Coronado Expedition, 2006

by Matt Wyckoff
w. Photographs by Scott Clark
On August 12, 2006, I flew from New York’s LaGuardia to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport to meet a good friend and photographer, Scott Clark. After renting a “windveil blue” Ford Taurus, I changed into a ridiculous conquistador outfit complete with plastic armor, knee-high leather boots, puffy shirt and tights. Our plan was to travel and photograph a section of the route taken by the Spanish Conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in his failed 1540 - 1542 expedition across what is now the American Southwest in search of gold.

Trying to inhabit the mind of a sixteenth century conquistador in the contemporary American southwest while driving and walking over the same land he traveled nearly 500 years earlier was a profound, yet often absurd, experience. When I began thinking about this project, my interest was in the tension between America’s recently unegalitarian policies in pursuit of its self-interest and its foundation upon the ideals of universal human liberty and freedom. Using the traditions of historical reenactment and performance art, I wanted to animate Coronado’s expedition to create a dynamic space, a kind of thematic road-trip, for myself to think about the themes of self-interest and altruism in a personal sense and also as these themes manifest in American foreign policy, specifically as they relate to the war in Iraq.

Coronado’s story was interesting to me as a foil for the war in Iraq because of the nature of its failures and its particular synthesis between personal, national, and religious interest. The root similarities Coronado’s journey does share with events in Iraq however, cast into relief the ultimately more important and illuminating differences between Coronado’s era and ours – between a historical understanding of “Empire” and the divergent contemporary expressions, intentions, and understanding of American E/empire.

Just south of Tucson, Arizona, Scott and I stopped at a Wal-Mart to pick up supplies for the week: camp fuel, granola bars, fruit, bread, beer, cheese, crackers, peanuts, ice and so on. For me, performance art – walking into a Wal-Mart in a conquistador outfit – takes a certain amount of nerve. A specific mental build up is required that involves the suppression of my ego and self-image. At the same time, this type of performance requires a certain amount of faith in the public – faith I wouldn’t get beat up, taken down to the station, or both. Confidence for this sort of thing can also come from a disdain for your “audience,” as was the case for many Dadaist and Situationist performers.

I failed to translate the frustration I occasionally feel toward politics and government in America into a healthy, or reckless, abandon in my own performance. I wasn’t able to transform the lingering twinge of guilt or embarrassment that came with making others and myself uncomfortable into something that felt heroic. Nonetheless, I used my admiration for the former heroes of the avant-garde as reassurance and walked into the already carnivalesque atmosphere of dense advertising, fluorescent lights, and beeping product scanners.

People respond to the ridiculous in a variety of ways. Most adults are hard-wired to look the other way for fear of getting pulled into the orbit – much the way children shrink in their desks when unprepared to be called upon in class. Those who did seem to take offense cast only disapproving stares or whispers. One young boy in Wal-Mart asked me eagerly if I was, in his words, “a real fighter.” His mother pulled him away before I could think of an answer, offering a hurried, conciliatory smile like the ones we sometimes give to people asking for change on the street. She moved quickly down the aisle as her son struggled to get another look over his shoulder. The boy’s apparent inability to distinguish me from the characters in cartoons or storybooks reminded me of when I was his age watching the Iran-Contra scandal unfold on television and being unable to differentiate the spectacle from over-acted early ’80s prime-time television dramas such as Dallas or Dynasty.

A few adults were far too willing to talk, but these people were comfortable around silly medieval looking costumes through their participation in the Renaissance Festival or the Society for Contemporary Anachronism (SCA). These organizations celebrate and idealize the past through regular reenactment and, often, heavy alcohol consumption. Strangely, looking back on the trip now, I felt more comfortable dressed as a conquistador in that Tucson Wal-Mart than almost anywhere else on the trip. It felt as if all reality had been suspended and one form of spectacle effectively cancelled out the other.

The sometimes-slim divide between reality and farce, truth and parody, is a wellspring of current cultural production including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Onion, and the intrepid comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen. The individuals who participate in the Renaissance Festival and SCA address a similar space between reality and fiction. The historical accuracy of their costumes varies widely and is often of little significance to the participants. These organizations often base their reenactments on broad misgivings about consumer culture and its luxuries while at the same time enjoying these luxuries in their “real lives.” In the Luddite tradition, their apparent misgivings for technology or contemporary culture give their reenactments a touch of the apocalyptic, as if they are preparing for a future that resembles the past they idealize.

