Betrayal of the allied peoples, slavery and bloody massacres: what happened after the fall of Tenochtitlan

It has been shown that A small group of Spaniards, called the Conquerors, did not defeat the indigenous people of the great Tenochtitlan on their own, but it was the thousands of indigenous allies that made the downfall possible.

By 1502, the Mexicas had established themselves as the strongest people in Mesoamerica. Only certain peoples, such as the Yopes, Totonacas, Tlaxcalans and Purepechas, refused to submit. Cortés had made the alliances of the peoples subjugated by the Aztecs, but after the consummation of the conquest, he did not grant them this precious freedom, but substituted it for his own demands.

After the fall of Tenochtitlan, a new definition of the concept began to emerge with which the conquest was seen as a pacification, civilization or religious conversion, an idea developed from the elites of the Spanish government.

“This version seeks to reduce the visibility of violence and see it as government action (…) It is a concept that will last for three centuries.“Said historian Federico Navarrete.

After the enormous losses that the Noche Triste supposed for Hernán Cortés in terms of supplies and people, he will add to his strategy of colonization – in addition to the massacres and the search for precious metals – the sale of slaves.

The specialist of the Historical Research Institute of UNAM, Johanna Broda, explained that several of the principles established by Bleda S. Düring and Tesse D. Stek, in their book The Archeology of Imperial Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Empires in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean WorldTo characterize hegemonic empires, they apply to the Mexican case.

The first is that local elites have been co-opted to follow the interests of empires, and for their own benefit, distancing themselves from their societies.. A second technique, he continued, is that of replace the local populations with groups of productive colonizers who owed allegiance to the empire, this by a combination of genocide, deportation, colonization and planned development of the regions, landscapes, which had little previous agricultural development.

“To recover the lost resources, Cortés undertook the entry of the cities, to capture the young people, the women, the common people, and marked their faces with incandescent iron to sell them. Slavery will become a basic commercial alternative, which will continue in the conquest of other territories like the West and the North-West, we even know that Mesoamerican populations were taken to what is today Panama, Cuba and Santo Domingo ”.

What is called the “Conquest of Mexico” was in fact only for Tenochtitlan, because our country did not exist as such., declared members of the Institute of historical research (IIH) of the UNAM, during the Conference of the human sciences, “The conquest: uncomfortable balance sheets”.

August 13, 1521 is a symbolic date that did not signify the end of the indigenous world, but of the Mexico-Tenochtitlan site, and the start of various large-scale historical processes that continue to this day and have shaped the plural nation. .and contradictory that sometimes we are.

The director of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Frances Rodríguez Van Gort, added that the aim is to question the simplistic interpretations of the Conquest and to show new ones, which highlight the complexity of the process and the multiplicity of actors who took part.

Federico Navarrete Linares of the IIH recalled that when 99,000 indigenous soldiers and less than 1,000 Spaniards took Tenochtitlan, “the only ones defeated were the Mexicans”. Tlaxcaltecas, Texcocanos, Chalcas, Huejotzincas, Cholultecas, Zempoaltecas and other allies were not considered defeated, but the promises of Hernán Cortés were rejected.

For this reason, the idea that the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan marks a “turning point” in national history is untenable. “There are those who have asserted that throughout the sixteenth century there was a collapse of Mesoamerican civilization and that later indigenous cultures are only vestiges of it, or that Europeans imposed their culture; it’s wrong”. The indigenous world did not disappear with the Conquest, but it changed, and the first great transformation was the imposition of Catholicism.

The Mexican Empire did not dominate all of Mesoamerica or what is now Mexico; In the following years there were military campaigns that were also mainly indigenous and allowed the conquest of other territories, such as Michoacán, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán or Sinaloa. “We are talking about more than 50 Tlaxcala and Spanish conquests from Nicaragua to Culiacán; together, they dominated a territory of thousands of kilometers, and this is the origin of New Spain ”.

In the expert’s opinion, the power of the Spaniards should not be overestimated or exaggerated. In 1521 there were 1,000 in a world of 10 million Mesoamericans, and by the end of that century there were only 100,000 or 200,000 in New Spain. They were never more than 10 percent of the population throughout the colonial period. Even more people of African origin than Europeans have arrived; the contingent of slaves was large, but the majority of the population remained indigenous, up to 70% at the end of the viceroyalty.

What began in the 16th century was a process of cultural exchange and the redefinition of identities and cultures that continues today. To call it interbreeding is insufficient; Mesoamerica was already a plural world and with the Conquest this plurality was reinforced, added Navarrete Linares.

The imposition of Hispanic culture was not complete. An example of this is that Spanish was not imposed as a language during the colonial period. At the time of Mexican independence in 1821, 70 percent of the population spoke an indigenous language, and Nahuatl was probably as widespread as Spanish.

Martín Ríos Saloma, also of this university entity, considered that August 13 is a symbolic date which is used in national history to mark “a before and an after”, but history is not dates or names , but processes. Thus, the period between the spring of 1519 and August 1521 is only the first phase of the recognition and colonization of these lands.

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