history

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Crisis: The Indians Talk Back 1560s

Late in the evening of January 7, 1568, the guards came to collect don Martín, the son of la Malinche by Hernando Cortés. The huge metal key turned in the lock; the heavy door creaked as it opened. The cell was in the basement beneath the High Court of Mexico, and don Martín knew what they had come for. The judge’s decision that he was to be tortured had been read aloud to him several hours before, according to law, and he had been required to answer at that time that he understood the pronouncement and accepted it. Yes, he said, he understood that he had been accused of treason against the king, but he had not committed any treason and still refused to make a confession. He understood what would follow.1

***

Don Martín—he was called “don” because his father had been made a marquis by the king—was escorted to the chamber where the rack was kept. Judges all over Europe had found that merely showing an accused man the apparatus generally had the desired effect. A representative of the court asked don Martín again if he would like to confess that he had plotted against the Crown, but he responded, “I have already spoken the truth and have no more to say.” A scribe recorded the prisoner’s statement and prepared to transcribe any other words he might utter. He was only to omit the screams, groans, or

A tlacuiloc, or scribe, writes a history. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 70r.

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun : A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/olemiss/detail.action?docID=5905185. Created from olemiss on 2022-10-10 17:58:00.

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any other testament to pain. The guards removed don Martín’s clothing and tied his naked body to the two ends of the rack. They turned the levers and dislocated the bones of both arms and both legs.

The High Court judge, who was present, asked don Martín for the names of any conspirators against His Majesty the King. The scribe reported that the prisoner once again said that he had already told the truth and had no more to say. The judge signaled that the guards should turn the rack again. They did. The man said once again that he had nothing to say. But the judge was not yet discouraged. Every single prisoner that they had brought in regarding the purported plot of rebellion had ended by confessing and mentioning names. It was already time, he decided, for the water torture. The guards low- ered don Martín’s head below his body. One held his nose closed and inserted a horn deep into his mouth and even into the throat. Then the other poured buckets of water in slowly, then faster, never ceasing, so that eventually the man would drown if it went on. There had been occasions when the proce- dure went too far and a prisoner died, but in general the judges involved knew enough to signal that the guard should stop just before it was too late.

Now the judge made the signal; he questioned don Martín again. The man gasped and could not speak. They waited. At length he spoke. “I have already spoken the truth and have no more to say.” Two more times they applied the water, and two more times he repeated his statement. Then the guards poured the water down his throat and into his lungs a fourth time. It went on and on and on. The judge waited. It went on. At last it stopped. And now don Martín faced his crisis.

He could talk. He had been part of no plot, but he could make up any- thing they might believe. Every other man they had brought here had done so. They had been the sons of Spanish noblemen, highborn and proud, commit- ted to maintaining their honor, yet they had caved quite quickly. They had been accustomed to sunlight and to public contests. Those other men had never imagined even the possibility of a world in which they would be utterly powerless, alone in the darkness in the presence of men who were not afraid to kill them.

Don Martín was different. His early childhood memories were of his mother, Malintzin, or doña Marina as the Spaniards called her, twice a pris- oner, ever a survivor, the bravest of women, as all men said. When he was eight years old, his father took him to Spain and left him there to become a page to Prince Philip, and he then learned the meaning of the word alone. He grew up a “half-breed Indian” in the eyes of those who surrounded him in the Spanish court. Silent, distant, he survived, but he was not stunned when

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humanity turned its face away from him. If anyone had ever looked past him, belittled him, or made him feel insignificant, they would learn who he was. In his world, honor came to a man by birth, but it also came from courage. His honor was all he had left, and he would keep it, in the eyes of all. He was the son of Hernando Cortés and doña Marina. And he believed deeply in the god of his father’s people: the story of Jesus had touched the inner recesses of his heart. He whispered, “I have told the truth, and in the holy name of God who suffered for me, I will say nothing more from this moment until I die.” He would die, then; he was ready. Two more times they poured the water, before the judge at last decided that it was truly useless. He made the signal to desist.2

When dawn came, word spread throughout the city of what had hap- pened. People spoke in hushed tones of the son of Cortés. To some of the Spaniards, he embodied the myth of the silent, stoic Indian, who suffered at the hands of others. In others’ eyes, he was simply a brave man, a man of honor, in the same way that any man might aspire to be. In whispered Nahuatl, the Indians told each other that the tecpan, the royal office, had been closed down again by armed men, this time in order to torture don Martín.3

***

Malintzin had done her best for her children and launched them as citizens of the Spanish world so they would not be utterly powerless in the future they faced, but don Martín, like many first-generation mestizos, had nevertheless had a difficult life. The ship bearing the child and his father away from the port of Veracruz towards Spain had departed in March of 1528, when he was just seven years old. As a youth, he lived at the Spanish court, along with several other sons of noble fathers, providing companionship and enter- tainment for young Prince Philip, the heir apparent, who was five years his junior. Don Martín’s father, as the most famous of conquistadors, had not only received the title of “marquis” for himself, but had also petitioned for and received a papal bull giving Martín the status of a legitimate child.4 The paperwork was all in order, whatever people may have whispered about the boy. Early on, after Martín’s father had returned to Mexico, and about the time the boy received word that his mother, Malintzin, had died, he became deathly ill with an infection in the lymph nodes. It was believed that he would die. Yet he survived. As Martín grew up, he received occasional messages from his father, living in Mexico, who assured him of his love for him. His father wrote to a cousin who was supervising his education: “Indeed I tell you that I don’t love him any less than the other [boy] whom God has given me with the Marquesa, and thus I always want to know about him.”5 Cortés had married a

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duke’s daughter during his sojourn in Spain, and she had proceeded to bear her husband a legitimate son, whom they also named Martín. This boy would supplant Malintzin’s son in the inheritance—he would become the marquis, the recognized son of Hernando Cortés—as the half-indigenous child well knew. He learned to live with that knowledge.

