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7 myths of the spanish conquest 1 (Intro (perceptions of Myth of the…

- - - - if columbus had not reached the indies anyone within a decade would have done so.
      - The fact that it was Columbus’s voyages, not da Gama’s, that would lead to the changing of world history was not to the Genoese’s credit. His discov eries were an accidental geographical byproduct of Portuguese expansion two centuries old, of Portuguese-Castilian competition for Atlantic control a century old, and of Portuguese-Castilian competition for a sea route to India older than Columbus himself.
    - - By this time, accusations of tyranny and incompetence on the part of Columbus had also reached the Court. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand responded by removing Columbus from power and replacing him with Francisco de Bobadilla
      - Bobadilla, who ruled as governor from 1500 until his death in a storm in 1502, had also been tasked by the Court with investigating the accusations of brutality made against Columbus. Arriving in Santo Domingo while Columbus was away in the explorations of his third voyage, Bobadilla was immediately met with complaints about all three Columbus brothers: Christopher, Bartolomeo, and Diego. Bobadilla reported to Spain that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. The 48-page report, found in 2006 in the national archive in the Spanish city of Simancas, contains testimonies from 23 people, including both enemies and supporters of Columbus, about the treatment of colonial subjects by Columbus and his brothers during his seven-year rule.
      - Because of their gross misgovernance, Columbus and his brothers were arrested and imprisoned upon their return to Spain from the third voyage. They lingered in jail for six weeks before King Ferdinand ordered their release. Not long after, the king and queen summoned the Columbus brothers to the Alhambra palace in Granada. There, the royal couple heard the brothers' pleas; restored their freedom and wealth; and, after much persuasion, agreed to fund Columbus's fourth voyage. But the door was firmly shut on Columbus's role as governor. Henceforth Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres was to be the new governor of the West Indies.
  - - - pobranzas de merito
        
        Cortes letters to the King for instance were widely read. the letters of these became popular and circulated.
        
        Bernal Diaz -> also published pobranzas and his was 600 pages long.
        
        the probranzas became the way in which the spanish reviewed the conquests^
        
        cortez became such a hero became his letters were widely disseminated and because the Mexican Empire was hugely imported cortes argued in his letters tht he had been on a divine mission etx.
        
        stuff the conquistadores had to write back home to inform the monarch of recent events and also a petition for rewards in the form of offices titles and pensions. -> they stressed the nature of self-sacrificing individuals etc.
      - Brnardinho de Sahagun
        
        rewrote his his General History of the things of New Spain rewroten into a paean praise to hernan cortes. He later claimed that this version was still a native version
        
        But the historian Sarah Cline has convincingly shown how the revisions pro moted the attitudes of Sahagún and the other early Franciscans toward the providential role of Cortés in leading the Spaniards into Mexico in 1519 and inviting the Franciscans in 1524 . The 1585 version thus had a political purpose, at a time when the early Franciscan agenda was under attack from other Span iards, and it reveals to us how the Cortés legend continued to be perpetuated long after his death.
      - Sepulveda
        
        had extremely negative views on the Indians and depicted cortes as a noble, valiant cortes
      - Gómora
        
        hagiography of Cortés -> jis narrative begins and ends with the brith and death of Cortes.
      - Bartolome de las casas
        
        was published for the first time quite late in 1875 and 1909
        
        man of the more critical sources were not published right away which helped tp establish the legend of the conquistadores
        
        For centuries, the standard sources on the Conquest and related topics were the reports of Columbus and Cortés, similar accounts by other con quistadors, and the colonial histories based on them. 55 These tended to con form to the conventions of Spanish imperial ideology, with many of the more controversial texts not being published until after the colonial period. The longer works of Las Casas, for example, the Historia general de las Indias (Gen eral History of the Indies)and La Apologética historia sumaria (The Apologetic History) saw print in 1875 and 1909 for the first time, and Motolinía’s Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies) and his Memoriales (Memorials) were not published until 1848 and 1903, respectively.
      - Prescott
        
        still widely read but essentially wrote for an audience that just wanted to hear the story of some war heros
        
        Yet the nineteenth century hardly unraveled the colonial-era development of the myth of Cortés and the other “great men” responsible for the Conquest. This was in large part due to the third chronological stage in the development of this chapter’s myth—the success of the histories of the Conquests of Mexico and Peru by William Prescott. Like Gómara’s account, Prescott’s narrative of the Mexican story ends not with the fall of Tenochtitlán, but later with the death of Cortés. As Prescott admitted, “The two pillars upon which the story of the conquest mainly rests are the Chronicles of Gómara and of Bernal Díaz.” For Prescott, these two balanced each other, so that while Díaz “freely exposes [Cortés’s] cunning or cupidity, and sometimes his cruelty, he does ” 57 ample justice to his great and heroic qualities.
        
