Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.

Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.

Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.

Authors

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490-1558)

« back to list of Authors

Search the archive for images

Questions for Discussion and Writing

“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” is a famous line from Robert Frost, suggesting that time must pass before newcomers achieve a full sense of belonging, before they understand a region from the inside and feel themselves truly of it.  Cabeza de Vaca is only one of the sixteenth century explorers who wandered the coastlines, probed inland, and remained Spanish in his national and cultural identity.  Even so, this voice seems to stand out from others of his time, for a willingness to see the New World in detail, and with imagination and an extraordinary measure of empathy.

1.   Recognizing that time, cultural difference, and the vagaries of translation all get in the way of our understanding, imagine that you faced the challenge of creating a personality and a voice from these accounts, perhaps as a character in a historical drama about the exploration of North America.  How do you imagine Cabeza de Vaca, and why?  If you had a large cast of characters, how would you distinguish him from the others – and why?  What moments in the NAAL excerpts figure in your thinking?

2.  Over the last century, America has promulgated two dominant and nearly opposite myths of early explorers: the noble, courageous bringer of light and civilization to the barbarous world; and (more recently) the despoiler, who is greedy, unimaginative, and sometimes even depraved.  On the web, find statues of some of these early explorers – Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortéz (for example, the one in front of the Palacio in Cuernavaca), Samuel Champlain – and also have a look a couple films or plays that represent the explorer in a very different light (Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, about Francisco Pizarro, is a prime example, as is the recent Hollywood spectacular The New World).  How do these very different myths of the explorer suit the different times in which the myths have flourished?  How might Cabeza de Vaca be located between these opposites?