In 1539, the boy turned eighteen. That same year his father returned to Spain. He brought with him the second Martín, the one destined to inherit the title and the lands. This boy, too, was to join Prince Philip’s household. The adolescent don Martín took the eight-year-old brother under his wing and tried to love him. The two of them traveled with their father while the famed conquistador conducted his business throughout Spain. In early 1540, for reasons we can never be certain of—but understandable youthful yearn- ing must surely head the list—don Martin decided to part from his father and brother, not to return to his life in the palace, but to visit Mexico, his child- hood home. Across the ocean, he seems to have visited María, his sister on his mother’s side, Malintzin’s daughter by Juan Jaramillo , and to have stayed at his father’s estate in Cuernavaca. Then, about a year later, he acknowledged that he had become someone different and did not belong there. He returned to Spain and took up his duties in the palace. As a knight, he went wherever the royal household needed their retainers to fight. He went at different times to wars in the Piedmont in Italy, to the Barbary Coast, to Germany, and to France.6

In subsequent years, don Martín remained connected with his brother, the heir, and they both attended their father’s deathbed. They had a some- what stormy relationship. They lent each other sums of money, paid it back or failed to, quarreled and made up more than once. Eventually they had a spec- tacular fight, and the older Martín sued his brother to obtain his inheritance in a lump sum rather than an annuity, saying he wanted nothing more to do with his brother. The younger Martín must truly have been a handful: his own mother sued him at about the same time, in an effort to force him to provide dowries for his sisters. Philip—who had become king in 1556—was called in to negotiate between the brothers, who had been his childhood companions. Perhaps the older don Martín felt chastened, or perhaps both did, for they were reconciled, and then made plans to travel to Mexico, together with another half-brother of theirs named Luis. They would take up their abode in the fabled land conquered by their father and live as rich men.7

Don Martín had recently married a girl named Bernardina, whom he apparently met, most romantically, while on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. An illegitimate son (named Hernando, for his

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famous grandfather) whom he had with a poor woman a few years earlier came to live with the couple, and soon Bernardina bore a daughter. In 1562, Martín and his wife decided that he would travel to Mexico, while she would return to her parents’ household with the two children. Later, if all went well, he would send for them. It was a fortunate decision, as it turned out, for the ship bearing the three Cortés brothers was damaged off the coast of Yucatan. Although they all survived the wreck, they made their way overland to Mexico City in a bedraggled and exhausted state.

The city welcomed the legitimate son of Hernando Cortés and his two half-brothers with great fanfare. The young marquis, however, quickly wore out his welcome. His wild and reckless behavior, combined with his arro- gance, alienated potential allies. He had a rather sordid and very public affair with doña Marina Vázquez de Coronado, the daughter of the man who had led the conquest of New Mexico and the wife of a good friend of his. A witty lampoon began to circulate: “A good man won this land by Marina, and now another man of the same name will lose it by another woman of the same name.”8 In the meantime, don Martín had once again sought out his sister María, the daughter of Malintzin. The young woman he had seen in 1540 had turned into an exhausted middle aged woman, weakened and demoralized by countless pregnancies that had yielded only two living children. Sadly, she died within months of her reunion with her brother. And with her disap- peared Martín’s last human connection to his early childhood—to Nahuatl nursery rhymes or common memories of a mother. His wife and children still had not arrived. He grew extremely depressed and spoke to others about the possibility of returning to Spain. He went to confession often, imagining he might be near death.9

Bernardina had been delayed in Spain as she sought travel permits for a number of young women from her home town—a barber’s daughter, for example, and a young woman who had been born illegitimate—so that they might accompany her to Mexico and find husbands far outranking those that would be available to them in Spain. It helped her application that her husband was the king’s old playmate, and eventually, in 1565, she and her entourage arrived in Mexico City. Don Martín was overjoyed to see her and the children—but by then, he was in the midst of other, overwhelming difficulties.10

The City of Mexico had become a political tinder box. First, the Mexica residents had exploded with anger when, in 1564, they were told that they were going to have to pay tribute just like all the other indigenous peoples of central Mexico. Ever since 1521, it had been their role to give their labor free of

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charge to the construction of city buildings and other projects, but they had not been given out in encomienda to individual Spaniards, nor had they been given cash tribute to pay, as had the people of the countryside. Because don Martín had been given the post of chief constable, it had fallen to him to calm the roiling indigenous populace.11 At the very same time, the encomenderos were becoming increasingly fearful that King Philip was planning to use his monarchical powers to limit their own ability as individuals to extract wealth from indigenous people, or even to hand down their encomienda grants to their heirs in perpetuity. It was certainly true that the Spanish king wished to prevent the growth of an all-powerful noble class in Mexico. Unfortunately, the legitimate don Martín went about making tactless comments, as was his wont. He loudly insisted on the right of the gentry of New Spain to make their own decisions and direct their own lives. Of course he valued his child- hood friend, the king, but he nevertheless loved to play the leader of disgrun- tled young men. Then in July of 1564, the longtime viceroy, don Luis de Velasco, died suddenly. In the power vacuum, the commotion and complaints increased exponentially. By the time Bernardina arrived the following year, her husband was forced to spend a good deal of his time explaining away some of his younger brother’s wilder statements and trying to convince him to tell his fellows that he was certain King Philip would address their grievances soon.

Despite all his efforts, Malintzin’s tactful son was unable to stave off disas- ter. One day in July, 1566, in the midst of some jousting celebrating the birth of a set of twins to the wife of the young marquis, the guards of the Audiencia, or High Court of Mexico, came to arrest don Martín. That same day, they also arrested the marquis himself, and well as Luis. These three Cortés brothers were accused of conspiring with others to take over the Audiencia chambers by force, publicly renounce allegiance to the King of Spain, and set the mar- quis in place as ruler of Mexico. Over the ensuing weeks, each of the three was interrogated. Don Martín confessed to having heard a great deal of angry talk, but said he did not believe it amounted to anything more than the swaggering of boys. He was then formally accused not of having participated, but of hav- ing known about the conspiracy for months without having done anything about it.

Within a few short weeks, two other brothers of noble lineage, Gil González and Alonso de Avila, emerged as the center of the somewhat incho- ate “conspiracy.” They were tried, convicted, and immediately hanged. The residents of Mexico City were stunned. They had not thought it would come to this for highborn Spaniards.12 The judges of the Audiencia then turned their attention fully toward the Cortés brothers. They equivocated in the

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case of the two Martíns, but they sentenced Luis to death. He had behaved as arrogantly as the young marquis and had likewise made enemies every- where he went, but he did not have the necessary wealth and connections to protect him.

Then suddenly there came a reprieve. A new viceroy at last arrived, don Gastón de Peralta, Marquis of Falces. He was a congenial man and a practical one, to boot. He ordered all trials and executions to stop until he had familiar- ized himself with the matter. He soon determined that the judges had exag- gerated the danger and sent the marquis and Luis home to Spain to be judged by the king himself. Malintzin’s son was released on house arrest while the viceroy considered his case further. He clearly hoped that in his case the whole matter would soon be forgotten, as it was perfectly evident that he was entirely loyal. And he wanted to stay in Mexico, the land of his birth.

