He was called Esteban, Estevanico, Esteban Dorantes, el Negro and Esteban el Moro. It is believed that he was taken from his native Morocco and sold into slavery in the Portuguese controlled town of Azamor, from where he could see the most treacherous and less explored of the oceans, the Mare Tenebrosum, or Sea of Darkness: the Atlantic.
Years later, Esteban was crossing that same ocean as a slave of Spaniard Andrés Dorantes. They arrived in today's Florida in 1527 with hundreds of men hoping to make fortune in the Nuevo Mundo. In a couple of years all but four of them were dead, most having perished in the treacherous waters that had become intrinsically linked to Esteban's life. Unable to return to Europe, the four conquistadores wandered through the inhospitable and, for them, unchartered territories of today's ern USA and northern . They were enslaved by natives – a curious situation for Estaban who was already a slave and saw his own master become a slave –, escaped captivity and after nearly 10 years since they first set foot in the New World, reached , recently built on the corpse of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. The group told the Spaniards "they had obtained some information in the countries they had traversed, and that they had heard spoken of, some great and powerful cities, where there were houses of four and five stories in height"(1).
This was enough to trigger the greed of the Spaniards. They envisioned towers covered in gold and precious stones. Esteban was made the guide of a new expedition led by a friar called Marcos de Niza. They walked 1,300 miles before reaching what is today New Mexico. Estaban and some natives went ahead the main group. One day the natives returned saying Estaban had been killed before reaching the village of , believed to contain splendid buildings and vast wealth. Nobody actually saw the murder. They only presumed his death. Estaban simply vanished. Frightened by the apparent killing of their guide, the expedition returned to Mexico City, much poorer than they were before.
Friar Marcos, while probably never seeing , said it was larger than Mexico city and yet the smaller of the Seven Cities of Cibola(2). In 1539 a new, larger expedition made of about 300 Spaniards and 1000 natives set out to find the treasured cities, guided this time by Friar Marcos. All they managed to do was to bring destruction to Hawikuh, which, unlike their fantasies, was a small settlement with houses made of dried mud bricks.
The Aztecs also believed in a city lost in the northern desert of Mexico but for them the value of that city was not measured by gold and precious stones. It was instead the birthplace of their people, a city which could exist physically and mythically at the same time and which became a reference for their own civilisation: Aztlan.
[1] Full text of ""
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/cabeza.htm
[2] http://parnaseo.uv.es/lemir/Textos/Maura.pdf
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The Book of Aztlan
Non-FictionThis is a short book about a journey through Mexico that took 20 years to materialize. The book delves into the imaginary and lived existence of the Mayas, Aztecs, Toltec, Teotihuacan & modern Mexicans.