Historical reenactments of any kind rarely occur without an agenda. Some aim for accurate or impartial history in the name of entertainment, education, or remembrance while others wallow in their distortion of history for ulterior, sometimes sinister and often self-aggrandizing motives. My own reenactment provides an informal guide to how the purpose of the reenactment may often determine its historical accuracy.

Out of 288 soldiers on Coronado’s expedition, only sixty-one declared that they owned any armor at all according to the expeditions records, and only forty-five had helmets. In fact, the bulk of Coronado’s army actually consisted mostly of Mexican Indians, contrasting the prevailing image of Coronado’s army as a troop of ironclad, medieval looking, knights. Accounts of what Coronado himself wore vary, but for the sake of being recognized as a conquistador I ignored many known facts and based my costume on little more than Halloween costumes and Google image searches.

After stocking up at the Wal-Mart in Tucson, Scott Clark and I pressed on, driving through an afternoon thundershower to the United States – Mexico border. The fence itself appears as exactly what it is – a crude, rusting hulk produced as the result of a particular kind of agitation between neighbors. We visited the fence near Naco, Arizona, just off of route 92 and east of the major border town of Nogales. There the fence stands around thirty feet tall and appears in places as a patchwork of scrap metal apparently hurriedly welded together. The mood in the area around the border fence was quiet and solemn: a fascinating sort of wasteland that, despite all of the argument over Mexican immigration into America, feels remarkably unaware it is at the center of dizzying and often vitriolic debate.

On the American side of the fence a few Hispanic men in cowboy hats gathered outside a bar under a neon sign flashing enigmatically in pink neon, “The Gay ’90s Bar.” They grinned mischievously under black mustaches, nudging each other and wheezing with restrained laughter as I walked past. A child’s birthday party went on unaware of my presence in a gravel lot beside sun-bleached stucco facades of buildings lining the nearly empty street. As I looked through holes in the fence, I saw the Mexican side of the border seemed similar, if not a bit less developed: Shack-like houses on red dirt lots were populated by children on bikes and adults milling around the open hoods of cars and trucks. As I climbed on and posed in front of the wall, little notice was given and no border patrol or bands of zealous “Minutemen” were forthcoming.

We drove from the border fence to the Coronado National Monument at the end of our first day. The park itself was built in 1911 and was originally named the Coronado International Monument. Because Mexico never completed its side, the name was changed in the 1950s to the Coronado National Monument. Now the park is another small reminder of the strained relations between the United States and Mexico in an incredibly scenic patch of mountains looking down on the San Pedro River Valley where Coronado’s expedition passed. Standing in the late afternoon light in a field twenty miles east of the monument’s visitor center with no civilization in sight I could imagine for the first time what passing through here in 1540 might have felt like.

The following morning we followed the San Pedro River north before taking the winding Coronado Highway to the Phelps Dodge “open pit” copper mine outside of Clifton, Arizona. This truly gigantic mine is harvesting one of the richest veins of copper in the world and would have surely been just under Coronado’s feet as he searched for gold and other precious metals in this part of Arizona.

My formal education about Coronado’s expedition occurred during my freshman year of high school. My ninth grade American history teacher, “Coach P,” stood in front of our class shading his eyes from an imaginary sun as if looking out into the distance to illustrate how in 1539 a Spanish friar by the name of Marcos de Niza might have mistaken a distant adobe pueblo named Cibola for the fabled “seven cities of gold.” This popular explanation vastly over simplifies the events leading up to Coronado’s expedition. The details of what is now believed to have led to Coronado’s expedition form a fascinating story about greed, power, misinformation, and belligerence that has frighteningly ubiquitous contemporary analogies.

The main trajectory of Coronado’s trip, 465 years ago, began in what is now Mexico, and by most accounts moved north and east through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and finally to the plains of Kansas near present day Quivera. Coronado traveled with an entourage of soldiers, slaves and livestock numbering collectively around 2,000. The expedition was blatantly aimed at finding fortune at the expense of native populations. The imprisonment, forced labor, or conversion of those natives to Catholicism that often followed was seen as a legitimate means toward the main goal of amassing enormous personal wealth and power.

The psyche of the Spanish living in New Spain in the 1530s contributed greatly to the planning of Coronado’s expedition. Following Columbus’s voyage in 1492 and continuing until Juan de Onate’s settlement of New Spain in 1598, Spaniards conducted more than one hundred separate major expeditions to explore, conquer, pacify, and colonize the New World.