In November 1567, however, a tribunal of special prosecutors arrived from Spain with instructions to reopen the matter. Men had been whispering in the king’s ear that perhaps the new viceroy had reasons to cover up a plot against royal authority. Falces was to be sent back to Spain. And Bernardina had to watch when her husband was arrested again on November 15. A number of men were tortured and tried. Two were executed. So it was that in January of 1568, don Martín was put on the rack and given the water treatment. When he would not confess even under torture, his lawyers were able to intervene successfully. For the first time, they made official mention of his mother, pleading for mercy for her sake. Martín was sentenced to perpetual banish- ment from Mexico. He died not long after, when the king sent him to fight the rebellious Muslims in the south of Spain. At about the same time as he and Bernardina and the children sailed for Europe, two more special judges arrived in the land. The king had learned that the City of Mexico was once again dripping with blood, and he sent representatives to check the carnage once and for all.

It had taken the Spaniards long enough to come to their senses. Why had they been so taut with fear as to lose the ability to reason? If don Martín ever spoke to his dead mother as he lay in his prison cell, they must have laughed bitterly together. They would have known the answer to the question. What the Spaniards were afraid of was, ironically, the Indians.

***

What happened in Mexico City in the 1560s was much more com- plex than what first meets the eye. There was much more afoot than a conflict between different groups of powerful Spaniards. In traditional accounts of

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the era, Aztec history has been missing; including it renders the chaotic period much more comprehensible. What seems to be a story of random vio- lence and inexplicable mutual hatred is actually a predictable political crisis. By now, forty years had passed since the initial conquest. The Mexica who were young children at the time or born in the tumultuous decade that fol- lowed—if they had survived the epidemics—were now at the peak of their adult lives. They were fully cognizant of the world of their fathers and moth- ers, but they themselves had been raised in a different moment. As a result, they were sometimes torn in their reactions to pressing issues and were pre- pared to respond to Spaniards in terms the Spaniards could understand.

Tenochtitlan’s royal family still survived as a politically viable entity. The war, the epidemics, and the imposition of monogamy had cut it down to size, but the descendants of Acamapichtli still carried the banner of their ancient history forward. In the late 1520s, after the murder of Cuauhtemoc, the Spaniards had named Indians they knew and liked to lead the people. The Nahuas used an old term for them, quauhpilli, or “eagle lord,” the term they had always used for commoners or outsiders who rose to positions of power through merit rather than birth. Members of the Mexica royal family still had much of the respect traditionally accorded to them as well as access to some of their former material resources, but both sources of prestige were dwin- dling. The prospect of penury pressed at them, and they also sometimes faced opprobrium on the part of the people for having lost the war.13 Then in the mid-1530s, a new viceroy arrived from Spain with full authority from the Crown to take over the governance of New Spain. To Hernando Cortés’s cha- grin, he himself was forced to take a backseat as a wealthy private citizen. The new viceroy, don Antonio de Mendoza, decided to select a member of the Tenochca ruling family to act as gobernador, or head of an indigenous cabildo, a collective that would be charged with maintaining order and assembling needed labor drafts. His goal was to establish such a body in every altepetl, and thus it was especially important that a proper model be established in Tenochtitlan, or the City of Mexico, as it was now called. The Indians, he thought, would govern themselves more effectively than any outsider could; offering self-rule was also a gesture of good will, for this was what the Indians said they wanted.14

The only question was whom to choose as a royal gobernador in the capi- tal. Moctezuma’s sons had mostly been killed by Cuauhtemoc. Only the two youngest had survived his rampage. One, Nezahualtecolotl (Ne-za-wahl-te- KOL-ot, or Hungry Owl), whose name recalled Nezahualcoyotl and Nezahualpilli, was almost certainly the son of a Texcocan mother. He was

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probably with the Spaniards during their original occupation of the city and thus became known to them, for immediately after the conquest, he was taken up as a protégé by Cortés. The conquistador had the boy baptized with the same name he gave his own sons, “Martín Cortés,” and then sent him off to Spain for a Christian education, as befit the son of Mexico’s late king. Nezahualtecolotl or “Martín” traveled back and forth across the Atlantic over the next decade and a half, and became so acculturated in Spain that he was soon known only by his Christian name, and eventually married a highborn Spanish woman. He died young, just as a different member of the royal family was about to be instated as gobernador, and some whispered in Nahuatl that he had been poisoned by Mexica noblemen who did not want to see this young man, who was effectively a Spaniard, live to claim power over them— though this story was undoubtedly apocryphal, as the man the gossips said was responsible had actually died before him.15 Moctezuma’s youngest son, don Pedro Tlacahuepantli (Tla-ka-way-PAN-tli), whose mother was from Tula, had been seven or eight years old at the time of the conquest. He would have been a friend of don Martín, Malintzin’s son, since the two youths trav- eled to Spain on the same ship in 1528; the young prince was to serve as a royal prop in the roadshow Cortés intended to put on in Spain. When don Pedro later returned to Mexico, he had almost no cultural capital, as the marriage that had produced him had not been a welcome event in Tula, but rather forced upon them by the Mexica, nor was his mother anybody important. Indeed, the pipiltin of Tula seemed to hate him. “Go back to Mexico City,” they are recorded as saying. “That is your land. Leave Tula [to us]; there is nothing for you here.” Don Pedro would spend his life fighting for an in her it- ance in Tula, and though he eventually won in Spanish courts, he was far from being in a position to claim authority over the Mexica.16

Fortunately, don Pedro was not the only possible royal gobernador, for Moctezuma had surviving nephews who were more warmly embraced by the Mexica nobility. The one generally accorded the most respect was Huanitzin (Wa-NEE-tzeen), who had before the Spaniards arrived already been estab- lished by Moctezuma as the very young tlatoani of Ecatepec. He ruled over an important Tepanec town, the Tepanecs forming a key element of the Aztec Triple Alliance. Predictably, he was among the close allies who went to fight by the side of Cuauhtemoc during the war, and he was taken up and impris- oned with the latter in Coyoacan when the peace was made. In addition, he was later among those forced by Cortés to travel to Honduras and back.17 He had since married his cousin, doña Francisca, the daughter of Moctezuma who had not been turned over to the Spaniards along with the long suffering

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Isabel, but who had instead been sent to her mother’s people in Ecatepec. (Huanitzin had had children with at least one other woman in the past, but they were not counted as his legitimate offspring in the new Christian world.)18