        Prescott’s books repackaged the Conquest myths that were rooted in the probanzas , relaciones , and cartas of the conquistadors, and reworked them into an ideology of imperial justification by the colonial chroniclers. He pre sented them to an audience eager to read that a “handful” of Europeans, because of their inherently superior qualities, could triumph over numer ous barbarous natives despite the odds and hardships. 58 This audience was well fed on a diet of the nineteenth-century European and North American versions of imperial and expansionist ideology. Prescott’s Spanish Conquests were credible and comforting, while the Catholicism of the conquistadors allowed the Protestant author and readership alike a facile explanation for the occasional, unfortunate excess or act of cruelty.
      - Diaz
        
        Probably the best known of Conquest accounts, Bernal Díaz’s narrative of the Conquest of Mexico, is seldom recognized for what it was—a monu mental probanza whose absurd length (over 600 pages when later printed) counterproductively assured it would not be read by the king, as indeed it almost certainly was not.
    - - Emulation of Cortés
        
        Charles Gibson: 1966 Although n other conquistador rivalled Cortes in military skill or in the capacity to control the conquest aftermath, all subsequent campaigns were in some measure modeled upon the conquest of the Aztec empire.
        
        Spaniarcds followed the behaviour of cortes because Spaniards were concerned to justify their action and give them legalistic veneer. Thus the procedure was followed by many and they did not really emulated Cortes they rather the conquest procedures.
        
        procedure
        
        founding of towns
        
        founding of vera cruz as a town -> better than carrying out the order of Diego Velazquez ,t eh cartoon of Cortez mission, these orders were to acquire as much old as possible. By choosing a different path cortez is depicted as selflessly giving up his profits
        
        procedure: reading out of a legal document, founding of a town was also often part of it. Founding of Vera Cruz was the most famous instance here by Cortes and his men in 1519. The founding gave a legalistic veneer
        
        In fact, the purpose of the imaginary Vera Cruz was not to set about build ing a town but to create a new basis of authority to replace that given to Cortés by his patron, the governor of Cuba. This case is famous but not unique; conquistadors routinely “founded” towns and cities during the course of explorations and invasions, settlements that were not built at that mo ment, if ever, but that figuratively marked the countryside as legally claimed and possessed by the expedition leaders. Early Caribbean cities such as Santo Domingo and Havana were founded two or three times before becoming permanent settlements. Francisco de Montejo founded at least four settle ments on the coast of Yucatan named after his home town of Salamanca; only one was ever actually built and none retained that name, but the puta tive foundings gave a legalistic veneer to Montejo’s claims that his expedi tions were going better than they actually were.
        
        appeal to a higher authority
        
        Francisco de Montejo was one of those agents and defended Cortes in 1520 in court but likewise tried to argue that Yucatan was a different part and himself as a recipient with the license to conquer. - that he received in 1526
        
        Francisco Pizarro did the same thing and travelled back to Spain to get his own license and he came back with titles for himself and none for Almagro. Pizarro had almagro executed in 1537 and Pizarro was later stabbed to death by one of Almagros sons. -> normal behaviour just the normal things conquistadores would do
        
        Another example is that of Gonzalo Pizarro who led a vast expedition into he Amazon. Francisco de Orellana was sent ahead but never returned and said because of the current of the river is´t was impossible for him to return. Pizarro said it as treachery and history stuck with this version.
        
