The Invention of Place

Abstract

There has already been much talk of Christopher Columbus, and I will be no exception to this rule. There is also much talk of Cortés and Pizarro, conquistadores and executioners from Mexico and Peru. By virtue of the cinema and the film made by Werner Herzog in the early seven-ties in the Peruvian Andes, there is sometimes talk of Lope de Aguirre, the “Wrath of God.” However, we almost never talk of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. However, Cabeza de Vaca is a great man, even a very great man. He felt the dizziness of space, and there were not so many to do so. Several trails lead to him. We could learnedly cite some American essays, or, more recently, two or three pages of La Conquête de l’Amérique. La question de l’autre (1982) by Tzvetan Todorov. Another possibility is offered by a film from the Mexican director Nicolás Echevarría whose title matches the not so banal surname of the conquistador. His name, Cabeza de Vaca, or “Cow Head” is a maternal inheritance and not an unusual sobriquet. In 1991, at the height of the wave of often mediocre blockbusters devoted by the Hollywood industry to the “discovery” of America and its fifth centenary, Echevarría proposed a different reading of the event, one that is more respectful of the views and culture of the First Peoples. He attributed the lead to Juan Diego, a great Spanish actor whose interpretation was nearly performance art. It fell to Diego to embody a man confronted with the problem of communication and cohabitation with other men, natives of the current Texas, whom he knew were separated by a radical otherness.