os of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Diss. U of North Carolina, 1995. Ann Arbor: UMI,1995.
- Ortiz's's dissertation focuses on the issue of prophecy in Cabeza de Vaca's narrative. She provides an overview of critical literature on Cabeza de Vaca's narrative and the general topic of prophecy. Cabeza de Vaca, according to Massengill, embodies in his self-descriptions a conception of hero, saint, shaman, and prophet. Relacion has been described by many as hagiography, and Ortiz asserts that "hagiographic overtones in the text permit the reader to see Nunez as a wilderness prophet and Christ figure" (iii). She examines how these notions of Cabeza de Vaca have been explored in critical literature. Patterns of prophecy and false prophecy are evident in Cabeza de Vaca's writing, creating a "weaving of prophetic voices" in a "unifying structure" (iv). Ortiz examines the ramifications of the prophetic dimension of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative on his own prophetic and shamanic activity.
- Pastor, Beatrice. "Silence and Writing: The History of the Conquest." 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Ed. Renee Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 121-63.
- Pastor asserts at the beginning of her essay that the 1992 celebration of Christopher Columbus's landing in America should have been the symbolic genesis of "a process of radical criticism" that approached the issues of conquest and discovery as "part of a project of demystifying and reevaluating" the study of the encounter between European conquerors and Native Americans (122). She calls Eurocentric historical accounts as a "vast mirage" that is created from "silence, omission, and absence" of Native voices. Columbus, Cortes, and Cabeza de Vaca are examined by Pastor. She suggests that Cabeza de Vaca's narrative "breaks the limits of the discourse of domination," by replacing the discourse of conqueror, with the discourse of ethnographer (136). Pastor traces in Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion, the stages of the transformation of the lost conquistador's consciousness. Pastor concludes, however, that Cabeza de Vaca's narrative ultimately reveals "another facet of the imperial mask" (146).
- Pastor-Bodmer, Beatrice. The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992.
- Pastor-Bodmer analyzes Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion as a literary expression of "the process of critical demythification" that she perceives as evident in earlier documents about the failure of expeditions (4). Cabeza de Vaca's narrative does not portray the lands of the Americas in mythical terms but as a hostile, wild, wilderness that at times appears uninhabitable. Pastor-Bodmer suggests that Cabeza de Vaca's portrayal of America is presented in ways that "unequivocally contradict the mythical representations initiated by Columbus" (131). The overall sense that Cabeza de Vaca communicates in his narrative is a type of destruction of the mythical conquest model. The author notes that Cabeza de Vaca expresses a "new identity" in his narrative that "goes hand in hand with a radical change in his view of reality" (142). Pastor-Bodmer suggests that Cabeza de Vaca's narrative is an expression of a "spiritual journey" that "leads to the humanization of the conquistador and the critical demythification of the conquest" (150).
- Pilkington, William T. "Epilogue." Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of North America. Trans. Cyclone Covey. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984.
- Pilkington's epilogue to Cyclone Covey's 1984 translation of Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion focuses on the literary and cultural significance of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative. Pilkington suggests that these two perspectives are more significant than the historical element to the narrative. Pilkington calls the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca a "peculiarly American document" that portrays a distinctly American theme -- "the physical and emotional struggle for an accommodation between races" (146). He also suggests that another distinctive theme that Relacion explores is the notion o