Andres Resendez “A Land So Strange” Essay

Thesis The agent posits that the derivative of a tragically stillborn resolution effort results with an epic ten-year odyssey of survival, assimilation, and revelation as the first emeritus World outsiders to athwart and live in the interior of North America. The coming of the experiences of Cabeza de Vaca, man of influence, stranded in unexplored lands, encountering and existing with countless inbred American tribes as guest, slave, trader, and healer engenders an atypical ideal of humane colonization and coexistence. Summary Resendez retells the story of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition to Florida, placing the survivors story against the context of contemporary Spanish politics, culture, and power struggles associated with colonization amid the pre-contact inherent American sphere. The stage is fortune with a brief description of the relationships of Velazquez, Narvaez, Cortes, and the Spanish court (15,17, 22). This background education clarifies the near impenetrability of obtaining a royal charter and the complicated, perfidious, and competitive maneuverings of the Spanish explorers (30-33).Cortes alleged treachery becomes heroic conquest slighting competitors Velazquez and Narvaez who after long time of petitions receives an adelantamiento in the New World (73). The expedition, three plus cardinal work force and women, lead by Narvaez experiences a litany of encumbrances that resulted in the unrealized and in imputable course unpropitious landing at Tampa Bay, over nine carbon miles off course (77). A landing party of three hundred men, including Cabeza de Vaca, set out to find Panuco, encountered Native Americans that enticed the group to search for well-disposed Apalachee further north (94). By this time the group was suffering heavily from hunger, disease, and at the hands of Native Americans, driven by desperation piles were built to carry the men along the coast of Louisiana, a degraded trek of starvation, drowning, and further Indian attacks, landed along the coast of Texas (134). contriteness claims all but four, deVaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and Moroccan Estebanico, whose lives over the next ten long time are analogous to Homers Odyssey. Initially treated as guests, cared for and fed by local indigenous peoples, soon to become slaves of galore(postnominal) itinerant tribes for six years (145). During captivity, the survivors learned native languages, cultures, intertribal dislodge (146), and in the case of de Vaca became a thriving trader with autonomous motivity privileges (149-151). The four escape their captors and implausibly achieve the status of healers, combining universality and native traditions in their ministering, are then used by Native Americans leaders in a heal for profit scheme were passed from 1 tribe to the next, and achieved pseudo celebrity status (183). Contact with Spaniards and reintroduction to civilized manner proved very difficult for the survivors after nearly ten years of a boriginal living and certainly suffered from culture shock, Cabeza de Vaca mentions difficulties wearing western robes again (215).Cabeza de Vaca, like Friar Las Casas twenty years earlier (21), overlap an epiphany to defend and advocate for peaceful cohabitation and humane colonization of America, neither realizing this rivalry (221). Critique The author employs pertinent primary sources, including the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, in chorus line with reasonable speculative insertions of the conditions and behaviors to make a compelling and more authorized story. However, Resendez states that they, the four survivors, all left the experience with the epiphany to advocate for humane colonization. The author only provides direct evidence that supports this claim in the case of Cabeza de Vaca, not that for his three survivor companions.