The best books on the Aztec-Spanish War (aka “Conquest of Mexico”)

A vivid account of life in the Aztec world and the tragic Aztec-Spanish War told by Indigenous scribes writing in Nahuatl during the decades following these events and the transformation to colonial New Spain. Mexican authors began publishing translations of Native-author sources in the late eighteenth century; yet, together with his former advisor, Ángel María Garibay, León-Portilla did more than any other twentieth-century scholar to elevate the voices and perspectives of Nahua peoples, the descendants of the prehispanic Aztecs. The Broken Spears was first published in Spanish in 1959 and translated to English in 1962. It has been translated into many other languages and revised versions since.  Its key sixteenth-century texts include portions of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, and sections of the Annals of Tlatelolco. Within these composite sources, readers can sense the multivalence of the Native authors and the micro-patriotism on behalf of the Mexica of Tlatelolco, as well as the subtle critiques they levied against the Mexica from the much larger and more powerful sister city of Tenochtitlan. The texts highlight what Nahuas found both interesting and horrifying about the bearded foreigners who invaded their lands; their nostalgia for the material culture and poetic rhetoric of the former Aztec world; and the sorrow they felt over its demise.

Although Spanish conquistador accounts of their invasion of Mesoamerica began with the letters Hernando (“Hernán”) Cortés began writing to Charles V while these events were still in progress, the most engaging eyewitness account was authored decades later by the foot soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo. He wrote it partially to justify the landholdings he had gained through Spanish colonization, at a time when they were under threat by the colonial administration, and partially to counter the great-man narrative provided by Cortés himself and by his secretary and chaplain, Francisco López de Gómara, who wrote a history based on interviews with the aging conquistador but never journeyed to the Americas. This abridged edition is very accessible to readers and contains an informative introduction by Carrasco with interpretive essays authored by him and other specialists following the primary text. Carrasco characterizes the highly readable narrative penned by Díaz del Castillo as akin to Don Quixote, minus the amusing satire of Cervantes. It is the most detailed eyewitness account of the invasion, Spanish-Aztec War, and its aftermath, and became the foundation for most subsequent histories.

The great Mexican author Carlos Fuentes wrote this book as a commemorative reflection of an earlier quincentennial, that of 1492-1992. Fuentes’ book is transatlantic in scope and considers the fraught history of Hispanic heritage in the Americas. The title metaphorically employs the mirror—both of the kind fashioned from obsidian by the Aztecs and the one bringing the viewer into Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece of Spanish golden-age painting, Las Meninas—in reflecting on this mixed inheritance five centuries later. Cultural mixing, or mestizaje, defines the creation of Latin America and its millennial-deep roots in the exchange networks, migrations, political alliances, and colonialism on the part of Mesoamerican and Iberian peoples, on both sides of the Atlantic. Fuentes is a gifted writer and Buried Mirror is what first got me thinking about these historical entanglements when I read it as a college student.

Townsend takes a novel approach to the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica by centering the narrative on one of the most pivotal yet misunderstood figures: the Native woman christened Doña Marina by the Spaniards and known historically as Malintzin or La Malinche. The last term is still a barbed one within Mexico, as it has been used historically to impugn Mexicans said to prefer foreign culture to their own and can be synonymous for treason. Malintzin was from the central Gulf Coast frontier between the Aztec and Maya worlds. Her ability to speak the Aztec imperial lingua franca (Nahuatl) and one or more Mayan languages, intelligible to the marooned Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar through his grasp of Yucatecan, made Malintzin the key translator of this historic encounter. She was enslaved prior to the Spanish arrival and then was gifted to the Cortés expedition following a truce after an early battle with the Maya. This made Malintzin a sexual servant to conquistadors and she bore a son by Cortés following the fall of Tenochtitlan. Through a careful reading and reinterpretation of the historical Malintzin, Townsend illustrates the tensions between human agency and social structures of power and oppression.

For a couple of decades, Restall has been at the vanguard of a group of historians developing what is known as the New Conquest History, an effort to balance the Eurocentrism of earlier histories of the Aztec-Spanish War and its aftermath. I’ve used an earlier book of his, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, in my teaching, as it is succinctly argued and provokes students to think critically about the early history of Latin America. This book builds on that and narrows the focus to how the historic encounter between Moctezuma, the Great Speaker of Tenochtitlan and the most powerful individual in Mesoamerica, and Cortés (on November 8, 1519) has been reinterpreted in the years since.  It ranges across five centuries of history, art, and aesthetics, and pop culture to poke holes in narratives that center Cortés’ presumed military brilliance and problematize notions that Moctezuma considered the Spaniards gods or behaved cowardly in “surrendering” his city and empire. It is the latest must-read book for readers looking for a more nuanced understanding of this historic encounter and how to reflect on it five centuries later.