The spoils from the first wave of this exploration made the investors and participants incredibly rich. The treasures taken from the initial exploration were quickly distributed to the investors and participants, leaving little for the flood of Spanish bound for the new world. This created a climate of intense speculation fueled by rampant rumors and longstanding myths. In their book, The Coronado Expedition, Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint write:

“To begin with, a robust heritage of thought led Europeans of the sixteenth century to believe that the Indies of Christopher Columbus harbored unimaginable stores of gold and silver and other precious goods.” … “The lure of such wealth in the East had already motivated more than a century of intense exploration by Portuguese and Spaniards before the Coronado Expedition was conceived. Cibola, when that name was first heard by Europeans through Marcos de Niza, was for many certainly a place in the Orient. It is worth remembering, in this regard, that more than twenty years after the [Coronado] expedition, Pedro de Castaneda, [a member and chronicler of the Coronado Expedition] still maintained that the lands north and west of Cibola and Tiguex were the beginning of Greater India.”

Aside from believing they were on the Indian subcontinent, the other powerful misconception that influenced the Spanish psyche in the 1530s was a myth about seven Catholic bishops and their congregations who had fled the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the early 700s. These Portuguese Bishops were long believed to have formed seven individual cities in a land called Antillia. They had supposedly become marvelously wealthy during the succeeding 800 years. This extremely popular myth along with dozens, if not hundreds, of lesser myths about the fabled “seven cities of gold,” and other wild stories of wealth to the north of New Spain all played a part in the Coronado expedition.

The journey of Fray Marcos de Niza was the next important event leading up to the expedition. Niza was sent prior to the Coronado Expedition to confirm the riches in the north and send word of the type and quantity of treasure to be found there. Marcos de Niza set out from the northernmost Spanish colony in March of 1539, guided on his journey by a Moorish slave named Esteban. According to his own records, some two or three weeks later Niza reached an agriculturally productive native settlement where he stayed for several weeks inquiring about the location of possible great cities to the north. He sent Esteban ahead with instructions to send word of what he found in the form of a cross. The size of the cross was to be equivalent to the importance and quantity of what he found.

Just days later Marcos de Niza received a cross from Esteban that was the height of a man. Marcos quickly followed soon learning for the first time the name of the place they were seeking: Cibola. Although Marcos was still far from the actual city, it is believed that he sent several messages back to Coronado and the acting leader of New Spain, Viceroy Mendoza, along the way containing the good news from Esteban and affirmation from local native populations that seven wealthy cities did indeed exist to the north. These messages would have taken more than a month to reach the capital of New Spain in what is now Mexico City. Once the letters reached Coronado and Mendoza, rumors would have spread rapidly about the existence of the prosperous cities to the north and the preparations, already underway, for the Coronado Expedition would have been redoubled.

During the delivery of these two messages, assuming these messages were indeed sent after the positive reports from Esteban, Marcos would learn that Esteban, upon reaching Cibola, had been murdered by the natives there. When he heard this news, Marcos de Niza had only approached close enough to see the city in the distance before fleeing back to Mexico.

By the time Marcos returned to the capital months later, the planning for the Coronado Expedition would have been almost complete. Still without an eyewitness to the wealth they believed existed at Cibola, Coronado and Mendoza had already staked their fortunes and reputations on the expedition. They were also drunk on stories of wealth and fame the expedition would bring, and there is no record of Fray Marcos de Niza voicing any doubts he may have had about the riches they would find. It was little more than a forgone conclusion that the expedition would begin on schedule despite not receiving tangible proof that there was gold at Cibola.

The ancient cities of Cibola are widely believed to have been the seven prosperous trading cities that actually existed on what is now the Zuni Indian Reservation in western New Mexico. When I reached the reservation I found a community open to outsiders, but one that seemed weary of its history with Europeans and Americans. On a tour of the reservation’s museum (which was quite good) my guide spoke with his head down toward the creaky plank floor about the history of the Zuni with long sighs and a disappointed affectation. His emotion seemed palpable later as I drove among the ramshackle houses and mud-covered streets of the reservation. I took the tour of the museum in regular clothes because I was too anxious I might cause offense. While I was in costume on the reservation, I could barely force myself out of the car in order to be photographed. My original intention for the costume to function as a tool for both comedic effect and thought seemed hopelessly misguided here.

Coronado’s arrival in the village of Hawiku, the largest in the cluster of seven trading villages known as Cibola, 465 years before mine was of course also marked with disappointment and distress. Finding no gold or other precious metals, Coronado read the natives the Spanish requerimiento and was met with a shower of arrows. The ensuing battle nearly killed Coronado, but the Spanish eventually overran the pueblo.