The Spanish viceroy decided that Huanitzin was the perfect candidate to serve as ruler of the indigenous cabildo. His people ranked him highly indeed.19 He spoke some Spanish and had worked with the Franciscan Pedro de Gante, probably at some point during his imprisonment. Christened Diego de Alvarado, he used his Spanish and indigenous names together and styled himself, “don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin.” After the reinstatement of the royal line in 1538,20 the new tlatoani wanted to make a sort of declara- tion on behalf of his people. Working together with Pedro de Gante, Huanitzin arranged to have the city’s most talented feather workers, who had once made gorgeous shields, craft a shimmering picture of the mass of Saint Gregory—at which an early pope had proved transubstantiation (the miracle by which the bread and wine of the mass become the flesh and blood of Christ) before a doubting audience. It was meant to be a perfect parable for what the Christian fathers had managed to achieve in Mexico. Then in a grand public gesture Huanitzin sent it off to the pope in Rome as a gift with a message in Latin embedded in the work itself: “For Paul III, pope. In the great city of the Indies, Mexico, this was composed under don Diego, governor, under the care of fray Pedro de Gante, Franciscan, in the year of our Lord, 1539.”21

Huanitzin lived only a few more years. After his death in 1541 the indige- nous council arranged to have power alternate to the opposite branch of the family, just as had been the custom in the days of old. Don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin (Tay-wetz-kee-TEE-tzeen), a grandson of Tizoc, whose reign in the 1480s had been so short, came to power and governed his people for almost fourteen years, until 1554. Tehuetzquititzin seems to have been generally well liked –his Nahuatl name meant “He-Makes-People- Laugh”—but his reign, like that of every Mexica tlatoani, was fraught with tension. He began by accompanying the Spaniards to the west, to participate in the Mixton War. In their histories, his people cast him as a warrior, going to fight as all new kings did. When he returned, the terrible epidemic of the mid-1540s had begun. It devastated both city and countryside. Tehuetzquititzin spent the subsequent years trying to defend his community’s resources from rapacious Spaniards as well as attempting to prevent the erosion of his own family’s wealth, without which they could not function as leaders. Throwing himself into the center of events, he earned some criticism. But he also met with significant success. He worked hard to unite the noble families in and around Tenochtitlan and was partly successful. Two years after his death in

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1554 the heads of family gathered together to sign a petition, asking that the Spanish Crown appoint a protector to safeguard the Indians’ interest; the highly literate group suggested Bartolomé de las Casas, whose writings were drawing attention to the situation in the New World.22 From 1554 to 1557 there was a hiatus, during which time the Spaniards postponed approving a new royal gobernador. Perhaps they were rendered nervous by such strong indigenous voices. Instead, a respected nobleman from Xochimilco (another quauhpilli or “eagle lord”) was brought in to rule. Eventually the eldest son of Huanitzin, don Cristóbal Cecetzin, agreed to serve and was elected. When he died unexpectedly in 1562, the pendulum once more swung back to Itzcoatl’s side of the family, and in 1563, don Luis de Santa María Cipactzin, a grandson of Ahuitzotl, was chosen.

It proved an unfortunate moment to become leader of the Mexica people. Beginning in the 1550s, the Spaniards had started to discuss the prospect of having the indigenous people of the island city pay tribute, just like all the other native peoples of Mexico, except that their payment would be made to the Crown, rather than an individual encomendero. In the 1520s, when the Spanish state apparatus was first put in place, the fact that the Mexica did not pay tribute had in theory been explained by their history: they had not been tribute payers when the Spaniards came. But it was also a consequence of the reality that the urbanites were already being asked to do as much as any strug- gling population could do. Although they did not pay any kind of tax in cash, they were nevertheless coerced into building downtown Mexico City, and they also provided food, fodder, and service to the households of important Crown officials as well as to the friars. The city’s people had grown used to these requirements, and they handled them as they had always handled public chores: they rotated them amongst the different wards of the city, which still matched the old calpolli units. Now the Spaniards spoke of adding tribute payments in cash and in kind, and the people grew restive, explaining that since they were artisans and merchants and did not have farmlands, they could not cope with such demands. The people had some staunch defenders in the Spanish population, among them the Franciscan friars as well as the viceroy, don Luis de Velasco, who believed that the Indians could not realisti- cally be expected to do more.23

Spain, however, had more power over the Indians now than they had had when the conquest was new. King Philip was in no mood to humor the Indians of the New World. He was strapped for cash—and would in fact later declare bankruptcy.24 In a time-honored Spanish tradition, he sent a visitador, or inspector, with full powers to investigate the situation and all prior actions

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of the viceroy. Jerónimo de Valderrama arrived in the City of Mexico in September of 1563. He ostentatiously established his quarters in the mansion of the young marquis, Martín Cortés, rather than in the offices of the govern- ment complex, thus distancing himself from the viceroy. He immediately sent a report back to Spain blaming the Indians and their friends, the friars, for the king’s cash flow problems. Specifically, he argued that the reason the people perceived themselves as poor was that they were currently pressured to give a ridiculously large quantity of money to their own indigenous nobility and to their religious caretakers. “All that has been taken from the Indians and has accrued to Your Majesty used to be consumed by the indigenous governors and noblemen, and the friars. The governors and noblemen drink their share up. The friars do, I am sure , use it for good in buying silver and ornaments for their churches and monasteries, but they do wrong to take the property against the will of its owners.”25 Valderrama insisted that he had it on good authority that the ordinary people would be delighted to pay a head tax to the king, if in exchange for that they were freed of their responsibility to labor on public projects and no longer had to support their own nobility.

The inspector was so biting in his attacks on the present policies of Velasco the viceroy—all in the name of the king—that by January of 1564, the viceroy had no choice but to cave. Though he predicted a crisis, he nevertheless signed into law the edict that the king so obviously desired: a requirement that the city’s indigenous people pay 14,000 pesos annually into the coffers of the Crown and that they make an additional substantial payment in corn. The law was effective immediately; the first of three annual payments was to be made in July.26 Three days after Velasco signed, a copy of the document was taken to the cabildo, the indigenous council, and formally presented to the leaders there. The gobernador, don Luis Cipactzin, appealed immediately, but to no avail. He was threatened with prison if he did not comply with the demands of the royal government. In February he signed the paper.27

