The Historian

ISSN: 0018-2370 (Print) 1540-6563 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhis20

Esteban: the African slave who explored America

by Dennis Herrick, Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 2018,
282 pp., $39.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0826359810

David Rex Galindo

To cite this article: David Rex Galindo (2020) Esteban: the African slave who explored America,
The Historian, 82:1, 88-89, DOI: 10.1080/00182370.2020.1722527

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00182370.2020.1722527

Published online: 14 May 2020.

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88 BOOK REVIEWS

one based upon free-market economics and normative morality, while repeating white
stereotypes concerning black criminality and social breakdown. Matthew Dallek finds the
Trump phenomenon a challenge to historians to follow in Brinkley’s footsteps – by tracing
how ideas shape political behavior and how the lives of individuals intersect with broader
social and cultural processes.

Justus D. Doenecke
New College of Florida
© 2020 Justus D. Doenecke
https://doi.org/10.1080/00182370.2020.1722472

Esteban: the African slave who explored America, by Dennis Herrick,

Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 2018, 282 pp., $39.95 (hardback),
ISBN: 978-0826359810

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and the African Esteban
were four of the few survivors of the ill-fated Pánfilo de Narváez’s 1528 expedition to Florida.
As Dennis Herrick points out in his biography Esteban: The African Slave Who Explored
America, Esteban matters because he 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” (1). His deeds are relevant because they challenge the U.S.
historiographical construct that the landing of the first African slaves in Virginia in 1619
marks the beginning of African-American history.
Herrick’s book explores the life of Esteban from his enslavement in Morocco in the
early 1500s up to his disappearance from historical records in New Mexico in 1539.
Herrick’s goal is to “[remain] true to facts that historians have come to agree upon,
points out those still contested, and challenges numerous errors and myths about
Esteban” (1). Due to the lack of primary sources on the subject, delving into his life
requires methodological creativity, interdisciplinarity, an ample knowledge of the avail-
able primary sources, and a solid historiographical foundation for historical context. The
two latter aspects are weak in this book, ultimately limiting its contribution to what we
know from previous works by Rolena Adorno, Patrick Charles Pautz, Robert Goodwin,
and Andrés Reséndez.
The book follows a temporal organization from the circumstances of Esteban’s captivity
in Morocco until his vanishing from the records in New Mexico. The first and last chapters
are the most intriguing, since Esteban’s origins and death are still a matter of speculation.
Herrick creatively relies on Moroccan scholars to prove Esteban’s sub-Saharan ethnicity and
his rising historical importance in Morocco itself. The bulk of the book describes the
castaways’ epic story, focusing on Esteban’s contributions to their survival. Regarding
Esteban’s end, Herrick laments that, despite the lack of evidence, some writers have
reinforced a fabricated, racist story “that the Zuñis killed Esteban for touching Zuñi
women” (191), suggesting that Esteban and Zuñis might have tricked Spaniards to survive.
The absence of eyewitness accounts concerning Esteban’s death renders Herrick’s claims a
matter of conjecture, however.
Herrick relies on the two known primary sources for the expedition, Cabeza de
Vaca’s account and the three Spaniards’ Joint Report, as published in Gonzalo
 THE HISTORIAN 89

Fernández de Oviedo’s massive Historia general y natural de las Indias. Spanish chroni-
cles are, nevertheless, deceptive, according to Herrick. The long scholarship on the
Crónicas de Indias and their ethnographical, historical, geographical, scientific, and
literary value, even if biased, are ignored here. Thus, he mistakenly situates the Joint
Report in Oviedo’s 1547 printed edition, instead of its actual debut in a mid-nineteenth-
century publication. Herrick then caricatures Oviedo’s Historia as being filled with
distorted, fabricated, exaggerated, and glamorized events “commonly accepted as the
history of the Caribbean” (47).
Moreover, his analysis of the Iberian world in the sixteenth century is simplistic. For
instance, instead of relying on the vast amount of scholarly studies of slavery and racial
relations in the sixteenth-century Iberian world, Herrick shockingly equates Esteban’s
expectations in 1530s New Spain to those of the enslaved York, who was a member of the
Clark and Lewis expedition in the early nineteenth-century United States (210–211). Such
historiographical flaws unfortunately diminish the book’s value for both academic scholars
and a general audience.

David Rex Galindo

Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile
© 2020 David Rex Galindo
https://doi.org/10.1080/00182370.2020.1722527

Tongues of fire: language and evangelization in Colonial Mexico, by

Nancy Farriss, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2018, xxi, 409 pp., $99.00
(cloth), ISBN: 9780190884109

For almost a century, the evangelization of New Spain has drawn enhanced scholarly
attention. Whereas Spaniards and dedicated ecclesiastics initially dominated as protago-
nists in these studies, the narratives of recent decades have increasingly made room for
native voices. This inclusion, in large measure, results from an emphasis on ethnohis-
torical studies that employ native-language texts; from these documents, the contribu-
tions of Nahuas (Aztecs) and, more recently, Mayas have become increasingly clear.
Examined to a lesser degree, however, is the evangelization of Oaxaca and its native
peoples, who speak a multitude of languages – constituting over half of those spoken in
Mesoamerica. With her recent book, Nancy Farriss makes a significant contribution in
remedying this situation.
At its heart, the work is a study of the role of translation in evangelization and, more
broadly, cultural change in early colonial Oaxaca. Farriss employs both indigenous-language
materials and Spanish sources ranging from dictionaries to devotional literature to the
mundane, everyday documents that were preserved by the colonial bureaucracy. When
this is combined with her own ethnographic fieldwork of several decades, Farriss succeeds in
shedding new light on a region whose process of evangelization is often left in the shadows.
Those acquainted with the recent historiography examining religion through indigenous-
language texts will find much that is familiar, yet also refreshing in light of new examples,
challenges, and events outside of central Mexico and Yucatan.
Divided into four parts, the work illustrates the evolution of strategies and linguistic
techniques, as ecclesiastics grappled with the early challenges of communication and