The expedition moved its camp east in order to chase other rumors of precious metals nearby. Ill-equipped to feed and clothe themselves, the expedition soon provoked ongoing hostility from the Indians they encountered as they took provisions and other useful resources from them. Despite these continuing failures, Coronado continued to pursue other tales of wealthy cities, such as the legendary city of Quivera near present day Quivera, Kansas before returning to New Spain.

My own trip would only take me as far as the Texas panhandle, near a site archeologists believe Coronado’s army camped during its extended search for gold after the events at Cibola. On August 18, 2006, near the end of my trip, I sat in Nielson’s Café, a dark, wood paneled family restaurant in the panhandle town of Floydada, Texas, located near the archeological site. I ate enchiladas and Spanish rice from its Mexican buffet, and read the “Today In History” section of their local paper, the Plainview Daily Herald.

Sitting among the dusty, late-afternoon columns of light slanting in through the windows the “Today In History” section of the paper caught my attention because it achieved something I wanted to do with this project – it forced a conceptual leap between past and present. The entries compress disparate moments in history forcing their comparison.
Comparing Coronado’s expedition and America’s war in Iraq is complicated because of the complex historical gulf that separates them, but the similarities are telling nevertheless.

I wanted to compare them because the nature of their failures stem from many of the same root causes. A lack of information and the arrogance that sometimes accompanies power characterized the origins of both efforts. Later both suffered from the consequences of outright lies and half-truths, cultural insensitivity and misunderstanding, impatience, and an inability to recognize or accept a flawed and failing strategy. These comparisons can be further drawn-out by the fact that the self-interested motivations of each were enabled by means of military conquest, and underlined with a religious or, in the case of spreading American style democracy, quasi-religious mission of fundamentally transforming the conquered in the image of the conqueror.

Drawing comparisons between the failures of Coronado’s expedition and the failures in the war in Iraq goes a long way to placing George W. Bush in the role of a modern day conquistador. While these comparisons may be apt in terms of illustrating how power itself does not insulate the powerful from failure, critical comparisons between the imperial activities of the Spanish monarchy and the current expression of American empire can only go so far in this context. More importantly simply analyzing the war in Iraq by the sum total of its failures is equally limited as a position or a strategy.

This is the precise source of much of my ongoing frustration about the war in Iraq. I have been largely unable to separate the numerous, obvious, and in some cases truly devastating critiques of the war (its duplicitous planning, suspect motivations, and failing execution among others) from the idea that “success” in Iraq (if it came in the form of some indigenously developed kind of democratization, stability, sovereignty, and economic growth) would almost certainly be in the interests of people in Iraq and the United States. In this context identifying why I feel so contradictory about the war in Iraq is about deciding weather or not altruism as a by-product is altruism at all. Any attempt to conjoin self-interest and altruism begs this important and pointedly philosophical question: Do the natures of self-interest and altruism allow either to be expressed in any single action or policy?

Biologists have come to terms with self-interest in animals by realizing that apparently altruistic behavior such as mutual grooming among apes or warning calls in various species of birds designed to alert the flock of danger are almost always revealed to have a self-interested benefit to the individual, or the individual’s genes. If this type of apparently altruistic behavior in animals is never truly selfless it does not diminish the actual mutual benefits that do occur.

In animals these behaviors evolve slowly through natural selection and are not conscious decisions, they are evolved strategies to extend life or enhance the chances of procreation. It seems reasonable to expect that underlying self-interested motivations most often compromise altruism in human society as well. This is why we revere what we identify as truly altruistic behavior in humans when it does occur – because it so rarely, if ever, happens. The larger part of human behavior that we value as being good or moral must often play the dual role of being good for us and others. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory of economics is a good example of this duality. Smith argues that by pursuing our economic self-interest to the best of our ability we are guided by an invisible hand that is actually using our individual effort to the benefit of the larger economy, and thus the society, as a whole.

Another strategy for determining good or moral behavior in a world where altruism is suspect is to analyze what actions are beneficial to the largest number of people while having negative repercussions on the fewest. By this standard the war in Iraq does not, and most likely will not measure up. Keeping this equation close at hand is nevertheless of fundamental importance to our futures as individuals and collectively as a country. The promise of “America” as an idea is found in this exceptionally difficult synthesis between self-interest and altruism – in getting the equation between doing the most good and the least harm right as often as possible. In his book, Dangerous Nation, American historian Robert Kagan describes this “ceaseless effort to reconcile universal principle and selfish interest” as “the true American mission.”