        Velazquez held the license that Cortes wanted and Cortés betrayed him by directly writing to the king.
        
        the search for precious metals
        
        says it is wrong how the frenzy for gold is depicted by many historians. The most important thing for Cortes was the governship
        
        gold was the preferred source of wealth.
        
        the value of gold
        
        If Spaniards seem at times single-minded in their quest for these metals, this was because gold and silver were not just the preferred source of wealth, but the only items whose value in relation to their transportability made the entire Conquest and colonial endeavor possible. No other New World prod uct even came close to being as valuably nonperishable, divisible, and com pact. Rather than being a barrier to “productive economic activity,” gold and silver from the Americas and its pursuit by Spaniards underwrote the Con quest and virtually all subsequent economic activity in the New World (let alone altering the economic and political history of Europe).
        
        the search for native populations
        
        every conquistador sought native allies. the conquistadores were ignorant of the region
        
        Malinche is quite famous here
        
        he was looking for Geronimo de Aguilar but he could only speak mayan and not nahuatl - the language of the mexican empire
        
        acquisition of a particular ally- the interpreter
        
        native interpreter
        
        spaniards routinely took them as hostages ( the rulers)
        
        the search for allies
        
        Almost as determinedly as they sought gold, Spaniards looked for native populat ions. One aspect of this complex process was the need to acquire na tive allies—the fourth standard Conquest procedure. This strategy was neces sitated by the fact that Spanish expeditions were always outnumbered by the native peoples of the regions being invaded, and that Spaniards were often ignorant of both region and people. Allies were potential sources of invaluable information. They also provided crucial support in the way of provisions and porters to transport them. Above all, native allies provided military assistance, offsetting the potential imbalance of numbers during battle and allowing the Spaniards to pursue a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. This was by no means an original or exceptional strategy as pursued by Cortés or by Pizarro; every conquistador sought native allies, as many and as soon as possible.
        
        The fifth routine aspect of the Conquest was the acquisition of a particu lar categor y of native ally—the interpreter. Much has been made of Cortés’s use of a Nahua noblewoman as his interpreter—the famous Malinche—of- ten giving the impression that she was an example of Cortés’s superior stra tegic skills. Yet Cortés was only following procedure and had quite predictably been keeping his eyes out for a potential interpreter ever since first sighting the mainland. To that end, he had gone to some trouble to rescue Gerónimo de Aguilar, shipwrecked seven years earlier on the Yucatec coast, on the rea sonable assumption that Aguilar had learned the mainland native language. 80 But Aguilar could only speak Yucatec Maya, not Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica empire, so Cortés continued to search. That Malinche could speak Maya and Nahuatl was pure luck, but she was soon taught Spanish anyway.
        
        the role of violence triggering fear
        
        The sixth aspect of Conquest procedure was the use of display violence, or the theatrical use of violence. Despite the assistance of native allies (and interpreters), and the use of African auxiliaries, Spanish-led forces often re mained outnumbered and seriously threatened by the native peoples whose lands they were invading. Despite evidence of numerous massacres by Span iards and the routine enslavement of the seminomadic peoples of the Carib bean and Central America, for the most part Spaniards did not seek to decimate or enslave native peoples but rather to subdue and exploit them as a more or less compliant labor force. A standard means of pursuing such subjugation was to employ dramatic displays of concentrated violence in order to terrorize a native group and convince them of the efficacy of coop eration with Spanish demands. Theatrical and terrorizing techniques ap pear again and again in the records of Conquest expeditions.
        
        These include the severing of the right hands (or sometimes the arms) of native prisoners, often by the hundreds; 85 the killing of women and, if neces sary, sending the corpses home; and the mutilation or killing of select in ments of them as dineros —and as the basis of the credit system that sup ported so much conquistador activity. 79 If Spaniards seem at times single-minded in their quest for these metals, this was because gold and silver were not just the preferred source of wealth, but the only items whose value in relation to their transportability made the entire Conquest and colonial endeavor possible. No other New World prod uct even came close to being as valuably nonperishable, divisible, and com pact. Rather than being a barrier to “productive economic activity,” gold and silver from the Americas and its pursuit by Spaniards underwrote the Con quest and virtually all subsequent economic activity in the New World (let alone altering the economic and political history of Europe). Almost as determinedly as they sought gold, Spaniards looked for native populat ions. One aspect of this
        
        tive allies—the fourth standard Conquest procedure. This strategy was neces sitated by the fact that Spanish expeditions were always outnumbered by the native peoples of the regions being invaded, and that Spaniards were often ignorant of both region and people. Allies were potential sources of invaluable information. They also provided crucial support in the way of provisions and porters to transport them. Above all, native allies provided military assistance, offsetting the potential imbalance of numbers during battle and allowing the Spaniards to pursue a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. This was by no means an original or exceptional strategy as pursued by Cortés or by Pizarro; every conquistador sought native allies, as many and as soon as possible. The fifth routine aspect of the Conquest was the acquisition of a particu lar categor y of native ally—the interpreter. Much has been made of Cortés’s use of a Nahua noblewoman as his interpreter—the famous Malinche—of-
        
