages, eat new food, dress in a new way, and interact with different human beings. In time, Cabeza de Vaca becomes a shaman, and is no longer a violent conquistador. At this point in the text a movement is generated, which describes what I call a double parabolic movement. In one phase of it, Cabeza de Vaca is physically moving (from the coast of Florida to the desert of Northern Mexico) searching to reunite with his own civilization: the Spanish settlements in Mexico. The other phase of this movement is also a journey, but a spiritual one. The Spaniard that arrived to Florida as a conquistador reaches the dry lands of Northern Mexico as a shaman. This process of learning and changing took him almost ten years. His unique position as both a conquistador and a shaman, at the same time, made him to approach this New World from an ambiguous point of view. For him it was a terrible place for a Christian to be, but it was also a unique place where it was possible to extend cultural and spiritual horizons. This constant fluctuation can be perceived throughout the reading I propose for his book, preventing him from reaching a definitive conclusion with regards to the New World.
