Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion Helps Unlock Secrets of Texas's Past

Coahuiltecans

The University of Texas at Austin has an amazing website dedicated to Cabeza de Vaca. Called Texas Beyond History, the site aims to inform students and visitors alike of the ways in which Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative helped to inform later generations of Texans of their ancestors' past. It begins with an editor’s note explaining how Cabeza de Vaca was lucky to have been picked up by the Native Americans of South Texas, and how we in turn benefit from their mutualism,.  Now, we have scores of material that would not have been available had Cabeza de Vaca not been around to write it all down.

In particular, the site highlights the ways in which Cabeza de Vaca’s association with the Native Americans exposed their “foodways,” in other words, their hunting and gathering practices. Because of Cabeza de Vaca, South Texan Indians’ techniques for cooking and hunting, as well as general information on the area’s natural wildlife and flora and fauna are available.

In addition to foodways, the site explains how Cabeza de Vaca’s association helped to bring to light some nomenclature that the Natives used for animals, plants and places, as well as their general trading practices and other customs. While there is too much detail to go into it here, it is worth it to note the name of the Natives with which Cabeza de Vaca had most of his encounters. Inhabitants of the Southern part of Texas and Northern Mexico, Cabeza de Vaca's traveling partners are called the Coahuiltecans. The Coahuiltecans lived in small family groups. Groups of families that spoke the same dialect would sometimes come together to form what the Spanish dubbed “naciones,” but what we would called tribes. Though they were all called Coahuiltecans, they were a diverse group of people with vastly different languages. In addition, various groups of Coahuiltecans subsisted off of the wide range of fruits, livestock and other forms of sustenance available in the Southern Texas region. Naturally, the differences in eating habits led to differences in lifestyle, foodways, and migration patterns.

I’m a little bit bothered that such a patchwork of different peoples with different languages and customs can be grouped under one name—the Coahuiltecans—but it is good that these people are getting the recognition that they deserve. I think it’s important to note that while the explorers might be the people who were “discovering” new lands, and writing it all down, they wouldn’t have been able to do so without the help of the willing and generous Natives. It’s also good to know that Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative is a potent source of material for learning about America’s native peoples. What we seldom see when reading travel literature is the point of view of the people that lived there first. While we can’t really get that directly from the Coahuiltecans, at least we can use what we do have to learn about them too.