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7 myths of the Spanish conquest 2 (The Indians are coming to an end (myth…

- - - - Some wars have two names. What Russians call the Great Patriotic War is known in the West as the Second World War. The Mexican-American War is, to those south of the border, the War of the North American Invasion. But the Con quest of Mexico has no other name. Nobody has ever called it, at least in print, the War of the Spanish Invasion, or the Spanish-Mexica War. The same is true for the Conquest of Peru, the Conquest of Yucatan, and so on.
  - - - As a result, expedition leaders were quick to claim that regions were over flo wing with precious metals and compliant native peoples. Such claims be gan with Columbus, who from the outset was keen to convince the crown that he had fulfilled the terms laid out in his contract (known as the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe , after the garrison town near Granada where the agreement was drawn up in April 1492 ). Early in 1493 Columbus explained to Ferdinand and Isabella that setting out on his voyage “I took the route to Your Highnesses’ Canary Islands, which are in the said Ocean Sea, in order from there to take my course and sail so far that I would reach the Indies and give Your Highnesses’ message to those princes and thus fulfill that which you had commanded me to do.”
      - the crown disputed that immediately
    - - Oerllanas letters correctly anticipated accusations by his patron Gonzalo Pizarro that he had illegally abandoned Pizarro in Amazonia. In the same way, Cortes letters had anticipated the anger of his own patron velazquez
      - Montejo trying to convince
        
        The adelantado Francisco de Montejo wrote a series of letters to the king designed to reassure him that Yucatan was both worth conquering and con querable. Indeed, these two themes of contract-related Spanish writing were so commonplace that the language of discovery and fulfillment came close to being formulaic. The following example, a description of Yucatan by Montejo in his letter to the king of 1529 , could have come from any one of dozens of conquistadors: “The land is heavily peopled and has very large and beautiful cities and towns. All the towns are a [veritable] fruit orchard. . . . I have found many signs of gold. . . . I went over a great part of the land and I hear d many reports of the gold and [precious] stones that are in it.”
  - - - A classic statement along these lines is Prescott’s comment that “the his tory of the Conquest of Mexico terminates with the surrender of the capi- tal.” 16 While such a statement conforms with the vast majority of what has been written on the Conquest, from the sixteenth century to the present, in the wake of the destruction of Tenochtitlán the Spaniards had not conquered Mexico; they had simply dismembered the Mexica empire. In a note ap pended to Cortés’s second letter to the king, an official in Spain, despite his optimistic tone, revealed the precariousness of the situation in 1522 : “They found little treasure . . . but the Spaniards, of whom there are at present fifteen hundred men on foot and five hundred men on horseback, are very well fortified in that city, and they have more than a hundred thousand In ” 17 dian allies in the countryside.
      - Here we have the conquistadors, a year after the supposed completion of the Conquest, still searching for war booty, needing to be fortified in the ruins of the city they had destroyed, and dependent upon vast numbers of native allies. Meanwhile, the Spanish presence in the rest of the region cov ered by the Mexica empire was minimal, and Spanish control over the larger area that would become modern Mexico was virtually nonexistent. Indeed, Spaniards had yet to even set foot in most of the regions of what would become colonial New Spain (roughly the civilizational area called Meso america). In the early 1520 s, Cortés apparently believed the Spanish asser tion that Michoacán was conquered and under Spanish rule. Yet the native Tarascan government remained intact and the Tarascans viewed their em pire as the region’s dominant power. 18 Twenty years later the wars of con quest in northern Mexico were still sufficiently extensive to warrant the viceroy of New Spain himself leading Spanish-native forces into battle. 19 So while 1521 was the end of the two-year war against the Mexica empire, it was the beginning of the wars of conquest in most of greater Mexico and Mesoamerica, wars that would persist into the twentieth century.
      - no control in the Inca Empire either
        
        the 7 dimensions of incompleteness
        
        the first dimension
        
        The first dimension of incompleteness is that of the rapidity of the Conquest in the core areas of native and subsequent colonial settlement. In addition to the tenuous Spanish grip on central Mexico in 1521 , Spanish control over Peru was almost nonexistent in 1532 , despite Atahuallpa’s cap ture and execution, and tenuous in 1536 , after the lifting of the Inca siege of Cuzco. An independent Inca state persisted until its ruler, Túpac Amaru, was executed by the Spanish in 1572 , and significant portions of the Andes remained outside direct colonial rule even after that. 20 Similarly, when the Spaniards founded Mérida in 1542 , Mayas continued to rule the vast major ity of the Yucatan peninsula. Independent Yucatec Maya polities still existed in 1880 , when Bishop Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona asserted that “the con quest [of Yucatan] was completed entirely with the victory gained in the battle of San Bernabé of June 11 , 1541 , against the army of Cocom, king of ” 21 Sotuta, who was the only one who had not offered obedience.
        
