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First, I would like to thank the Huntington, John Carter Brown, and Newberry Libraries, whose amazing collections and fellowships made this article possible. The CLAH Lydia Cabrera Award provided invaluable funding to do archival research in Spain that added a great deal of depth to my analysis. Special thanks goes to Michael Francis, who taught me paleography at the University of North Florida and who accidentally introduced me to Cáncer and Madalena. Thanks to Chau Kelly and Kristie Flannery, who helped reassure me in the early stages of this article when it seemed almost impossible to write. Thanks also to the participants of the TePaske Seminar for their helpful feedback. I owe a great deal of gratitude to my next round of peer-reviewers: Christine de Lucia, Hayley Negrin, Iris Montero, Kate Godfrey, and my wife, Amanda Cave. Finally, I owe an immeasurable debt to Erin Woodruff Stone and Rebekah Martin, both of whom read multiple drafts; I cannot be grateful enough to them. Thanks to Matthew Restall and Tatiana Seijas for their comments on later drafts and advice in going through this process, and also to the anonymous reviewer at The Americas for pushing me to clarify my thinking and add more context to the final draft.
In 1549, after 11 years of slavery, and exile, an indigenous woman made it home to her people. In the time of her captivity, she became one of the most geopolitically important and well-traveled indigenous women in the Spanish Empire. Her name--or the name Spanish society gave her--was Madalena, and she returned home to Tocobaga, in what is now Tampa Bay. From bondage in Havana, she was taken to be the translator for a missionary expedition that sought to peacefully convert her people into citizens of the imagined Spanish colony of Florida. 1That mission, like every other European attempt to settle the region up to the nineteenth century, would fail, but this latest failure of Spanish colonialism meant that Madalena could return to life among her own people, unlike most indigenous slaves of the sixteenth century. Figure 1
Madalena greeting Cáncer in a 1950s Catholic tract
Source: Brother Kurt and Brother Antoninus, Friar Among Savages: Father Luis Cáncer (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1958), 55.
Madalena...