Join us to learn the story of one of the most fascinating and least understood men in the history of the American Southwest: the Moroccan “slave” known as Estevan de Dorantes in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of New Spain. Estevan led the first Spanish expedition to Zuni lands and was the first Moroccan, African, and non-Native American to set foot in present-day Arizona and New Mexico.

Hsain Ilahiane (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is an applied cultural anthropologist and professor at the School of Middle Eastern & North African Studies and the W.A. Franke Honors College. Hsain’s areas of theoretical interest include development, poverty, globalization, applied anthropology, economic anthropology, and political ecology. His most recent book is The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco: Economic and Cultural Transformations (Lexington Books, 2022), and he joined the University of Arizona in 2023 after serving as the department head of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University.

The event is co-sponsored by the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and its Arabic Flagship Program, the W.A. Franke Honors College, the School of Anthropology, the Department of American Indian Studies, African American Students Affairs, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.