        the second dimension
        
        The second dimension of incompleteness relates to the protracted nature of the military conquest of the so-called fringe or marginal regions of what gradually became Spanish America. Above all else Spaniards sought native settlements upon which to construct their colonies. But outside Mesoamerica and the Andes, they found sparse populations of semisedentary and nomadic natives who were not amenable to colony building. In such regions it took decades to establish toeholds and these remained unstable, poor, and attrac tive to few colonists. Writing in 1701 , Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, au thor of the official account of the Spanish conquest of the Itzá Maya in the previous decade, admitted that Spanish expansion had left “great portions” of the Americas partially or entirely unconquered—and he recognized that this was due to the intractability of some natives and to the difficult terrain in some regions. But most of all, argued Villagutierre, it was because God was saving some natives for subsequent generations of Spaniards. So much for secular explanation! 22 As Villagutierre predicted, the colonial frontiers of northern New Spain, Yucatan, Peru, and other regions would gradually ex pand, but that process included periodic contractions of frontiers and fre quent military activity.
        
        For example, early attempts at conquest and settlement at two ends of Spanish America—Florida and the River Plate basin—were disastrous. At least six expeditions to Florida failed dismally between 1513 and the 1560 s, when a permanent Spanish settlement was finally established. The first founders of Buenos Aires in the late 1520 s were reduced to cannibalism and the town was not permanently refounded until the 1580 s, while lasting Ibe rian settlement on the northern bank of the River Plate (now Uruguay) did not come until a century later. New Mexico was conquered at the turn of theseventeenth century, but was then lost to the Spanish empire in 1680 and had to be reconquered in the 1690 s. The Sambos-Mosquitos were able to push back the colonial frontier in Nicaragua during the seventeenth cen tury. The seventeenth-century subjugation of the Tule of Panamá was never consolidated and then reversed in a revolt in the 1720 s, necessitating a pro tracted reconquest beginning in 1735 . Chocó and Petén were not conquered at all until the 1680 s and 1690 s, respectively, but the Spanish presence in Petén declined rather than grew in the early eighteenth century.
        
        Looking at Spanish America in its entirety, the Conquest as a series of armed expeditions and military actions against Native Americans never ended. Florida’s Seminoles were still fighting Spaniards when the colony was taken over by the United States (to whom they have never formally surrendered either). The Araucanians of Chile—who fought for decades and eventually killed the black conquistador Juan Valiente—resisted conquest into the nine teenth century, when they continued to fight the Chilean republic in the name of the monarchy they had previously defied. The Charrúa of Uruguay were not finally subdued until the new nation’s president organized their massacre in the 1830 s. 24 Argentines also faced—and eventually slaughtered with machine guns—unconquered native peoples in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Guatusos-Malekus of Central America were en slaved and slaughtered in the late nineteenth century. Yaqui resistance in northern Mexico also lasted into the modern period, while at Mexico’s south ern end, the Maya of Yucatan pushed the colonial frontier back in 1847 to its sixteenth-century limits, and a string of Maya polities persisted there into the early twentieth century.
        
        the third dimension - the pax colonial
        
        wth the conquests wake came the peace between the natives and the spanish. However there was violence
        
        There is a pair of possible reasons for this. One is the localized nature of colonial revolts, which made them relatively easy to put down and therefore appeared to colonial and modern observers insignificant compared to the kinds of wars that swept Europe during the same centuries and would ravage much of modern Latin America. The other relates more closely to the myth of comple tion. Despite periodic Spanish hysteria over real or imagined revolts by natives and enslaved Africans, Spaniards believed that their empire was God’s way of civilizing natives and Africans in the Americas. Colonial rule was thus seen as peaceful and benevolent, an interpretation that relied upon the Conquest’s being complete.
        
