text: For the next four years, Cabeza de Vaca and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades lived in the complex indigenous world of South Texas, where tribes of different cultures and languages often lived in conflict with one another. Cabeza de Vaca wrote detailed anthropological notes on the customs and culture of the people he met, including a few tribes that have been tentatively identified by modern researchers, such as the Karankawa people along the Gulf Coast and the Tonkawa in central Texas. Most tribe names in the Relación, however, are not attested by any other written source and difficult to link to any tribes mentioned elsewhere.
  Southwestern North America
  By 1532, only four members of the original expedition survived: Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and Estevanico, an enslaved Moor. They headed west and gradually south hoping to reach the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico, becoming the first men of Europe and Africa to enter Southwestern North America (present day Southwestern United States and Northwest Mexico). Their precise route has been difficult for historians to determine, but they apparently traveled across present-day Texas, perhaps into New Mexico and Arizona, and through Mexico's northern provinces near the Pacific Coast before turning inland.