Andrés Reséndez's A Land So Strange is a historical tale of conquest that ends up disastrous and mission gone terribly wrong. Reséndez’s story works toward providing more information in which the Narrative published by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in 1542 leaves out. The story is about the journey of a castaway Spaniard who was in turn enslaved and befriended by the Native Americans. He gets enslaved for years by the indigenous Texas Tribe and eventually escapes with two other Spaniards and a native slave, Estebanico. Reséndez story engages powerful written/ spoken language in its ordinary form by including maps, footnotes, and a Further Reading section. This conquest portrays the inversion of power dynamics and dependence on survival upon firm …show more content…
They were without food and without contact from anyone for weeks. A major change occurs when the Spaniards are without supplies and had to find a way to return to the Spanish-controlled land for survival. Reséndez states how they had to eat animals such as horses in order to survive, "Protected by their breastplates, fierce animals and lethal weapons, conquistadors learned early on that they did not need to negotiate with the natives. In most cases, they could simply impose their will. Nor did Spaniards have to make an effort to understand the social world of the natives or, for that matter, conceive of them as anything other than potential subjects" (113). They had lost their sense of superiority that was given to them through technology. They traveled on rafts down the such as Mississippi River and were separated leaving only Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and a resilient slave named Estevanico. There are some speculations that the civilized Spaniards had turned into cannibalism out of desperation. In “The Native Societies of the Americas Before Contact” the authors write that “Mesoamerican peoples, like many others in the Americas, practiced limited forms of human sacrifice (Kicza, Horn 12). The Europeans and Amerindians both used human bodies, but they reasons were different. The Europeans did it out of survival while the Amerindians did it out of worship to the …show more content…
To start off the book they experience a terrible hurricane in which Cabeza de Vaca states, "At this time the sea and the storm began to swell so much that there was no less tempest in the town than at sea, because all the houses and churches blew down, and it was necessary for us to band together…in order to save ourselves from being killed" (66). His life is at danger and he reacts with fear and horror. But later on he comes to realize the beauties around him transforming his view on the world that surrounds him, "During their time with the Mariames, Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes came to appreciate the raw beauty of their surroundings. They describe the shimmering Texas coast and the flat grazing lands and good pastures that extended as far as the eye could see. … On three different occasions Cabeza de Vaca was able to gaze at these imposing animals and taste their meat, which he pronounced better than beef"