        the fifth dimension
        
        The fifth dimension of the Conquest’s incompleteness was the degree to w hich native peoples maintained a degree of autonomy within the Spanish empire. This was in part an autonomy permitted and sanctioned by Spanish officials, and it was nurtured by native leaders through illegal means and legal negotiations. As a general rule, Spaniards did not seek to rule natives directly and take over their lands. Rather they hoped to preserve native com munities as self-governing sources of labor and producers of agricultural products. This practice had precedent in Islamic-Iberian custom, as it devel oped in the eighth-century Muslim invasion of the Iberian peninsula and dur ing the subsequent centuries of the reconquista . 28 But it was also a practical response to Spanish-American realities. The new settlers were not farmers, but artisans and professionals dependent upon the work and food provided by na tive peoples who greatly outnumbered them.
        
        the sixth dimension
        
        The sixth dimension of incompleteness is that of the spiritual conquest. Amidst the complex sixteenth-century debates among Spanish priests and friars regarding the efficacy of different conversion methods and the spiri tual state of native peoples, there emerged a myth regarding their Christian ization. This myth held that while native people remained superstitious and prone to recidivism, they had essentially been converted in the early days of evangelization. As the vanguards of that process, the Franciscans were the greatest proponents of its myth; their perspective fared well over the centu ries and was given renewed vigor in the early twentieth century by Robert Ricard, whose La Conquête Spirituelle du Mexique (The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico) was a widely read paean to the success of Franciscan conversion campaigns. 30
        
        In recent decades, scholars have painted a more complex picture of native reaction to Christianity. While some have argued that native religion sur vived behind a veneer of Christianity, and others have proposed that native and European religions blended into a set of unique regional American vari ants on Catholicism, the most sophisticated interpretations recognize that a combination of both processes occurred. With variations right down to the level of the individual Andean, Chibcha, Muisca, Maya, and Nahua, natives accommodated and understood Christianity and its place in their world in ways that we are only just beginning to grasp.
- - - - Malinche herself would have been completely lost to the siroccos of his tory were it not for her speech; her historical identity is based upon what she said. Yet because she spoke the words of others, as their interpreter, she is also strangely silent. This has allowed her to become many things to many people: a symbol of betrayal; an opportunistic sexual siren; a feminist icon; an Aztec goddess in disguise; the mother of the first mestizo , and thus of the Mexican nation; the ultimate rape victim of the Conquest. Almost all of this tells us much about modern Mexican history but little about the Conquest, especially as most of these interpretations, including all the negative ones, date from the dawn of Mexican Independence in the early nineteenth century.
  - - - In 1528 Pizarro acquired a pair of native boys on the northern Peruvian coast. They were taken back to Spain in 1529 , taught Spanish, then brought on the Conquest expedition of 1531 , and acted as interpreters at Cajamarca in 1532 , when Atahuallpa was captured. Like Malinche in Mexico, these two became well known, even famous, among Spaniards and natives. Christened, diminutively, Felipillo and Martinillo, the latter was later able to style him self don Martín Pizarro. This impressive-sounding name partly reflected don Martín’s status as a native noble, but also his value to the Spaniards and crucial role at Cajamarca. He was granted a share of the Cajamarca spoils (although Pizarro cheated him of it) and, later, an encomienda . He lived in Lima for many years, acquiring the prestigious title of Interpreter General as well as a second encomienda , before being caught up in the Gonzalo Pizarro revolt. He traveled to Seville to appeal the sentence against him, where shortly afterward, around 1550 , he died. In 1567 his half-Spanish daughter, doña Francisca Pizarro, was at court in Madrid petitioning the king for a pension as did so many of the descendents of conquistadors.
  - - - Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel also argues for writing as a hall mark of European superiority, specifically in his depiction of the initial meet ing of Pizarro and Atahuallpa in 1532 , in the central plaza of the northern Peruvian Inca city of Cajamarca. Pizarro had less than 200 men, all heavily armed. Atahuallpa had an entourage of 5 , 000 , but most were unarmed and the rest lightly armed (his army waited on the plains outside the city). The first Spaniard to approach the emperor was not Pizarro, but a Dominican friar, holding a cross and a Bible or missal. Within minutes the book was on the ground, and shortly after that Atahuallpa was pulled from his litter and taken captive, while the Spaniards cut down thousands of his servants, kill ing about a third of his entourage. Diamond’s assertion is that literacy ex plains the nature and outcome of the meeting between the Spanish captain and the Inca emperor. “Spain possessed it, while the Inca Empire did not.” Spanish writing transmitted information that brought Spaniards to Peru in the first place. Writing then gave the invaders a cognitive advantage over Atahuallpa—whose access to “scant information” thus led him to make ” 33 “naïve” and “fatal miscalculations.
      - problems with this view
        
