In 1536 four men stumbled into Spanish province of Nueva Galicia in northwest Mexico. They were weary, tanned, and unkempt, after having endured nearly a decade of hardships--starvation, shipwrecks, disease, captivity by Gulf Coast Indians--while trekking through regions of present-day Florida, Texas, and north Mexico. These men were only survivors of Panfilo de Narvaez's doomed 1527 Spanish expedition to Florida. In his 1542 narrative of ordeal, La relacion, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca tells how men survived by, in part, convincing native populations that they were powerful healers. Cabeza de Vaca relates that by end of their journey they had become demigods, wielding power and influence over natives. To maintain that stature--and a measure of mystique--Cabeza de Vaca and his two Spanish companions limited their interactions with Indians, communicating with them most often through mediation of lone black African slave to survive expedition, named Esteban. Cabeza de Vaca writes, We had a deal of authority and influence over [the Indians]. And in order to conserve this we spoke to them but few times. The black man always spoke to them and informed himself about roads we wished to travel and villages that there were and about other things that we wanted to know (153). This moment is intriguing for several reasons. First, it delineates three categories of people: Cabeza de Vaca and other two Spaniards form one group; natives compose another; Esteban alone constitutes a third, notably excluded from Cabeza de Vaca's reference to we who enjoyed a great deal of authority and influence. Also worth noting is elevated status Cabeza de Vaca claims for himself and Spanish. He constructs a hierarchy that, importantly, is possible because Esteban stands in middle, his role as a mediator portrayed as service to Spaniards. The slave's relegated position in this moment is in line with what his Spanish readers, and we today, might have expected. He stands in a subordinate position. Referenced by a generic marker, the black man, he is a nameless servant performing a task for his Spanish masters. It is surprising, though, and this is final reason moment is intriguing, that Cabeza de Vaca recognizes Esteban's importance as a mediator, even as he writes Esteban into a servile position. Unlike traditional representations of black African slaves in early colonial texts, Esteban is not represented as marginal or incidental. His language skills enable men's survival. What is more, elsewhere in text, Cabeza de Vaca represents him as being equal to Spaniards when he assumes role also as a healer, enjoying same demigod status as his Spanish counterparts. (1) There is a level of complexity, of inconsistency, in Esteban's representation. I recognize that what I have deemed as an inconsistency could be product of my own twenty-first-century reader's sensibility. From Cabeza de Vaca's perspective, slave's representation could very well have been unproblematic, details folding coherently into his rhetorical design. The inconsistency seems less result of a presentist reading, though, if we consider manner in which Esteban's representation both reflects and counters narrative norms of Cabeza de Vaca's contemporaries. Consider narratives of earliest conquistadors, first to introduce black African slavery into New World. As historian Matthew Restall has pointed out, black Africans were present on every major Spanish expedition to early Americas, often functioning as slaves or conquistadors themselves. (2) In narratives written about those expeditions, black Africans are not mentioned unless performing some duty--caring for horses, manning boats, hauling supplies. They function more or less as a collective body, nameless, faceless, voiceless figures working for their masters in Americas, re-creating Old World models of servitude. …