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Like “Fourth World” populations elsewhere in the “Third World,” where rapid economic development is the national goal, the right of Mexico’s original inhabitants to their own cultures and their own languages is under constant pressure.
In 1519, on the eve of the Conquest, there were an estimated 11 million souls in central Mexico; by the close of the sixteenth century, there were only about 2 ½ million Indians left, and by 1650 no more than 1 ½ million, just 13.6 percent of the pre-Conquest total.
The conquistadores had not been ordinary soldiers, but adventurers expecting riches. To placate them, the Crown granted them encomiendas , in which each encomendero would receive tribute payments from vast numbers of Indians; in return, the encomendero would ensure that their souls would be saved through conversion to Christianity. In time, this led to incredible abuses against the natives, and in 1549 a new system, repartimiento , was substituted, in which the natives were theoretically supposed to get fair wages for their labor. However, through the cupidity of their Spanish overlords and bureaucratic abuse, repartimiento swiftly turned into a system of forced labor.
İspanyol mağlubiyeti sonrası Aztec ağıtı
The completeness of the Aztec defeat is beautifully defined in an Aztec lament:
Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now,
and their walls are red with blood.
Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore.
The water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine.
We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.
The shields of our warriors were its defense,
but they could not save it.
Equally incomprehensible and thus devastating to the Aztecs’ defense was the Spanish policy of wholesale terror, so well exemplified by the act of Cortés in cutting off the hands of over fifty Tlaxcallan emissaries admitted in peace into the Spanish camp, or the massacre of vast numbers of unarmed warriors at the order of the terrible Pedro de Alvarado, while they were dancing at a feast.
Far from being held in thrall by a view of Cortés as the returned Quetzalcoatl, Motecuhzoma appears to have dealt with him as what he said he was, namely, an ambassador from a distant and unknown ruler. As such, Cortés had to be treated with respect and hospitality. Welcomed into the great capital and even into the royal palace, Cortés chose to take his host captive, to the chagrin and disgust of the Huei Tlatoani ’s subjects.
On their way to the Valley of Mexico and the heart of the empire, the conquistadores met with opposition from the Tlaxcallans; after crushing these fierce enemies of the Triple Alliance, Cortés gained them as willing allies; the Tlaxcallans would come to play a key role in the overthrow of Mexican civilization.
As the Aztec scholar Inga Clendinnen has forcefully put it, “Historians are the camp-followers of the imperialists.”
With flowers You paint, O Giver of life!
With songs You give color, with songs
You shade those who will live on the earth.
Later You will destroy eagles and jaguars:
we live only in Your painting here, on the earth.
With black ink You will blot out all
that was friendship, brotherhood, nobility.
You give shading to those
who will live on the earth.
We live only in Your book of paintings,
here on the earth.
Thus spoke Tochihuitzin,
thus spoke Coyolchiuhqui:
We only rise from sleep,
we only come to dream,
it is not true, it is not true,
that we come on earth to live.
As an herb in springtime,
so is our nature.
Our hearts give birth, make sprout,
the flowers of our flesh.
Some open their corollas,
then they become dry.
Thus spoke Tochihuitzin,
thus spoke Coyolchiuhqui.
The transitoriness of life on this earth and the uncertainty of the hereafter appear in a song ascribed to the tlatoani Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Texcoco:
I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this:
Is it true one really lives on the earth?
Not forever on earth, only a little while here.
Though it be jade it falls apart,
though it be gold it wears away
Not forever on earth, only a little while here.
The mature man:
a heart as firm as stone,
a wise countenance,
the owner of a face, a heart, capable of understanding.