        There are a number of problems with this argument. First, there is no evidence that Pizarro and his colleagues were any better informed about the Inca empire and Andean culture than Atahuallpa was about the Spaniards; both leaders had sent out spies and questioned northern Andean natives before the meeting. Second, it is highly debatable whether writing would have been a better system of communicating information than the oral tech niques and quipu devices (complex sets of colored, knotted strings attached to rods) developed over centuries by Andeans. Even if we concede writing to be marginally more efficient, under the specific circumstances of Pizarro’s invasion, its possible advantage hardly explains the entire outcome of the Conquest of Peru. Third, Diamond’s assertion that “literacy made the Span iards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history” that was denied to Andeans is a highly problematic generalization that is better explained by the geographic factors articulated by Diamond elsewhere in his book.
        
        Fourth, as it is not clear how much or little Atahuallpa knew of Pizarro’s expedition, we might accept Diamond’s premise, but it is still not at all clear what difference it could have made. The Spaniards, allegedly better informed, The Spaniards, allegedly better informed, followed the predictable patterns of the Conquest. During the initial en counter this included using legalistic measures to validate their actions (the reading of the Requirement), the use of display violence (the massacre of unarmed retainers), and the capture of the native ruler. In the encounter’s immediate aftermath, this included a dependence upon native interpreters, the use of native allies, and the emphasis on acquiring precious metals. It seems unreasonable to deem Atahuallpa naïve for not attempting to have the Spaniards all killed before they could get near to him, and unrealistic to expect that any amount of information would have inspired such a brutal and draconian decision. It is doubtful that knowledge of the Mexica empire and its collapse would have deterred the Inca ruler from engaging—rather than simply slaughtering—the invaders. Had the circumstances been re versed, and unknown foreigners landed on Iberian shores, curiosity would certainly have gotten the better of the Spaniards too.
        
        Finally, the argument is further undermined by the parallel case of the C ortés-Moctezuma encounter. Mesoamericans did have writing, forcing Diamond to dispense with the literacy argument and resort to another myth (to be refuted in the next chapter), that “Montezuma miscalculated even more grossly when he took Cortés for a returning god and admitted him ” 35 and his tiny army into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.
    - - Diamond’s argument about writing is part of a well-entrenched myth going back at least to the Middle Ages and Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that alphabetic writing distinguished civilized people from barbarians. Las Casas claimed that Aristotle had made the same distinction. While the Dominican was wrong, his claim illustrates the deep-rooted validity of the distinction in the European mind.
    - - In two additional accounts of the incident, miscommunication is placed at the center of the encounter. One is by a seventeenth-century mestizo of mixed Inca-Spanish descent, Garcilaso de la Vega, the other by a sixteenth- century conquistador, Pedro de Cieza de León. Each offers still further varia tion on the details, and each takes a rather predictable position on Atahuallpa, but both blame a third party (other than the emperor or Pizarro) for a break down in communication leading to the Spanish attack. Garcilaso has Ata huallpa taking the initiative in proposing the meeting, but his friendly, even deferential intentions are inadequately conveyed by interpreters both before the meeting and during it. He is especially derisive of Felipillo, whom he characterizes as a low-class Andean whose Spanish was coarse and whose grasp of Christian dogma was virtually nonexistent. For all Felipillo’s fail ings, he is not ultimately to blame. Garcilaso instead calls the real culprit “the Indian language” of Quechua, which he derides as the inferior tongue of an ignorant people. 38 Garcilaso’s final verdict anticipates the argument that the natives were defeated by their communicative disadvantages—be it lack of writing, inability to read “signs,” or, in Garcilaso’s crude version, the inferiority of their language. In his view of events, the friar’s book falls from his lap by accident and is not the immediate cause of hostilities, which break out because the Spaniards become impatient with the lengthy discussion be tween the friar and the emperor and begin to harass Atahuallpa’s servants.
      - fray valverde
        
