One of the most fascinating, and least understood, men in the history of the American Southwest was the Moroccan “slave” known as Estevanico de Dorantes in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of New Spain. Estevanico was one of the four survivors of the Pànfilo de Narváez expedition, which sailed from Spain in 1527 with the objective of conquering Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. The survivors were stranded on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and soon captured by Native Americans. After eight years of slavery, the expedition members escaped and traveled west, across western Texas, through the southwestern borderlands, and arrived in Culiacán, Mexico, in the spring of 1536. Three years later, Estevanico led the first Spanish expedition to Zuni lands and was the first Moroccan and African and non-Native American to set foot in what became Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. In the sixteenth century, Portugal occupied Morocco. Famine drove thousands of Moroccans to Spain and Portugal in various forms of servitude. The inhabitants of Azemmour—Estevanico’s home on the Atlantic coast—received permission from the Portuguese king, Don Manuel, to emigrate to Spain. People left Morocco in search of a better life in the Iberian Peninsula. This suggests that Estevanico might have emigrated as a servant, an indentured laborer, or an employee in search of economic opportunities. He may not have been a slave at all but instead a political or economic refugee since the Azemmouri people sided with the Portuguese invaders. Despite Estevanico’s role in Spain’s age of exploration and imperialism in the Americas, historical accounts are silent about him except to note that he was a slave who accompanied Fray Marcos De Niza on his travels through the American Southwest. Nevertheless, Estevanico remains an important figure in the social history of Pueblo Native Americans.