Valderrama and his colleagues were determined to try to direct popular resentment away from themselves and towards the Mexica nobility. In March, they encouraged the filing of a lawsuit against don Luis Cipactzin and his fel- low councilmen. The case was brought by a group of craftsmen from the neighborhood or sub-altepetl of Atzacualco. The leaders were Juan Daniel, a bread baker, and Pedro Macías, a tailor. The royal family lived mostly in the sub-altepetl of Moyotlan, and so at first glance, one might suppose that the resentments of Juan Daniel and Pedro Macías were based in a competitive spirit between neighborhoods, or possibly in anger at the expectations that the nobility had of the common people. Today, however, we can see the

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heavy-handed guidance of the Spanish lawyers who claimed to be taking Juan’s and Pedro’s statements. They gave some odd reasons for insisting that their current indigenous governors should not be empowered to rule—saying that they were not literate in the Spanish letters, that they loved to celebrate feast days with old-style dancing and even the wearing of feathers, and that they did not care who was a polygamist or how many taverns there were in the city. These were not complaints likely to emanate from an ordinary indige- nous baker and tailor. Only at the very end was a statement added that the nobility robbed the people through exorbitant tribute demands that they placed upon the commoners. The two might indeed have voiced resentments of this kind, possibly going back many decades.28

Don Luis Cipactzin fought back. In court, his lawyers denied some of the charges and creatively defended their client against others. They gently pointed out, for example, that it was their understanding that even in Spain municipal office holders were not always fully literate. More importantly, perhaps, don Luis defended himself in the eyes of his people. In June, he married doña Magdalena Chichimecacihuatl (Chee-chee-me-ka-SEE-watl, Chichimec Woman), who was apparently the ward (the grandniece) of the former gobernador, don Diego Tehuetzquititzin. The girl was thus the young- est in the lineage of Tizoc. In making this marriage, don Luis reminded every- one of their joint proud ancestry in the lineage of Itzcoatl, son of Acamapichtli, the first seated king of the Mexica. Don Luis himself ostentatiously danced before the crowd, wearing the traditional feathers and playing a gold-painted drum, recalling the celebrations and ceremonies of untold generations as well as the significance of a king dancing.29

Within days of the wedding, don Luis sent emissaries to speak to key groups. The indigenous church painters and scribes who worked for the Franciscans received them with interest. Two elders came who presently were serving on the cabildo. The speakers used ancient metaphors to remind their listeners that they should remain devoted to the cause of keeping the Mexica polity alive and viable, speaking poetically and formally, just as their fathers had done in trying political times. “Does it not stem from here, the breath, the words of the altepetl, its years of blood sacrifices?”30 If the church artisans and scribes—who themselves had studied with the wise friars and were descended from the artisans of the ancien régime—were going to behave inharmoniously and rebelliously, there would be no altepetl left to fight for. It would implode, and then the Spaniards would crush whatever pockets of political organization remained. The emissaries reminded them that don Luis and his colleagues among the nobility did not take any of this lightly. They

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regarded their responsibilities seriously, as good chiefs always had. “They suf- fer anxiety in the night. They don’t eat with tranquility, worrying about how they will care for the wings, the tail [the commoners].”

In the waning days of June 1564 and the first few days of July, the Mexica talked of little else. They spoke to the friars and even recorded arguments with them, disputes which the Spaniards themselves never mentioned. They also debated each other and grew even more vociferous. They all felt they simply could not afford to pay the required new head tax every four months. Most did not blame don Luis for the change in the law, as Valderrama wanted them to (they did not accept the idea that it was his or his predecessors’ corruption that had caused all this), but many were nonetheless convinced that their gov- ernor could have done more to stave off the disaster. His Nahuatl name “Cipac” meant “Alligator,” but now they began calling him “Nanacacipac” or “Mushroom Alligator.” He was as insubstantial as a mushroom that sprouted overnight, like a “paper tiger.”31 Often they called him simply “Cipac” with- out the “-tzin” suffix acting as an honorific, which they still applied to all the other royal figures of the recent past. Relatively few people seemed to under- stand the enormous pressures on him from both sides.

On Monday, July 3, seven members of the indigenous council were arrested. They were to be held hostage while the Crown’s office demanded popular participation in some public works projects in addition to the collec- tion of the tribute. On Friday it was announced that three hundred people would be arrested at random and sold into indentured servitude if the com- munity did not cooperate. On Monday, July 10, armed Spaniards went house to house collecting “volunteers.” To stop this, don Luis Cipac called a great public meeting for Thursday.32

At two o’clock in the afternoon people surged into the tecpan, the indig- enous government building, and climbed to the second floor. Don Luis Cipac and the other cabildo members were seated in the center; those who had been jailed had been released to participate in the meeting. Juan Cano, Isabel Moctezuma’s Spanish husband, was there to lend his authority. Almost all community leaders and master craftsmen were present, as well as many ordi- nary people, including dozens of women. If the tax were not repealed, it was in effect mostly women who would have to pay it by increasing their spinning and weaving for Spanish markets; their husbands’ income really could not be stretched any further. Don Luis asked the clerk of the cabildo to read aloud a statement he had prepared about the futile efforts he had made to protest the new law; the speaker finished with a summary of the new tribute, the first installment of which had to be collected without any further delay.

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At the end of the speech, people cried out, “Where will we get it from?!” One old woman made an impassioned statement and began to cry. Public tears were symbolic for the Mexica; they were laden with political weight and shed only at significant moments.33 It was as if the woman had touched the core of years of anger. The situation devolved into pandemonium. A man who was present later recorded what happened:

There was more raging and shouting. And they insulted the governor himself. . . . Pedro Maceuhqui [a member of the indigenous council] jumped in, separating people and restraining them. He had his staff of office on his shoulder. Suddenly they grabbed it from him and were going to kill him. They ganged together to kill him. They pulled his shirt off. Just naked was how they left him. They got Juan Cano out of there. He took out his sword so they would [back off and] let him go. Otherwise he would have died at the people’s hands. And while people were crying out, everybody gathered on the rooftops, and the Spaniards on their roofs. Some ran to hear what was happening at the tecpan, and others ran away. The ones doing business at the market all came. And all the people in the houses came out, the old women and the old men, the children, the people of the altepetl. People threw stones at the upper floor of the building. They destroyed a floral carving that ran around the wall. Then a Spanish officer came and took out his sword and chased people. The Spaniards and some of the mestizos who were there all took out their swords and dispersed people. The women broke through the patio wall on the left side, where people were flung. Men and women just climbed over each other so that they fell back and screamed and shouted. Many really got hurt, and they hammered one old woman’s face. The Spanish officers gathered really fast and pursued people and dispersed them. Right away they took people prisoner. The ones whom they collected they took upstairs and put into the hands of the governor, who beat them. When they were beaten, their hands were tied. The Spaniards went to close all the roads everywhere. Everywhere people were seized along the roads. They armed them- selves with lances, shields, and other weapons.34