        In two additional accounts of the incident, miscommunication is placed at the center of the encounter. One is by a seventeenth-century mestizo of mixed Inca-Spanish descent, Garcilaso de la Vega, the other by a sixteenth- century conquistador, Pedro de Cieza de León. Each offers still further varia tion on the details, and each takes a rather predictable position on Atahuallpa, but both blame a third party (other than the emperor or Pizarro) for a break down in communication leading to the Spanish attack. Garcilaso has Ata huallpa taking the initiative in proposing the meeting, but his friendly, even deferential intentions are inadequately conveyed by interpreters both before the meeting and during it. He is especially derisive of Felipillo, whom he characterizes as a low-class Andean whose Spanish was coarse and whose grasp of Christian dogma was virtually nonexistent. For all Felipillo’s fail ings, he is not ultimately to blame. Garcilaso instead calls the real culprit “the Indian language” of Quechua, which he derides as the inferior tongue of an ignorant people. 38 Garcilaso’s final verdict anticipates the argument that the natives were defeated by their communicative disadvantages—be it lack of writing, inability to read “signs,” or, in Garcilaso’s crude version, the inferiority of their language. In his view of events, the friar’s book falls from his lap by accident and is not the immediate cause of hostilities, which break out because the Spaniards become impatient with the lengthy discussion be tween the friar and the emperor and begin to harass Atahuallpa’s servants.
      - another speech and how it was misinterpreted
        
        Cortés recorded the Mexica emperor’s speech in a letter to the Spanish king, and although other Spanish chroniclers wrote down very similar ver sions, the speech shows signs of evolving as it passed through Spanish hands. From the very start, with the version reported by Cortés, the speech seems to have been spun in a way that turned the emperor’s words of welcome into a statement of submission. Most improbably, Cortés has Moctezuma telling the Spaniards that his people had always awaited the arrival from overseas of
    - - nahuatl had
        
        Malinche was able to understand tecpillahtolli , a legacy of her noble birth, and she had been translating it into Spanish for months leading up to the Cortés-Moctezuma meeting. Otherwise, Moctezuma’s speech could not have been conveyed to Cortés and his colleagues with any degree of fidelity. 52 But even with the benefit of Malinche’s education, when rendered in Spanish, with the polite adornments of Nahuatl prefixes and suffixes gone, and the principle of courteous reversal lost by the lack of a genuine equivalent in Iberian culture, the speech does indeed seem to be one of surrender.
      - impact was overestimated of speech
        
        However, these interpretations followed the events they describe, some imme diately and others decades later. Certainly there was plenty of miscom munication during the Conquest, but to argue that such miscommunication was so imbalanced and benefited the Spaniards to such an extent that it ex plains the Conquest ignores the complexity of Spanish-native interaction.
      - at the end of the day they did understand what the other side wanted
- - - - indigenous cultures were neither barbarous nor idyllic but as civilised asnd imperfect as the european ones.
    - - found that the natives were normal people (p. 103)
    - - As Las Casas puts it, in his summary of Columbus’s Diario : “It should be noted here that the natural docileness, simple, benign, and humble condition of the Indians, and their lack of weapons, together with their going naked, gave the Span iards the audacity to hold them in low esteem, and put them to such harsh labor as they put them to, and to be relentless in their oppression and de struction of them.” 13 Such a view was anticipated by fray Antonio de Monte sinos as far back as 1511 , when the Dominican, in his famous sermon to the Hispaniola colonists, asked them: “On what authority have you waged a de testable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? . . . Are these not men?”
  - - - The apotheosis myth—part of the larger myth of native desolation—is central to the way Europeans perceived the native reaction to the Conquest. That connection is made explicit by Todorov, when he refers to “the paralyz ing belief that the Spaniards are gods.” 24 Todorov is not alone in taking the apotheosis myth for granted; it is more a part of the Western understanding of the Conquest today than it was in the sixteenth century. Larson’s lam pooning of the myth (Figure 14 ) works only because it is still such common currency in popular histories and textbooks. But there was no apotheosis, no “belief that the Spaniards are gods,” and no resulting native paralysis.
      - Like so much of Conquest mythology, the apotheosis of the conquista dors seems to be rooted in the voluminous writings of Columbus. Or at least so it appears. In Dunn and Kelley’s translation of the diary of the first voy age, the natives “are credulous and aware that there is a God in heaven and convinced that we come from the heavens.” In Zamora’s translation of the 1493 letter to the king and queen, Columbus states that “generally, in what ever lands I traveled, they believed and believe that I, together with these ships and people, came from heaven, and they greeted me with such venera tion.” But here is Morison’s translation of the parallel passage in another letter written by Columbus in 1493 :
    - - In fact, the passages are ambiguous, at best. Columbus never uses the word “gods,” nor are we are given any idea as to what native word he has taken to mean cielo . In light of the inexact nature of Columbus’s so-called conversa tions ( conversación , “intercourse” in Morison’s translation) with Caribbean natives, his interpretations of native statements and actions must be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Furthermore, there remains not even circumstantial evidence that the provision of food and drink and other gestures of friend- ship—made to Europeans by natives all over the Americas for various prac tical reasons—constituted “offerings” of a religious nature.
      - Urs Bitterli
        