        Cortes did no burn his ships. however, in 1546 Cervantes de Salazar referred in print to Cortés ship burning and the image took hold.
- - - - had captained one of the vessels under velazquez on the 1518 grijalva expedition. He rose to prominence during the military encounters in the valley of mexico.
      - he initiated the noche triste ->initiated a bloody massacre. In 1522 Cortés granted him the first encomienda in the environs of Tenocchtitlan-mexico city.
      - led an expedition into Guatemala either sent by Cortes or with his blessing. The wars in Guatemala would drag on for a decade
      - Almagro met with alvarado and they made the deal that alvarado would leave Peru to Diego de Almagro dn Pizarro. Alvradao was paid we'll but almagro was allowed to recruit y
      - In accordance with Conquest patterns, the following year Alvarado led a major expedition down into Guatemala—either sent by Cortés or with his blessing, depending on one’s perspective. In addition to Spanish recruits, many from the Mexican wars, African slaves, and Nahuas from his encomienda , Alvarado also took his three brothers, two of his cousins, and 44 other members of a patronage circle he had cultivated as an encomendero . Through a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, Alvarado played the two major native groups of the highlands off against each other, the Quiché Mayas and the Cakchiquel Mayas.
- - - - The conquistadors say that the Tlaxcaltecs deserve that His Majesty grant them much favor, and that if it had not been for them, they [the Spaniards] would all have been dead, when the Mexica repulsed the Christians from Mexico, and that the Tlaxcaltecs offered them a haven.
    - - Napot Canche was governor of the cah [Maya town] here in Calkini; it was on his palace patio that the tribute was delivered to the captain, Montejo, when he and his soldiers arrived here. . . . Their swine and their Culhuas [Mexica] arrived first; the captain of the Culhuas was [a Mexica named] Gonzalo.
  - - - In the 1760 s an Italian friar of the Capuchin order named Ilarione da Bergamo traveled through Mexico, later writing up an account of his jour ney. Ilarione’s brief references to the Conquest, based on his conversations with Spaniards in Mexico and his reading of the popular histories of the time, give us some sense of the state of Conquest myths in the late eighteenth century. Ilarione’s understanding is that the greatly outnumbered conquis tadors could only pull off their remarkable feat owing to their superior weap onry, the handicapping superstitions of the “wretched Indians,” and the interventions of providence. The Capuchin friar’s perspective reflects that of colonial Spaniards, a view encapsulated by Bernal Díaz’s pithy explanation of one typical encounter—“The Indians were charging us in such numbers that only by a miracle of swordplay were we able to drive them back and re form our ranks.” Notably still absent in Ilarione’s day, as in Díaz’s, are natives or Africans fighting alongside the Spaniards.
  - - - But Spanish survival and the impression made by their weapons allowed the Tlaxcalan faction in favor of making an anti-Mexica alliance with Cortés to come to the fore. As these Tlaxcalans rightly judged, with Spanish assistance they would be able to destroy the Mexica empire and its capital city (see Figure 7 ). As Prescott deftly puts it: “The first terrible encounter of the Spaniards with the Tlascalans, which had nearly proved their ruin, did in fact insure their success. It secured them a strong native support on which to retreat in the hour of trouble, and round which they could rally the kindred races of the land for one great and overwhelming assault.” We cannot be sure how many native allies Cortés had, but by any estimate they outnumbered Spaniards many times over. Gómara stated that Cortés first arrived in Tenochtitlán with 6 , 000 such allies. According to prominent Conquest historian Ross Hassig, the final siege and assault on the Mexica capital was carried out with 200 , 000 native allies, “even though they went virtually unacknowledged and certainly ” 10 unrewarded.
      - But Spanish survival and the impression made by their weapons allowed the Tlaxcalan faction in favor of making an anti-Mexica alliance with Cortés to come to the fore. As these Tlaxcalans rightly judged, with Spanish assistance they would be able to destroy the Mexica empire and its capital city (see Figure 7 ). As Prescott deftly puts it: “The first terrible encounter of the Spaniards with the Tlascalans, which had nearly proved their ruin, did in fact insure their success. It secured them a strong native support on which to retreat in the hour of trouble, and round which they could rally the kindred races of the land for one great and overwhelming assault.” We cannot be sure how many native allies Cortés had, but by any estimate they outnumbered Spaniards many times over. Gómara stated that Cortés first arrived in Tenochtitlán with 6 , 000 such allies. According to prominent Conquest historian Ross Hassig, the final siege and assault on the Mexica capital was carried out with 200 , 000 native allies, “even though they went virtually unacknowledged and certainly ” 10 unrewarded.
      - Two contexts are particularly important. One is that of native politics. The Tlaxcalans and other Nahuas and native Mesoamericans endeavored as much as Cortés and often with equal success to exploit the situation in the pursuit of immediate political goals. Tlaxcala’s neighbor, Huejotzingo, had long resisted incorporation into the Mexica empire and likewise assisted the Spaniards in the Conquest. Indeed the Huejotzincans later wrote to the king of Spain that they had never opposed the Spaniards and had been better allies than the Tlaxcalans, who “in many places ran away, and often fought badly.” In contrast, they asserted “we helped not only in warfare, but also we gave them [the Spaniards] everything they needed.” 13 The Huejotzincans, in other words, were not passive tools of Cortés’s strategy; rather they sought to use the Spanish presence to promote their interests and pursue rivalries first against the Mexica and later against the Tlaxcalans.
      - standard procedure
        
