How I researched the conquest of Mexico: Sources, contradictions and what they reveal
Taking on a project of podcasting a major historical events inevitably exposes you to its contradictions and ambiguities
Imagine you are standing in line at a 7-Eleven, waiting to purchase a coffee. It’s the middle of a hot day and you are on your way to a late shift at work. You don’t have much time. The line for the coffee is long and you, and most people standing in line with you, are staring at your phone zoned out as you shuffle toward the front one customer at a time. Nothing is out of the ordinary.
Until it is. At first you don’t notice, but at some point a customer at the counter is speaking strangely to the cashier, who is also behaving tensely. You can’t quite make out what is being said, but the vibes are all off. The discussion between the customer and the cashier begins to get louder, and you now notice that the customer has one arm bent 90-degrees, hand in his front hoodie pocket. It seems like he might be holding a gun.
Just then, he whips out his gun, fires a shot that thankfully misses everyone, jumps across the counter fumbling for money. The cashier begins to hit him. People are taking out their phones to witness. Someone is screaming for help but contributes none himself. Before anyone can react, the customer runs out of the store and his hood falls slightly down, exposing part of his profile before he disappears around the corner. Too long later, the police arrive and question people who have stuck around.
The cashier’s adrenaline is still rushing and she fails to tell the story in a sensible order. The store’s camera footage–captured at 15 frames a second on 240p resolution for easier data storage–is inconclusive. Later, phone footage taken by a bystander customer shows an unsteady head waving the camera around too wildly to get a good focus on the events (which were already well in motion by the time filming began). Eye-witnesses can’t decide if the suspect was a light-skinned Black man, Mexican or a white guy who looked like he’d been in the sun a lot. No one is even sure if he managed to get hold of some money.
The contradiction of historical sources
Now imagine that this happened 500 years ago, except instead of a convenience store robbery involving a few dozen people, it was a world-altering event that resulted in a few hundred Spaniards, at least tens of thousands of their indigenous allies and hundreds of thousands of Mexica warriors and citizens fighting until the dismemberment of one of the world’s greatest empires extant at the time in a region of the world more densely-populated than anywhere outside of China.
If a few dozen people witnessing a single crime failed to produce one authoritative account of what happened, does it stand to reason that the increased scale of the Conquest of Mexico would make objectivity any easier?
In research, there are primary and secondary sources.
What are primary sources in history?
Primary sources are those which are based on the accounts or artifacts of people who experienced the event. In my example above, it would be CCTV footage, cell phone capturings, the police record of events and any social media postings from the people involved.
What are secondary sources in history?
Secondary sources are articles, memos, books and other documents written by people (often historians) interpreting primary sources. In the 7-Eleven robbery example, it would be TV nightly news reports, newspaper articles or after-the-fact discussion from people on or offline arguing about the event and presenting their findings. All of it, however, is based on the observations of people or the systems they have built to capture the information in the moment.
Such is the problem of history. For all the records we have, the artifacts excavated, the diaries and testaments and recountings and miscellanea collected, interpreted and analyzed, history remains simply the aggregate of human experience. And human experience is notoriously unreliable.
That doesn’t make history impossible, but it does make it difficult, and subjective.
Sourcing the conquest of Mexico
The Conquest of Mexico is one of the most-documented events of its era. Dozens of conquistadors wrote some accounts of their experiences in the event. Nahuatl-speaking sources wrote about their own interpretation of events in the new Latin script their language was adapted to by Spanish missionaries as early as the 1530s.
They also told stories to their children and, later, to their grandchildren, who wrote down these stories along the way until the last links to people who experienced these events first-hand finally faded. Occasionally, ruins, weapons and other artifacts are excavated which shed new light on these events. We have a relatively wealthy body of evidence which explains what happened and when.
The scholarship of this event has also been equally expansive. As one of the most pivotal and dramatic events to have happened in the history of the world, there has been no shortage of excellent (and, for the record, mediocre) scholarship on the event. Sifting through the body of evidence, such as it is, is extraordinarily daunting.
Climbing aboard the moving train
The late Howard Zinn once wrote that you can’t be neutral on a moving train, by which he meant that since we’re all caught up in the systems of the day, not picking a side to sit on doesn’t change the fact that you’re still being hurtled along in a vehicle moving hundreds of kilometers an hour.
While putting together the reading list for this project, I’ve tried to remain conscious of the fact that I am jumping onto a moving train, whose destination is determined to some degree by biases both within me and without me. I read English fluently, Spanish with difficulty and Nahuatl not at all. This means that I am dependent on English-language scholarship for the most part, which tends to be dependent on Spanish-language primary sources (which often dominates the Nahuatl primary sources).
For hundreds of years, secondary scholarship took Spanish accounts of the conquest at face value. The conquest was seen as a natural consequence of Spanish superiority on both a moral and technological level. When the independence of Mexico was achieved, the conquest was recast as a founding myth, which carried its own baggage. 20th century scholarship revived indigenous perspectives but not always with indigenous participation. Modern day scholarship has continued to evolve to try and balance Spanish sources against Nahuatl sources, but there is not always a clear line between revisionism and revanchism.
Complicating all of this is the fact that I am not a researcher, but simply a writer and enthusiast doing his best. People spend their entire academic careers attempting to refine a single point of perspective in an event I am attempting to cover in its “totality” for the purposes of entertainment. My best will inherently be not good enough.