        Zamora accepts the apotheosis myth tentatively, but others have embraced it ful ly. Swiss historian Urs Bitterli, for example, spins the scant “evidence” in Columbus’s writings into a full-blown acceptance of the myth, summariz ing his reasoning with the question, “Was it not the most obvious conclu sion to regard these beings, so unfamiliar in their appearance, their behavior and their powers, as supernatural?” Surely the most obvious conclusion was to see Europeans as human beings, as they looked and acted like them, and as in fact they were taken to be by natives throughout the Americas.
      - Gómara
        
        makes no direct mention of the captains apotheosis. He asserts that the natives of tabasco (Totonacs) originally thought that the men and horses were one , a probable spanish invention that grew over time. He also states hat the as the Spanish passed through the Valley of Mexico towns on their their march on Tenchtital people came out of their houses and screamed: these men are gods. But this was not actual
      - Bernal Díaz
        
        no consistent evidence of the Spanish being taken for gods. He Diaz states that some Cempoalans (Gulf coast natives) exclaim upon learning of guns, that they must be teules. But the word teules is very ambiguous and means more than just the translation of god sometimes also something like god-like.
        
        similarity of the helmets
        
        Like Gómara, Díaz tells of the same Mexica lord (whom he calls “Tendile”) expressing wonder at the Spaniards and their technology. But instead of the Quetzalcoatl reference, he tells an odd Cinderella-as-conquistador tale of matching helmets. One of the Spaniards has a rusty old helmet that resembles the headgear on an image of Huitzilopochtli, the patron deity of Tenochtitlán. Tendile is given the helmet to send or take to Moctezuma, who is supposedlyso struck by the similarity he is “convinced that [the Spaniards] were of those whom his ancestors had said would come to be lords of that land.” 31 This is an echo of the speech that Moctezuma allegedly delivered to Cortés upon their meeting. This does not mean that Spaniards were seen as gods, merely as descendants of men who once ruled Mexico, but it is one of the threads of invention and misunderstanding that became woven into the myth of Span ish apotheosis. Shortly after the Spanish-Mexica war, the Cortés-Huitzilopochtli connection evolved into a story that Moctezuma had welcomed Cortés be cause he believed the Spaniard to be Huitzilopochtli. But the royal chroni cler Oviedo, who found the story in a letter written by colonial Mexico’s first viceroy, stated it to be untrue. 32
      - cortes himself
        
        As for Cortés himself, he neither names Teudilli/Tendile nor mentions any tales of wonder, referring to him as a local lord who offered gold and provi sions to the Spaniards (as native rulers often did to avoid hostilities and en courage the invaders to move on). In his letters to the king Cortés makes no claims to having been taken either as Huitzilopochtli or Quetzalcoatl (whom he never mentions at all) or any kind of god. His concern is more to establish the political legitimacy of his invasion and, in letters written before Tenochtit lán has fallen, to convince the king that despite ongoing hostilities the Mexica empire had already in some sense been ceded to Spain.
        
        franciscans
        
        As for Cortés himself, he neither names Teudilli/Tendile nor mentions any tales of wonder, referring to him as a local lord who offered gold and provi sions to the Spaniards (as native rulers often did to avoid hostilities and en courage the invaders to move on). In his letters to the king Cortés makes no claims to having been taken either as Huitzilopochtli or Quetzalcoatl (whom he never mentions at all) or any kind of god. His concern is more to establish the political legitimacy of his invasion and, in letters written before Tenochtit lán has fallen, to convince the king that despite ongoing hostilities the Mexica empire had already in some sense been ceded to Spain.
  - - - It seems unlikely for natives to assume that men on horses were a new type of creature when the riders were accompanied by other men who looked the same but were on foot. Indeed, Mesoamericans had never seen horses, but they had seen deer, and indeed immediately began to call horses a type of deer. 53 Delight, not fear, was the reaction of the Chontal Maya king, Paxbolonacha, when invited by Cortés on the occasion of their initial meeting to ride for the first time on horseback into the Chontal capital.
      - on the mortality issue
        