Evening approached. The writer remembered, “The Ave María was ringing.” The Spaniards’ chief constable arrived. The people gave a great shout. Perhaps they knew who he was—the son of Hernando Cortés by his indigenous woman, the lady Malintzin. It was indeed don Martín himself who had come

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on this day in 1564, not long after his arrival in the city. As a preliminary step in his investigation, Valderrama had temporarily removed the viceroy’s offi- cers from their positions of power and replaced them with interim figures. To the post of chief constable, he had named don Martín. Now Malintzin’s mes- tizo son faced the sea of angry indigenous faces. He had not spoken much Nahuatl—if any at all—since he had bid farewell to his mother as a boy, and so he spoke through an interpreter. Like his mother once had done, he coun- seled peace, asking the people to save their lives and fortunes. He said if they did not go home, orders would be issued to arrest them and sell them into slavery. “Everyone must go home. Go home, Mexica.” Whatever he felt inside, and however much he had lost the ability to express himself in Nahuatl, don Martín certainly understood those closing words from the interpreter’s mouth, mirroring his own words in Spanish. Xicallaquican, mexicaye. (Shee- kal-ah-kee-kan, Mesh-ee-ka-ye.) “Go home, Mexica, go inside.” They could not turn the tide of power, he reminded them; they should salvage what they could of their lives.35

Forty-six men ended up being arrested—thirty-one Tenochca and fifteen Tlatelolca. They were quickly tried over the next few days; all were found guilty. On July 21, their heads shaven to mark their shame, they were marched through the streets and given two hundred lashes as they went. Then they were sold into servitude for terms of two or five years. The town crier announced the punishment at every corner, so that everyone in the city should know of their crimes. The indigenous man who had been writing about the events carefully recorded a list of their names, so that posterity should not forget what they suffered.36

That Sunday, July 23, the writer mentioned, there was a public perfor- mance of the Chalca Woman’s Song, the same vehicle for subtle protest that had been sung years before by the musician known as Flamingo Snake, when he wanted to call the Mexicas’ attention to the unnecessarily draconian mea- sures they were using to repress the Chalca people. “It is infuriating. It is heartrending, here on earth. Sometimes I worry and fret. I consume myself in rage. In my desperation, I suddenly say, ‘Hey child, I would as soon die.’” The familiar notes echoed through the streets. It made the authorities nervous. On Monday morning, the Spaniards set up eight poles by the indigenous market; they announced they would tie anyone who criticized the authorities to these poles.37

Inspector Valderrama, meanwhile, was in a state of shock. He had genu- inely convinced himself that the indigenous people wanted to enter into a cash economy with payments made directly to the king rather than continuing

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with the status quo. He wrote to Philip II, blaming the friars. “One can’t believe that this riot by a few Indians could have happened if they hadn’t been incited to it, because besides the fact that they are naturally so obedi- ent, the [new] tax has been of great benefit to them. An animal without rea- son understands and recognizes the good that is done for him, more than a man, even though he has a bit of reason. I have made a great effort to under- stand them [meaning the Mexica], and the situation has not become clear.”38 It had, apparently, never occurred to him that the children and grandchil- dren of the Aztecs who had ruled the Mesoamerican world only forty years earlier might protest becoming impoverished, tribute-paying plebeians in such short order.

The viceroy, don Luis de Velasco, was not surprised at all. He knew the situation on the ground and had expected something like this to happen. But he was in no position to use the recent events to regain his prior authority, for he was dying. After a long illness, his kidneys were failing. He had spent the last fourteen years working tirelessly to cement relations between the various sectors of the new colony, and he now watched as his creation devolved into chaos. He lost the will to struggle; on July 28, he died.39 The senior Audiencia judge, Francisco Ceynos, became the interim authority in the colony. He was a deeply cold man, who once said scathingly to a group of indigenous peti- tioners who were complaining of Spanish policy, “When it was still the time of Moctezuma, didn’t the people used to give their own children to have their breasts cut open for their devil-gods?”40 He was also a good friend and sup- porter of Inspector Valderrama. Malintzin’s son don Martín insisted on resigning as chief constable the moment he learned that don Luis de Velasco had breathed his last. Apparently he could not bear the thought of enforcing the orders of Ceynos and Valderrama.41

In this don Martín made a wise decision, for Ceynos and his colleagues immediately embarked on a major effort to sow dissension among the Indians by attempting to pit the enraged populace against their own nobility. In August, Juan Ahuach, a church painter who worked for the Dominicans, was arrested for demanding an investigation of the gobernador’s actions in accept- ing the imposition of the new taxes. Ceynos sentenced him and a companion to hang. The gobernador, don Luis Cipac, put his personal anger aside— though Ahuach was still shouting that he would take the gobernador down with him if he died—and together with the entire cabildo and numerous fri- ars he went to plead for the lives of the two dissenters. By the end of the day the advocates had succeeded, and the two men were released. However, the troubles were not over: the Audiencia chief took Ahuach aside as he left and

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encouraged him to continue to complain about the indigenous authorities, even inviting him to create a painting that showed their abuses.42

In September, the attorneys for the plaintiffs who had originally brought suit against don Luis Cipac and the cabildo were forced to appear before the Audiencia judges and confess that their clients—Juan the baker and Pedro the tailor—had disappeared. They had run off to the countryside during the tumult in July and had not returned. Messages given to their connections had not led to their reappearance; they seemed to want nothing more to do with the case. Ceynos and Valderrama were displeased, and soon a new suit was filed against Cipac and his cohort. This time the leader of the petitioners was Toribio Lucas Totococ, a rebel who had been among the forty-six rioters sen- tenced to servitude. He was now suddenly released, most likely in exchange for participating in the case against don Luis Cipac—terms he would have been only too happy to accept. Don Luis loathed him, calling him “a sedi- tious, offensive outsider.” Toribio Lucas Totococ produced many years’ worth of complaints he had previously filed against the cabildo for excessive demands, complaints that only now were going to get a serious hearing, thanks to the efforts of the current Audiencia judges to focus popular anger against Cipac rather than themselves.43