        The other context is that of Spanish actions elsewhere. The search for native allies was one of the standard procedures or routines of Spanish con quest activity throughout the Americas. Pedro de Alvarado entered high land Guatemala in 1524 not only with thousands of Nahua allies but also expecting to be able to take advantage of a Mexica-Tlaxcala type rivalry; the two major Maya groups of the region, the Cakchiquel and the Quiché, had both sent ambassadors to Mexico City a year or two earlier. As a result, for the rest of the decade, a brutal civil war ravaged the highlands as the Span iards used these groups against each other and against smaller Maya groups, while periodically turning with violence upon these native “allies.” 14 Con versely, Spaniards under the Montejos sought desperately to make sense of regional politics in Yucatan in order to exploit or establish a similar division, being forced in the end to make a series of often unreliable alliances with local dynasties such as the Pech and Xiu. These Maya noble families con trolled relatively small portions of Yucatan, and the Spaniards never achieved control over the whole peninsula.
      - in the Inca Empire
        
        The most obvious example of how Spaniards sought native allies, looked for native divisions, and benefited enormously from them is the Inca civil war. Smallpox spread into South America faster than Europeans did, so the disease had preceded Pizarro into the Andes, killing the Inca ruler Huayna Capac and his heir before Spaniards entered their empire. Two brothers, Atahuallpa and Huascar, then took control of the northern and southern halves of the empire, respectively, in an uneasy peace that collapsed into civil war after two years. Had Pizarro arrived in northern Peru just a few months later, he most likely would have found a united Inca empire under Atahuallpa’s rule. But Pizarro’s timing was accidentally perfect, and he was able to insinuate him self into the conflict. Although seized by Pizarro, Atahuallpa sought to turn his captivity to his advantage by using the Spaniards against his brother Huascar. Alliances and betrayals proliferated and soon both Inca rulers were dead.
        
        later allies
        
        Their successor, Manco Inca, was supposed to be a Spanish puppet, but he soon rebelled. However, four years of Inca disunity during the Pizarro- Almagro invasion had given the Spaniards a steady enough supply of native allies to permit Spanish survival in the region. Manco’s great siege of Cuzco in 1536 would probably have resulted in the elimination of Pizarro’s forces were it not for his Andean allies. These were initially less than 1 , 000 but grew to over 4 , 000 later in the siege as two of Manco’s brothers and other nobles of the same Inca faction came over to Pizarro’s side. These allies saved the Spaniards from starvation, rescued individual Spaniards, acted as spies, and fought along with Spanish horsemen in sorties against the besiegers. 17 Their assistance enabled Pizarro and his company to survive until Almagro’s relief force arrived. Native support not only saved Pizarro in 1536 , it also allowed the Spaniards to survive long enough to establish a permanent foothold in the Andes and to begin to build colonies.
      - cortes
        
        conquest festivals performed in Mexico. The first took place in Coatzacoalcos, on the Gulf coast, late in 1524 . The occasion was the entry into the town of the Cortés-led expedition en route to Honduras, and the festival was a wel come in the form of (in Bernal Díaz’s words) “triumphal arches, and certain [mock] ambushes of Christians and Moors, and other grand entertainments and dramatized games.” As an anticipatory celebration of Cortés’s Hondu ran triumph, the festival was full of irony, as not only were almost all the celebrants natives, but in reality Cortés was leading an overwhelmingly na tive army against rebellious Spaniards under one of his old captains, Cristóbal
        