Primary sources in the Conquest of Mexico
For the primary sources in my project, I have chosen the following:
The Conquest of New Spain (Penguin Classics) - Bernal Diaz del Castillo: Perhaps the most balanced of all the conquistadores in that Diaz (who participated in several of the Spanish conquests in the Americas beyond Mexico) attempts to present an exhaustive account of the conquest from beginning to end. In doing so, he sought to counterbalance the narratives of Cortés’s letters–which felt depicted Cortés as a kind of superman who was everywhere and did everything, against Nahua-sympathizers like Bernadino Sahagún and Bartolomé de las Casas that he felt were overly-deferential to the Mexica. His writing is frequently illuminating, insightful, cranky (more than once Diaz writes that he is tired of describing an event in detail) and invariably pro-Spanish. While he learned to speak Nahuatl, he had little interest in their customs or perspective and saw the Spanish conquest, while flawed, as a mission for God and glory that was ultimately justified.
The Florentine Codex: One of the many codices collected by a mix of indigenous sources and mestizo or Spanish editors that sought to capture the thought and culture of the Mexica and other indigenous groups. The Florentine Codex is the name given to a manuscript edited by Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary and early anthropologist who collected Nahuatl sources into a history of the region. It provides invaluable insight into the pre-Columbian history and culture of the people there, but is limited in that while the Nahua were free to speak on many topics, there was intense pressure by their Spanish overseers to self-edit themselves on topics of religion and sexuality, and it can be difficult to parse the difference. Further complicating it is that I am not reading the source directly, but Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano’s edited volume of English-language interpretation of the codex.
Chimalpahin: Also known as Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Chimalpahin was a Nahua-speaker from Chalco who in the 17th century wrote an enormous body of annals on Nahua culture and history based off his interviews with many of his elders, including his own grandmother–who was a girl during the conquest. While not technically a primary account in himself, his words channel those who did witness the events firsthand and provide some of the most exhaustive insight we have into the Nahua word from a Nahuatl speaker whose work was largely unedited by his Spanish bosses.
Secondary sources in the Conquest of Mexico
For the secondary sources in my project, I’ve been most impressed by the following:
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs - Camilla Townsend: Townsend is a professor of indigenous studies at Rutgers University and by far one of the best historians I have encountered on the Nahua world. This work, published in 2019, uses recent translations of indigenous annals like Chimalpahin’s to uncover new insight to the Mexica and their perspective and history, casting them not as victims of a conquest which destroyed them, but an incredible adaptive people who may have been defeated, but made the best accommodations to the power politics of the day and survived as best they could. Beyond being great scholarship, Townsend is an excellent, evocative writer–something uncommon in historical writing.
Rivers of Gold: the Rise of the Spanish Empire - Hugh Thomas: Thomas was a British MP and historian whose focus was primarily on Spain, its empire and eventual revolution in the 20th-century. Having visited many corners of the Spanish empire’s historical coverage himself and spent decades immersed in its scholarship, Thomas is one of the most authoritative voices on the context, beginnings and development of the empire and the Spanish approach to the Americas. Beyond this work (part of a trilogy on the Spanish empire) he has an exhaustive account of the conquest I have yet to read (at 1,700 pages in its Kindle edition, it’s quite the project to take on in itself).
Tlacaelel Remembered - Susan Schroeder: Tlacaelel is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating figures of the Aztec Empire and whose role is painfully under-examined by much of the scholarship. A Bismarckian figure that constructed the realpolitk of Mesoamerica as the power behind the throne, he served a succession of tlatoani with cunning and skill. Schroeder’s work looks at as much evidence which exists at this figure and builds a portrait of a man whose influence remains outside much of the historical record, giving an idea of the extent to which power functioned in the Aztec world.
How I organized my research
With these sources and more, I have done my best to go through and research as much as I can to present the best possible version of my podcast. For those interested, my workflow looks like this:
First, I read the books (obviously). I do this on my Kindle so that highlighting and note-taking is easier to track.
Second, I upload my highlights to my computer (I use Clippings.io for this but there are other methods of doing so).
Third, I sort the highlights of the book into the episode outlines I have on Notion so that while writing outlines for each episode I can quickly reference the most relevant information in the outline document itself.
Fourth, I build out my outlines from these notes, which I then use to write the episode scripts. Each episode is based on the perspective of one historical character (with some exceptions) and in that episode I prioritize the evidence which either comes from that source (where available) or which supports the interpretation of events most agreeable to that character. The point is not to build consensus, but to highlight contradiction (this is where the “paranoid” aspect comes into “paranoid historical storytelling” in my podcast description - always being locked into one perspective and never knowing what’s totally right or what’s historical sleight of hand).
It’s a system that’s open to revision as I move through this project and onto others, but it’s one that has served me well so far.
Closing thoughts
Any historical project (even if it’s not strictly “history”) is going to be fraught with amplifying biases, misdirections or assumptions about the events in question. For a project whose purpose is primarily entertainment–such as a podcast–these distortions are all the more unavoidable. Podcasting demands a simplified narrative of limited perspectives that history–as it “actually” happened–resists.
In real life, a man robs a 7-Eleven and ten witnesses tell ten different incomplete stories. In history, historians document and analyze all the evidence of those ten different accounts to find what the consensus and contradictions point to. In podcasts, tell the story of what happened–whether or not it’s strictly true.
Next time: I’ll be looking deeper into an example of the way that holes in the historical record compel a writer writing on the Conquest of Mexico to fill in the gaps with guesswork and creative license by looking the the problem of the historical La Malinche. See you then.