Mystery confines Estebanico
History ignores black explorer who guided Spanish in Southwest
Ablack Moroccan slave who explored present-day Texas, New Mexico and Arizona with Spanish conquistadors is credited with being the first person of African descent to enter the American Southwest, but he’s all but absent from the states’ histories.
Estebanico was among shipwrecked Spaniards who wandered through the American coastal south and later led an expedition into New Mexico, which ended in his disappearance.
But while some scholars say the American Southwest likely would not have been settled by Europeans without Estebanico, there are no parks, buildings or malls named in his honor like they are for other Spanish conquistadors. Tourism agencies have informational webpages about Estebanico’s past, but there are no tourism sites around his historic journeys.
American literary studies professor Finnie Coleman, from the University of New Mexico, said black people “have never had a place” in the heritage of New Mexico and the Southwest.
“To embrace Estebanico,” Coleman said, “would be to embrace a new narrative.”
Scholars believe Estebanico, who’s known by many other names, including Estevanico, Esteban and Esteban the Moor, was born in Morocco around 1500 and likely was sold into slavery in the port city of Azemmour by Portuguese slave traders.
Spanish aristocrat Andres Dorantes bought Estebanico and took him along for Panfilo de Narvaez’s ill-fated expedition of 1527 to colonize Florida and the Gulf Coast. A series of storms left some of the party in Florida while others sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to seek Spanish settlements.
Cabeza de Vaca, Estebanico, Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado landed at present-day Galveston, Texas, and began their eight-year journey to find a Spanish settlement back in present-day Mexico. The four fellow shipwreck survivors wandered through Texas and northern Mexico while adopting traditions of the Native American tribes they encountered, according to accounts by two of the survivors.
During a second expedition, Estebanico, according to historical accounts, was killed at Zuni Pueblo.
Or was he? British scholar Robert Goodwin suggested in his 2009 book, “Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First AfricanAmerican Explorer of the American South,” that Estebanico may have staged his death to escape slavery.
University of New Mexico law professor Kevin Washburn, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, said Estebanico is forgotten in the Southwest’s story largely due to racism.
“History can’t just be the public relation job done by the victors,” Washburn said. “It’s got to be everyone’s history.”
Coleman, who is black and Native American, said some tribes blame Estebanico for hardships they later experienced and that may be another reason he’s largely forgotten.
“A Pueblo elder once told me, ‘We never forgot it was you who brought them here,’” referring to a black person leading the Spanish into New Mexico and Arizona, Coleman said.
The New Mexico Tourism Department doesn’t know of any monuments or anything else named after Estebanico in the state, spokeswoman Bailey Griffith said. But the department had on its website information about him and his effect on the European settlement of New Mexico.