        When the Spaniards under Cortés left the Gulf coast and headed toward central Mexico, native Cempoalan warriors and porters accompanied them, and Tlaxcalans, Huejotzincans, and others later became part of a vast sup port force that greatly outnumbered the Spaniards. The Huejotzincans con tinued to fight alongside Spaniards and provide other services as the Conquest stretched out over the 1520 s and 1530 s. As Huejotzingo’s rulers would inform the king in 1560 , “we never abandoned or left them. And as they went to conquer Michoacan, Jalisco, and Colhuacan, and at Pánuco and Oaxaca and Tehuantepec and Guatemala, we were the only ones who went along while they conquered and made war here in New Spain until they had finished the conquest; we never abandoned them, in no way did we hold back their ” 19 warmaking, though some of us were destroyed in it.
        
        other nahuas fighting
        
        In fact, the Huejotzincans were not the only Nahuas to fight in other re gions of what became New Spain. Montejo brought hundreds of warriors from Azcapotzalco, in the Valley of Mexico, to Yucatan. One Maya account of the Spanish invasion offers a revealing commentary on their use as a van guard force. Following a series of military encounters in the region, the Span iards entered the important town of Calkini in 1541 to accept the nominal submission of the local Maya rulers. The description of that ritual by the rulers of Calkini remarks pointedly that the Nahuas—called Culhuas by the Maya after Culhuacan, the town that had once dominated the Valley of Mexico—arrived first. The Maya account also noted that the leader of the Culhuas had been baptized Gonzalo, that their force brought along a herd of pigs (an animal introduced by the Spaniards), and that they were the ones who gathered up the tribute goods offered to the Spaniards.
        
        Indians were foreigners to each other
        
        There is no hint of racial solidarity between Nahuas and Mayas in this account, nor should any be expected. Spaniards lumped different native groups together as “Indians,” but to the Mayas of Calkini, the Culhuas were as foreign as the Spaniards. They were invaders to be repulsed or accommo dated, as circumstances allowed, just as if they had come alone as part of the Mexica imperial expansion into Yucatan that never happened but may have eventually occurred had the Spaniards not appeared.
        
        the ideal scenario
        
        Ideally, these auxiliaries came more or less voluntarily (that is, they were not enslaved) and in large numbers, as was the case with Montejo’s “Culhuas” in Yucatan. However, native groups who were not accustomed to providing tribute or organized labor services to lords, such as the semisedentary peoples of the Caribbean and southern Central America, resisted these arrangements. The Spanish response was to enslave such peoples. The enslaving of Native Americans was soon banned by the Spanish crown, who viewed native slav ery as contributing to the extinction of most Caribbean native groups, as being made redundant by African slavery, and as being unnecessary among mainland sedentary societies (where organized labor systems already existed). But in the early decades of the Conquest, natives routinely accompanied Spaniards as slaves on expeditions to other regions, mostly, but not solely, in the Caribbean. Native slaves from Nicaragua participated in the Conquest of Peru, for example. They fought and provided other services alongside other natives and Africans, both slaves and free servants. Natives tended to outnumber Africans, as most of the latter were costly slaves purchased from transatlantic traders. While the men fought and transported supplies, there were also native women who cooked and acted as female company and lov ers for the Spaniards, had children by the Europeans, and settled with them as servants in their new colonial residences.
        
        it was normal to have them
        
        the Caribbean. Native slaves from Nicaragua participated in the Conquest of Peru, for example. They fought and provided other services alongside other natives and Africans, both slaves and free servants. Natives tended to outnumber Africans, as most of the latter were costly slaves purchased from transatlantic traders. While the men fought and transported supplies, there were also native women who cooked and acted as female company and lov ers for the Spaniards, had children by the Europeans, and settled with them as servants in their new colonial residences.
        
