| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, the Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked across America in the Sixteenth Century. By Andrés Reséndez. (New York: Basic, 2007. xiv, 314 pp. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-465-06840-1.)

This beautifully written narrative serves two purposes: to tell again the story of the epic journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Estebanico, Alonso del Castillo, and Andrés Dorantes in light of modern scholarship and to offer a sympathetic vision of the Native American cultures within which they lived and journeyed from the wrecks of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition's barges on the Texas coast to the Sinaloa River in western Mexico. Andrés Reséndez argues that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions managed to bridge a cultural chasm, thereby proposing a different model for Spanish-Native American encounters, one based on mutual regard and shared elements of belief in what is often called the enchanted world. The castaways used that shared cosmography to fashion themselves into healers, a persona that, once created, allowed them to move freely from Texas into northeast Mexico and then northwest along the "corn trail" across the Sierra Madre Oriental to La Junta de los Ríos and up the Rio Grande before swinging southwest to finally meet Spanish slave hunters near the Sinaloa. The book concludes with the later lives of the four principals.

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