Meanwhile, some of the people continued to protest the tax itself, rather than directing their energies against their gobernador and his supposed collu- sion or irresponsibility. Among these was one of the leaders of the church painters who worked for the Franciscans, a man named Marcos Tlacuiloc. He was probably the same person who had become famous for painting a wildly popular image of the Virgin of Guadalupe at a chapel near an ancient foun- tain shrine in Tepeyac, just north of the city. It attracted so many visitors that it made the Franciscans nervous and generated a great deal of agitation amongst them.44 (Later, in the seventeenth century, the story would be born that the site had become famous because an Indian named “Juan Diego” had seen an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe there, just a few years after the conquest.45) Marcos, like a number of others, refused to pay the four pesos required of him and was carted off to prison. The friars apparently paid, or at least petitioned, on his behalf, for they asked his brethren with concern what had become of him, and he was subsequently released.46 While Marcos was jailed, he witnessed a set of exchanges that he would never forget. Ceynos himself came to the prison and tried to reason with (and possibly threaten) the jailed protestors. One in particular, Pedro Acaçayol, talked back to the colonial authority:

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Ceynos said, “There’s nothing more for you to wait for. You can’t keep the pulque you’ve already drunk. Look around! Things are becoming clear. You’ve been here for three Sundays. Doesn’t it hurt you, all that has already happened to you? Are you here to make a point?” Then he said to Pedro Acaçayol, “Listen, you. Four pesos are what you have [assigned to you]. In order to accomplish a little something, put down one peso and three tomines, and a basket of corn. Three tomines can be instead of a basket of corn, because you don’t have lands and fields. That is all [the corn] you will have to give in one year.” At that Pedro answered. He said, “It will not be possi- ble, O king. Where will I get it from? I have only saved one half-peso and ten cacao grains. Please listen, O king. Even though I might be paid four pesos [for my craftwork] it doesn’t stretch [to cover every- thing]. It is needed for my children.”

“And do you serve only your children?” “Whom if not my children? Our Lord gave them to me. . . . And

if I had the money, [you ask]? Yes, if I had it, I would put it down. But all this is to what end? Where am I to get it?”

Ceynos said, “Fine, you will be sold to the metal works.” “Fine, you know what to do, for you are the king.”47

Pedro Acaçayol’s last words were clearly laced with irony. To the Nahuas, a king by definition knew what was best for his people and considered their future. Yet Ceynos understood nothing about the community he temporarily governed and persisted in making reckless demands, causing social unrest and producing poverty. Although Acaçayol’s words were remembered and repeated, and probably gave both him and others some satisfaction, they did little for him in a practical sense. He was sentenced to labor in the metal works manufactory, just as the Spaniard had threatened.48

One ardent protestor who had not yet been jailed asked to meet with don Luis Cipac and the other cabildo members. He had what he considered a bril- liant idea, designed to unite the nobles and the commoners behind one cause. Commoners raged that the nobles had not protected them and that the tax would not hit the wealthy noble families as hard as it hit the ordinary people. Nobles railed against the commoners for not understanding the extraordi- nary agony entailed in being an intermediary between the masses and an uncaring and powerful government. Now this man suggested that two Mexica individuals, one pilli and one macehualli (one nobleman and one commoner),

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come forth and agree to sacrifice themselves for their community. They would stand together, each loudly refusing to pay the tax. They would probably be executed—but they would have made the point to the Spanish authorities that they could not push the Mexica beyond a certain point. That would give the Spaniards pause; it would pressure them to readjust their demands. The gobernador and his colleagues heard the idea out. Then they looked at each other, amazed at the man’s innocence, for they knew the Europeans well. They laughed harshly. “You propose that [only] two will die? When they have died, then you will die.”49

At the end of September, don Luis Cipac himself was arrested and jailed for failing to cause his people to conform. He remained in prison for three days, and then was released on September 30, with instructions to begin the public collection immediately. The pressure was clearly affecting his mental state. The day he was released, he heard an old woman shouting outside about the injustice of the tax. He leaned out the window and shouted, “Bring her in! Tie her up!” Then he had her and at least one other woman beaten. One observer described the blood that came from their torn flesh with disgust.50 Word spread throughout the city both of the gobernador’s arrest and of his whipping of the women. In the first week of October, indigenous officials began to move through the neighborhoods of the city, house by house, col- lecting the tax, or as much of it as they could. The city’s women now worked into the night, spinning yarn and thread. This work that had been their badge of honor during the time of their city’s power, when they did not have to do it and could buy the cloth if they chose, or demand it as tribute, now became a dire necessity.

On Sunday, October 14, the cabildo members held a public counting of all that had been collected: 3,360 pesos. It was not the required one-third of 14,000 pesos, but it was a good start, enough to buy the community some time. The officials looked so exhausted as they stacked the coins and sorted and double counted and recorded the results in front of everyone that it was difficult to blame them. “How can we be confused?” the people asked. “Aren’t we a conquered people?”51 Then the cabildo members went in procession to deliver the funds to the Royal Treasury. When they returned to the tecpan, they held an open meeting. A representative from each of the city’s four quar- ters spoke. Two of them wept, marking the political significance of the moment. Don Martín Ezmallin of Moyotlan, a grandson of Ahuitzotl (through one of the tlatoani’s daughters), who was old enough to remember the days before the conquest, actually sobbed. He spoke of the injustice of asking men without land to produce more income as if by magic, along with

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the tragedy of having to ask the women to make the money by spinning. But then he spoke angrily of those who had been rebellious. “You elders, you men of experience, you have hurt the altepetl by confronting it and rising up. Did anyone here order this? It came from Spain.”52 Older people, he thought, should not behave with the naiveté of young hotheads who knew no better. He reminded them that with the might of Spain behind the tax, there was nothing anyone in Mexico could do to stop the collection. He concluded by forecasting political doom if they didn’t somehow find a way to raise the rest of the required 14,000 pesos, this year and every year, for the Spanish state had not yet exhausted its strength.

