Cow Tipping

Cabeza de Vaca was son of Teresa Cabeza de Vaca y de Zurita. In 16th century documents, his name appeared as "Alvar nuñez cabeça de vaca". Cabeza de Vaca means "head of cow". This surname was granted to his mother's family in the 13th century, when his ancestor Martin Alhaja aided a Christian army attacking Moors by leaving a cow's head to point out a secret mountain pass for their use.

--Wikipedia, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

I hope in some measure to convey to Your Majesty not merely a report of positions and distances, flora and fauna, but of the customs of the numerous, barbarous people I talked with and dwelt among, as well as any other matters I could hear of or observe.

--Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Relation


Maybe it's because I'm a feminist, but one of the first things that stood out to me when reading Norton's (and later Wikipedia's) biographical information on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was the fact that he uses his mother's family name rather than his father's family name. In fact, Norton never tells us his father's family name (neither does Wikipedia, for that matter). I understand that De Vaca is proud of his family heritage, but it still seems like an usual thing to do -- usually the mother's family name is preserved in middle names or in ways other than the primary surname. (OTOH, I am not conversant in 16th-century Spanish naming conventions, so maybe this is no big deal.)

While I may be a feminist (though not completely fluent in Feminist Theory), I am definitely not a cultural anthropologist, despite a lifetime love of National Geographic. However, there were a few passages in our assigned reading (excerpts from De Vaca's "The Relation") that made me think that the Native peoples De Vaca traveled among may have either been matriarchal, or at least had matriarchal aspects to their culture.

One such passage that made my femmy-sense tingle was:

When a daughter marries, she must take everything her husband kills in hunting or catches in fishing to the house of her father, without daring to eat or to withhold any part of it, and the husband gets provided by female carrier from his father-in-law's house. Neither the bride's father nor mother may enter the son-in-law's house after the marriage, nor he theirs; and this holds for the children of the respective couples. If a man and his in-laws should chance to be walking so they would meet, they turn silently aside from each other . . . . The woman, however, is free to fraternize with the parents and relatives of her husband.

The reasons this caught my attention relate to the different treatment of the husband and wife in this scenario:

1) She is allowed to go back to her parents' house, and she is allowed to "fraternize" with her husband's parents, while he is not allowed to associate with hers. (We are not told whether he is allowed to socialize with his own parents);
2) The husband must give up all that he catches to be later given an allowance of meat/fish/whatever delivered "by female carrier"; and
3) Could it be that, instead of bringing her husband's catch to her father, she's really bringing them to her mother?

As I said, I am not a cultural anthropologist, so I may be way off-base, but I still think it's an interesting way to look at this narrative.

ADDENDUM: In class today, we talked about Estaban, a "companion" of De Vaca. I put "companion" in quotes because Estaban was a Moroccan slave in Narvaez's expedition who ended up shipwrecked along with De Vaca - you can see him in the picture up there at the top of this post. There is some new scholarship that proposes that Estaban ended up the real leader of De Vaca's group, which Dr. Scott said was in a new book (which I saw in earlier Google searches, but can't find right now - I'll post it if I find it - Here it is!!). Today I came across this interesting page about Estaban. Here's an excerpt:

In the spring of the year 1539, a tall black man lay mortally wounded by Zuni arrows in the village of Hawikuh, in what is today northwestern New Mexico. If he prayed in his last breaths, he surely addressed God as "Allah." How did a Muslim come to visit—and die in—New Mexico in the early 16th century? I had never come across such a figure during my university history studies in the United States, nor had I read of him in French history books at the lycée in Casablanca, Morocco, where I grew up. I heard of him only quite recently, by accident.

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