        Similarly, it seems unlikely that natives would assume a man was a god pending his death as evidence of his mortality. The human experience leads us to assume, from a very young age, that people (in fact, all living creatures) are mortal, an assumption that would only logically be overturned by re peated acts of invincibility or resurrection. But the myth has no tales of such acts. Nor can we speculate on some sort of cultural exceptionalism on the part of Mesoamericans. There is plenty of evidence that they took death for granted much as other cultures do. One of the most important deities in Mesoamerica, the rain god and Earth god called Tlaloc by the Nahuas, was also a death god. 55 Furthermore, deification in Mesoamerica was postmor tem, not premortem. The ruler Quetzalcoatl became a god, or became asso ciated with the god of the same name, only after he died. 56 Finally, there are many more logical explanations for Spaniards being called “children of the sun.” For example, a lieutenant of Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, was nicknamed Tonatiuh, “the sun,” by the Mexica because of his shock of blonde hair—no doubt his most notable feature from the perspective of the dark-haired na tives. As we have seen, in the Andes the designator “son of the sun” was one of high status originally reserved for the Incas.
        
        generally the spaniards as gods myth only makes sense if natives are assumed to be primitive, childlike or half-witted.
  - - - Tlaxcalas corpus christi plays were the biggest of its time. These celebrations of the achievements of the Tlaxcalts can be taken as evidence of the vitality of the natives. p.122
    - - titulo was a community history that promoted local interests, particularly related to landownership -> the Spanish conquest in not written as a major event. (p. 122)
      - The Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. two sides of the story
        
        The Nahua version of events of the 1520 s asserted that Nahua warriors had come down to Oaxaca from cen tral Mexico in response to a plea from the Zapotecs, who needed help defend ing themselves from the cannibalistic Mixtecs. Cortés approved the mission, but when he came to Oaxaca in the wake of Nahua victory, he and the Nahuas fell out and fought. The Nahuas won this battle too, and after this, the “original conquest,” they settled in the valley on land granted to them.
        
        In contrast, the Mixtec version claimed that Cortés came to the valley first, where he was welcomed by the Mixtecs, who gave Spaniards some land on which to settle. The trouble began when Cortés returned with a group of Nahuas, who started a fight and were soundly defeated by the Mixtecs. With Cortés as peace broker, the Mixtecs graciously allowed the Nahuas to settle in the valley. The boundaries of the land they were given were not surpris ingly less generous in the Mixtec título than in the Nahua version.
        
        what does this tell us?
        
        In both versions, local community—or micropatriotic—identities remain paramount. There is no acceptance of the colonial division of peoples into Spaniards and “Indians,” nor is there an acceptance of the Conquest as either a Spanish initiative or a primarily Spanish triumph. Native defeat is not only denied, but inverted. Even the phrase “native defeat” is meaningless from a community perspective that views all outsiders in more or less the same way, whether they be Spaniards, Mixtecs, Nahuas, or Zapotecs—or even people of the same language group who live in a separate town.
    - - mexican expansion
        
        The third indicator of native vitality during the Conquest was the role played by natives as allies in the campaigns that followed the major wars of invasion. Although in the long run these campaigns usually (but not always) resulted in the spread of Spanish colonial rule, in the short run they often constituted local native exploitation of the Spanish presence to advance re gional interests. For example, the armies of Nahua warriors who waged cam paigns in what is now northern Mexico, southern Mexico, Yucatan, Guatemala, and Honduras helped create the colonial kingdom of New Spain and were led by Spanish captains. But the vast majority of those who fought were Nahuatl-speakers under their own officers. Many of them remained as colonists in new colonial towns such as Oaxaca, Santiago (Guatemala), Mérida, and Campeche, and their culture and language made a permanent mark on these regions. As symbolized by place-names in highland Guate mala to this day, Nahuatl became a lingua franca in New Spain. In many ways, these campaigns were a continuation of the Mexica expansionism that had gone almost unchecked for a century before the Spanish invasion.
        