        Whether as squads of Huejotzincan warriors helping to topple the Mexica empire, a Nahua from Azcapotzalco leading his men into a Maya village, or an enslaved native Nicaraguan woman serving a conquistador in Peru, na tive peoples are everywhere in the Conquest alongside the Spaniards. One symbolic illustration of their omnipresence is found in the first couple of conquest festivals performed in Mexico. The first took place in Coatzacoalcos, on the Gulf coast, late in 1524 . The occasion was the entry into the town of the Cortés-led expedition en route to Honduras, and the festival was a wel come in the form of (in Bernal Díaz’s words) “triumphal arches, and certain [mock] ambushes of Christians and Moors, and other grand entertainments and dramatized games.” As an anticipatory celebration of Cortés’s Hondu ran triumph, the festival was full of irony, as not only were almost all the celebrants natives, but in reality Cortés was leading an overwhelmingly na tive army against rebellious Spaniards under one of his old captains, Cristóbal de Olid. The return of
      - festivals
        
        The return of Cortés to Mexico City in 1526 oc casioned the second such festival on record. Again the dances, games, and mock battles all featured native celebrants, supposedly commemorating Spanish triumphs but very clearly also representing their own complex roles in the incomplete Con quest. As Díaz dryly observed, during the festival the lake that then still sur rounded Mexico City was “full of canoes and Indian warriors in them, according to the manner in which they were accustomed to fight against us ” 23 in the time of Guatemuz [Cuauhtémoc].
        
        the participation of Africans
        
        Whatever their identity or perspective, none of the inhabitants of Mexico City in 1539 would have viewed a black presence in that year’s festival of conquest as incongruous. All took for granted the fact that Africans too had participated in the real Conquest. Indeed, Africans were ubiquitous not only to the Conquest of Mexico but also to the entire endeavor of Spanish invasion and colonization in the Americas. Because the majority of such Afri cans arrived as slaves, and because of their subordinate status in the increas ingly ethnocentric Castilian worldview, the widespread and central role of blacks was consistently ignored by Spaniards writing about the Conquest. As with so much else in the evolution of the Conquest into a collage of myths, subsequent historians and others consolidated this marginalization. Evidence of black roles is thus scattered and often opaque, but when the pieces are put together, it is incontrovertible.
        
        valiente
        
        Valiente: Among the evidence that can be pieced together is the life story of one seemingly extraordinary black conquistador, Juan Valiente. 25 Although we have no direct information on Valiente’s youth, he was almost certainly born in West Africa around 1505 and purchased as a very young man by Portu guese traders from African slavers on the coast. He then became part of the great wave of people and supplies that entered Mexico in the wake of the Spanish invasion and the fall of the Mexica empire. After being purchased by a Spaniard named Alonso Valiente, the young African was baptized and brought to his new master’s house in the newly founded city of Puebla around 1530 . Not surprisingly, Juan Valiente grew restless in his position as an en slaved domestic servant. Whether he pursued various strategies to stretch the bounds of his servitude we do not know, but in 1533 he was able to con vince his owner to let him go and seek opportunity as a conquistador for a period of four years, “providing that he keep an account of [his earnings] and bring it all back me [his owner].” The African would have kept a nota rized record of this agreement
        
        Among the evidence that can be pieced together is the life story of one seemingly extraordinary black conquistador, Juan Valiente. 25 Although we have no direct information on Valiente’s youth, he was almost certainly born in West Africa around 1505 and purchased as a very young man by Portu guese traders from African slavers on the coast. He then became part of the great wave of people and supplies that entered Mexico in the wake of the Spanish invasion and the fall of the Mexica empire. After being purchased by a Spaniard named Alonso Valiente, the young African was baptized and brought to his new master’s house in the newly founded city of Puebla around 1530 . Not surprisingly, Juan Valiente grew restless in his position as an en slaved domestic servant. Whether he pursued various strategies to stretch the bounds of his servitude we do not know, but in 1533 he was able to con vince his owner to let him go and seek opportunity as a conquistador for a period of four years, “providing that he keep an account of [his earnings] and bring it all back me [his owner].” The African would have kept a nota rized record of this agreement on his person at all times to avoid being ar rested as a slave in flight.
      - the Atlantic slave trade
        
        1502 the first slaves arrive from africa, 1510 the first big deal for the spanish crown
        
        Garrdio joined the cortez expedition
        
        there was also black presence in the peruvian conquest (p,60)