The comparisons that can be made between Coronado’s expedition and America’s war in Iraq are underscored by the larger and more illuminating differences between Coronado’s era and ours. The difference between self-interest in Coronado’s era and ours is in large part economic. The economics of Coronado’s era were largely redistributive; in other words, wealth was often gained by simply taking it from others. Contemporary economics however sees growth (the creation of new wealth) rather than redistribution as the most successful economic strategy. The perceived moral differences between simply taking wealth from others and creating it are truly striking.

In a theoretical sense redistributive economics has slowly been discouraged and criminalized over the course of human history, whereas economic growth often implies spiritual fulfillment and personal/national self-realization. This difference accounts for a massive spirit gap between the pursuit of one’s self-interest in Coronado’s era and ours. Further, Coronado’s conquest was of relatively little consequence back in Spain. The thousands of Native Americans that were disaffected by Spanish conquest of the America’s had little recourse to take out their frustrations on Spain or the Spanish population. The realities of international terrorism make our situation decidedly different. Terrorism and other emerging effects of globalization are perhaps the most difficult differences to reconcile between our era and Coronado’s.

Even though Coronado’s journey covered several continents it can still be characterized as self-interest in a global-izing rather than a truly global world. Our historical understandings of early forms of globalization such as Coronado’s journey are often understood as inevitable and even noble. We often view them as a kind of heroic wandering that allows us to see Coronado’s expedition as a journey of exploration as much as a journey of exploitation. The seeming inevitability of some historical exploitations, exemplified by Coronado’s expedition or the treatment of Native Americans during America’s westward expansion, form an understanding of history that allows us to see contemporary conquest in the same light – we come to expect empires to act imperially and we justify those actions, however unjust, as the inevitable or natural progression of power. This is obviously a dangerous perception.

The contemporary reality surrounding self-interest now includes the already mentioned biological debates concerning our understanding of evolution and its main components of competition and natural selection. Some argue that these tools of evolution encode and affect our selfish, as well as our apparently altruistic, behavior all the way down to the survival and fundamental character of our genes. Any conversation concerning self-interest also includes issues of global warming, global capitalism and free markets, over-population, pollution and degradation of the environment, disease, poverty, terrorism, and nuclear war just to name a few. All of these issues can be seen collectively as products of globalization. The fact that at its heart, globalization is a force fueled by the striving of billions of individuals for more opportunity and a better life for themselves and their families further underscores this complexity. The growing reality that all human futures are intertwined and connected recognizes the complexities and rapid development of globalization since Coronado’s era.

In this light one of the most pedestrian of clichés rings true: To produce a just and peaceful world we, as individuals, and as nations, cannot live under the assumption that our interests take precedence over others. On the other hand, we cannot dispel the fundamental, or indeed biological, motivation to BE – can’t live with, can’t live without. As competition for global hegemony, safety, energy, resources, and access to markets grows more complex and desperate, reconciling and perhaps streamlining this paradox between acting in the service of some greater good and acting in our own self-interest will be a major challenge for global stability.

Given the staying power of something so fundamental to our makeup as self-interest, what is, to use Bill Clinton’s refrain, “the third way”? Terry Eagleton writes about this enlightened self-interest: “To be concerned for another is to be present to them in the form of an absence, a certain self-forgetful attentiveness. If one is loved or trusted in return, it is largely this, which gives one the self-confidence to forget about oneself, a perilous matter otherwise. We need to think about ourselves partly because of fear, which the assurance that flows from being trusted allows us to overcome.” To thrive in this way through the realization of another, to find this trust, is to find love. In the end this means finding a way to truly conjoin altruism and self-interest – in other words, to realize them as the same thing. Despite the lofty idealism of its charge, continuing to search for ways to bring an enlightened version of self-interest into being, through humor and humility, art, politics, foreign policy, capitalism, the free market, cultural production and, yes, even love, is the expeditionary cause of our time.




Writer’s note:
I would like to extend a very special thanks to Scott Clark, both for his insight and company during this trip and for his fine work in documenting yet another project of mine that would otherwise exist only in print. I would also like to thank Peter von Ziegesar and Lindsey Baker for their substantial efforts in the editing of this text through its many versions. Finally I’d like to thank John S. Vitale, Peat Duggins, Nadya Volicer, and Ky Anderson for their advice, questions, thoughts, and opinions throughout the project. Thanks.