        Chontal Maya expansion
        
        A slightly different type of example is that of the Chontal Maya expan sion of the late sixteenth century under their king, Paxbolonacha. His simul taneous colonial identity was as don Pablo Paxbolon, the region’s governor. Although the Chontal Mayas’s first major contact with Spaniards was as early as 1525 , not until the 1550 s did the region become fully incorporated into the nearest Spanish colony, Yucatan. Beginning in the 1560 s, and running con tinuously until his death in 1614 , Paxbolon engaged in campaigns against neighboring Maya communities that had yet to be incorporated into the colony or that had slipped out of colonial control. The Spanish presence on most of these expeditions was minimal or nonexistent. Although Paxbolon had a license from Mérida permitting him to round up refugees and “idola ters,” a Chontal Maya título written during his rule recorded such campaigns before and after the Spanish invasion, revealing the colonial ones to be little more than continuations of age-old slaving raids.
      - Native influence later
        
        Inca survival paralleled in many ways the perpetuation of status by Mocte- zuma’s relatives and descendents. While they lacked their pre-Conquest po litical clout, their local social and economic significance was underpinned by confirmation of titles and honors by the Spanish crown. 76 Likewise, most of the highest-ranking noble Maya families, as a result of protracted nego tiations through a Conquest decades long, succeeded in preserving their lo cal status as community rulers in return for accepting Spanish political authority at a regional level. The Spanish governor of Yucatan became the halach uinic (provincial ruler) but the noblemen of dynasties such as the Cocom, Pech, and Xiu remained as batabob (local rulers or town governors) for the next three centuries.
    - - elections
        
        Most of the Xiu noblemen named in Figure 17 ser ved as batabob , illustrat ing the flourishing of the native municipal community from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—the fifth indicator of postinvasion native vitality. One of the native mechanisms of adaptation to colonial rule that fostered the golden age of the native town was the ready adoption of the Spanish cabildo (town council). The cabildo ’s election, offices, and functions Spaniards imposed on native towns early in the colonial period—or at least, Spaniards assumed they did. In fact, native élites only appeared to create Spanish-style cabildos . Their “elections,” if held at all, were but a veneer covering traditional factional ma neuvers and cycles of power sharing. Spanish titles such as alcalde (judge) and regidor (councilman) were adopted, but the numbers, rankings, and functions of the officers followed local traditions, while many cabildos contained officers with pre-Conquest titles. In some cases municipal governors were Spanish appointed, but in many more instances native governors continued to func tion as they had before the Conquest, even keeping precolonial titles, ruling for life and passing the positions on to their sons.
      - only superficial changes
        
        While Spaniards viewed native cabildos as products of colonialism, na tives initially adopted the framework of the cabildo as a superficial change and then soon came to view it as a local institution rather than a colonial one. This double perception is another example of Double Mistaken Iden tity, whereby both Spaniards and natives viewed the same concept or way of doing something as rooted in their own culture. In this way, the native bor rowing of Spanish cultural elements did not represent native culture loss or decline, but rather adaptability and vitality (the sixth indicator of post-Con- quest native cultural vitality). Natives tended to view borrowings—be they Spanish words, concepts, ways of counting, of worship, of building houses, or of town planning—not as loans but as part of community practice and custom. They viewed them not as Spanish, nor even as native, but as local. And they were able to do this because of the integrity and flourishing of semi-autonomous municipal communities. By the end of the colonial pe riod, there was little about native culture in most of Spanish America that (in James Lockhart’s words) “could safely be declared to have been entirely European or entirely indigenous in origin. The stable forms that emerged in the long run often owed so much to both antecedents, with many elements having been similar from the beginning and others now interwoven and integrated, that identifying what belonged to which antecedent becomes to ” 79 a large extent impossible, and even beside the point.
      - the "Holocaust"
        
        Just as the violence and drama of the Spanish invasion gave way to gradual cultural change, so did the immediate tragedy of native population decline give way in the long run to opportunities of various kinds. The Andean chronicler Huaman Poma warned in 1615 that the “Indians are coming to an end,” and in demographic terms, a century after Spaniards began their con quests on the American mainland, this almost seemed a real possibility. The rapid decline in the Native American population, beginning in 1492 and con tinuing well into the seventeenth century, has been called a holocaust. In terms of absolute numbers and the speed of demographic collapse—a drop of as many as 40 million people in about a century—it is probably the great est demographic disaster in human history.