So back in the first episode of the first season of this podcast series, I begged someone to make a movie about the wanderings of Alvar Nune's Cabeza de Baca and his three companions.

Well, as several of you pointed out, someone actually has made this movie. In 1991, Mexican filmmaker Nicolas Nicolas Echevaria created a really striking and

kind of trippy art house film that actually does a pretty good job capturing the surrealness

of Cabeza de Vaca's adventures. But it's not an easily digestible film, and in its

strangeness, it partly obscures the facts of what happened. The facts are this.

After almost a decade of misfortunes,

three Castilian nobleman and one black, quote unquote, Arab from Morocco,

were all that remained from a 600-man expedition that had left Castile in 1527 intent on conquering North America.

And yet, these four men,

Alvar Nunez Cabez de Vaca,

Alonso Castillo,

Andres Dorantes,

and Esteban

came to embrace their role as wanderers

and as instruments of their God's will.

Soon, they found themselves elevated

from mere slaves to the subsistence-level tribes

of the Texas coast

into the role of medicine men. And after a series of miraculous cures, they became revered

shamans, attended to by thousands of Native American followers. Their success as shamans

carry these four castaways and their followers across the deserts of northern Mexico, across the Rio Grande, across the continental divide, and all the way to the Pacific Ocean, more than 2,000 miles overland from where they had disembarked in Florida almost a decade prior.

As they finally drew closer to New Spain, however, they began to question what role they were still playing in the European conquest of the Americas.

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