for book on Spanish explorer
Rolena Adorno, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, won the American Historical Association's J. Franklin Jameson Award award for her three-volume tour de force, "Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez," which she wrote with Patrick Charles Pautz, a graduate student at Princeton University.
The Jameson Award is granted by the American Historical Association only once every five years. The honor was announced at the association's 114th annual meeting. Two other members of the Yale community were honored at that time. (See related story.)
Adorno's book, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1999, has also won the Western Historical Association's Dwight L. Smith Award and the Best Book Award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies. The latter described the work as "a monumental and groundbreaking body of scholarship that redefines the boundaries of colonial Spanish American literary studies at the dawn of the new millennium."
The book deals with an early Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, whose ill-fated expedition of 1527 has inspired novels, poems and feature films. His account has been called the quintessential tale of the European confronting -- for the first time -- the wilderness of North America and its inhabitants.
The 1527 Narváez expedition, of which Cabeza de Vaca was royal treasurer, was meant to establish a major settlement in "La Florida," the vast northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, the venture ended in disaster. Cabeza de Vaca and 300 others became lost in the untracked forests of the Florida peninsula. Building makeshift rafts, they crossed the Gulf of Mexico to the Texas coast, a voyage of three months. There they faced disease, starvation -- which led them to cannibalism -- and capture by indigenous peoples.
Cabeza de Vaca's narrative recounts hurricanes, attack by pirates, violent conflicts among the men of the expeditionary company, and extreme physical and psychological suffering. He and the other survivors of the raft ordeal encountered dozens of indigenous communities, were enslaved for years but eventually escaped, established trade among Indian villages and allegedly performed miraculous cures.
Some eight years later, Cabeza de Vaca emerged on the west coast of Mexico with three other survivors of the original Narváez expedition, having traversed on foot the entire breadth of Texas and Mexico. Being a responsible civil servant, he wrote a report of his experiences to send back to the home office in Spain. That report, in its original version, is the core of Adorno's new book.
In their introduction, Adorno and Pautz speculate on the enduring power of Cabeza de Vaca's story, citing its ability to show "what it was like to be a member of a seaborne and land expedition of conquest in the early period after the conquest of Mexico" and to dramatize "the trials of making life-and-death decisions under conditions of extreme hardship and the greatest uncertainty."
Historically, the Adorno/Pautz study offers insight into the first 50 years of Spanish exploration in the New World by situating a single expedition within the framework of its times. The authors assessed pertinent historical, geographical and ethnological scholarship in order to reconstruct the preparation, execution and fate of the Narváez expedition, including interactions with native cultures. Also central to their work was an analysis of the progress and politics of Spanish sea exploration in the area of North America from 1492 through the 1530s. They examine, as well, Cabeza de Vaca's life on the frontiers of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, including his governorship of Río de la Plata in South America a decade after his captivity in North America.
On the literary side, Adorno and Pautz present the first modern edition of Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 Spanish-language account, accompanied by a facing-page English translation. They conclude the book with an analysis of the creation of the account, its reception and publication history.
According to Adorno, "The goal of the project was to create a body of work that could address the multidisciplinary uses of this pivotal text, read for centuries as a historical document and, more recently, as a canonical piece of New World literature."
-- By Gila Reinstein
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