One of the first “outsiders” who set foot in New Mexico was neither Hispanic nor Anglo. In fact, he wasn’t even European. Mustafa Azemmouri, was a man of many names. History books usually call him by his slave name: Esteban, sometimes spelled Estevan. He’s also referred to as Estevanico, Esteban de Dorantes or Esteban the Moor. Estevan was born in the port city of Azemmour, Morocco, sometime around 1503. In 1513 he was captured by the Portuguese and became a slave. Sometime around 1521 he was purchased by Andres de Dorantes of Bejar del Castanar, who joined an expedition to explore Florida in 1527. After the expedition went badly, the survivors made crude boats and rafts and tried to sail to Mexico, floundering on the Texas coast near present day Galveston. Only 80 of the original party of nearly 500 made it this far; after five years of enslavement by the local Indians, the number was down to four.
In 1534, these four men escaped their captors and began the long walk back to Mexico. They moved from tribe to tribe, acting as medicine men as they went. Estevan proved to be gifted in languages, and became fluent in several Indian dialects. He carried a medicine rattle, a feathered, beaded gourd given to him by a chief, as his good luck symbol and trademark. The men followed the Rio Grande, entering Mexico near El Paso. They finally arrived in Mexico City in July of 1536, where the Viceroy, enchanted by their tales of a golden city, organized an expedition to Arizona and New Mexico. Estevan guided the group, which was led by a Franciscan priest named Fray Marcos de Niza.
When Estevan arrived in at Hawikuh, a Zuni pueblo in Northwest New Mexico, the inhabitants saw that his medicine gourd was trimmed with owl feathers, a bird that symbolized death to the Zuni. Thinking him evil, they killed him.
Estevan was only the first of many Africans who came to New Mexico as slaves or servants. Many of the Spanish brought their slaves with them to the new world. Another is Sebastian Rodriguez, who was born sometime around 1642 in Angola, Africa and came to New Mexico in 1692. Records indicate that Governor Diego de Vargas, the man charged with resettling New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, brought Rodriguez with him as he traveled north. Rodrigues had been the drummer and town crier for the garrison in El Paso. He continued to serve in that capacity once Santa Fe returned to Spanish control. Rodriguez was able to both marry and acquire property. Records show he purchased land in Santa Fe in 1697. One of his sons continued in his father's positions as Santa Fe’s town crier and drummer in Santa Fe. Another son became one of the first settlers of the northern village of Las Trampas.
Rodriguez wasn’t the only African to enter the state with the reconquest. Among the over eight hundred persons that Vargas brought into the area were twenty-seven families listed in the records as Negro or Mestizo. Many of these families were given grants in the mountain communities north of Santa Fe. They married and mixed with their neighbors, both Spanish and Native, their cultures melding into something unique to Northern New Mexico.