***

During all these months, one young indigenous man had been lis- tening to all that was said with particular fascination and horror. His name was Paquiquineo, though he was more often called by his Spanish name “don Luis de Velasco”—after his godfather, who had been the viceroy himself. He was an Indian from the Chesapeake Bay, in the far north (a kinsman of Powhatan, father of Pocahontas). He now lived with the church artisans who worked for the Dominicans, among them Juan Ahuach, the angry painter. In 1560, he had been kidnapped from his homeland when he and another com- panion boarded a Spanish ship, one that was exploring the coast of North America. Since he was the son of a chief, the ship’s captain eagerly took him to be presented at court as soon as he returned to Spain. He thought the boy might possibly serve as an intermediary in the forbidding wildlands of the north, where no fully settled peoples like the Mexica had yet been found. Perhaps he might turn out to be an effective go-between, like Malinche. Back in Spain, King Philip spoke to the young man with interest, for the latter had already learned enough Spanish to make conversation possible. It turned out that he was still an entirely unrepentant pagan, not an eager middleman, and he asked only that he be returned to his homeland. Hoping to make an ally of him, and believing that something was due to a fellow prince, however savage he might be, Philip agreed. He ordered that Paquiquineo be taken on board the next fleet to Mexico, and then returned to the shores of North America on the fleet’s return trip, following the winds.53

Paquiquineo traveled in the same fleet that carried the Cortés brothers and, like them, arrived bedraggled after a rough crossing in 1562. Until the outbound convoy was ready to sail, he was deposited in the Dominican mon- astery in Mexico City. Whatever he may have felt, he did not live in complete isolation, for not only had he learned some Spanish, but he had also acquired

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some Nahuatl from a Mexica Indian named Alonso who had been aboard the ship that had originally picked him up. The companion from home who had been kidnapped along with him was also still with him. The two of them almost immediately became deathly ill in the teeming metropolis. “They got so sick,” wrote the head of the Dominican order, “and arrived at such a state, that it was not thought they would escape.”54 In this condition, Paquiquineo finally accepted baptism and took the Christian name of his noble patron, the viceroy, don Luis de Velasco. He was given attentive care, and he recovered.

Only then did Paquiquineo learn how poorly it had served him that he had impressed the Dominican provincial, fray Pedro de Feria, with his cour- age and his intelligence. Suddenly the friar decided that he saw in him the key to his order’s future. The Nahuas had by and large become good friends with the Franciscans and thus, thanks to that order’s influence over the Nahuas, the Franciscans had become the leading order in Mexico. Now the Dominicans would work with this young man to gain a similar influence over the hitherto untamed lands of North America. He spoke to the archbishop—who was himself a Dominican—and obtained a document forbidding Paquiquineo from returning home. Surely, the Dominicans reasoned, the king would not want him to return alone to his homeland now that he was a Christian, for if he were to backslide, his soul would be consigned to hell. Paquiquineo, they decided, would have to wait until the Dominicans were ready to launch a great undertaking in the north, in which he could serve as translator and guide. Paquiquineo argued, but to no avail. The provincial told him suavely that if he was so distressed about the situation, he could travel back to Spain and speak to the king again. But the young man demurred; if that were his only choice, he would rather stay in Mexico. At least he was on the right continent.55

So it was that the young Algonkian-speaking Indian from the Chesapeake was privy to all the protests that the Nahuas of Mexico City launched in 1564, as well as to all the agonies they suffered. He saw the violence and heard all the plans to try to get the Spanish overlords to change their minds, but it all came to nothing. In early 1566, a direct order arrived from the king to send Paquiquineo to Cuba where he was needed to help launch an expedition to his homeland, and he finally left Mexico. It would end up taking four more years before he at last made landfall in the Chesapeake region near his home village, in the company of a Jesuit mission.56 There, above the James River in Virginia, he was welcomed by his people. Not long after the ships that had brought the settlers left, he arranged to have all the Spaniards present killed, except for one young boy, who later told the story. The Spaniards concluded

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that if even a beloved protégé could do such a thing, then the northern Indians must be inherently barbaric; they steered clear of the northern lands for a long time afterward and allowed the English to gain a foothold at the place they called Jamestown. But perhaps Paquiquineo had simply learned something very important from his years among the Mexica: namely, the futility of rebellion once Europeans had gained a secure foothold.

***

Despite their power, or perhaps because of it, the Spanish authorities of the Mexican Audiencia certainly feared all kinds of social unrest as the tense year of 1564 turned into 1565. Reports of the full extent of the rioting had reached the king—undoubtedly through the sympathetic Franciscans— and now Valderrama found himself on the defensive. He whined in his letters to the king, “I have told the truth in everything that I have written. Your Majesty has been badly served here before I came.”57 In an effort to regain authority and influence, he attempted to go on the offensive. Allying with the Dominican archbishop, Valderrama and the Audiencia announced that the doctrinas (parishes currently served by the Franciscans) were to be taken from them and turned over to secular clergy.

Hoping to please the monarch, Valderrama and the Audiencia pursued the possibility of having encomiendas return to the Crown wherever there was no male heir. This last set of steps caused the encomenderos to become enraged and to flock to the young marquis, the son of Cortés, hoping he would lead them. The encomenderos lived with a great deal of power over the Indians in their lives, and they were a lengthy sea voyage away from the authority figures of Spain. Some began to say they should think of secession, that no one in New Spain needed anything from the mother country any longer. Don Martín, Malintzin’s son, knew these young men well, so he was likely speaking truth when he said that none of them were capable of planning and executing a complex political coup, but were only strutting and shouting like boys. In any event, the talk soon quieted when no firm steps were taken to limit the power of the encomenderos.

In March of 1566, Valderrama, no longer trusted by the king, was pres- sured to depart in the same convoy that took Paquiquineo away. Valderrama had always liked the cocky young legitimate heir of Cortés. But now he was gone. Ceynos, the senior Audiencia judge, was fully in charge, and he did not like the young marquis at all. Within weeks, he moved against the Cortés brothers, accusing them of having committed treason a year earlier, during the middle months of 1565. They had purportedly planned an uprising, working

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hand in glove with the Franciscan friars and the Indians. “And when they were arrested,” reported an indigenous commentator, “muskets were brought to the tecpan, to the central patio of the building, and a Spanish military guard was prepared, every one of them armed.”58 Ceynos was taking no chance of the Indians rioting in defense of the accused rebels—which he apparently believed they might do.

Then began the summary trials, the torture sessions, and the executions. The rapidity and harshness with which Ceynos dared to move against the scions of noble families—among them former playfellows of the king— would be mystifying, were it not for the context. All of New Spain knew that the year before, the Audiencia had faced a massive popular upheaval among the indigenous citizens of the city. Spaniards everywhere still shuddered when they thought of that terrifying Thursday in July 1564, when the Mexica had poured into the streets en masse, armed with anything they could lay their hands on.

Yet there was no genuine evidence that any of the would-be Spanish rebels had ever spoken to any of the Indians about their plans. The trials only revealed rumors that they had.59 They certainly could not have been in regular consultation with don Luis Cipac, for indigenous records reveal that he had broken under the stress by that time. In April 1565, he had begun to experience delusions, and in May, he suffered a mental collapse: he climbed up to the roof in the middle of the night and began a sword fight with an imaginary enemy. He fell to the ground, breaking several bones as well as his spirit.60 In August, as soon as he recovered, Ceynos arrested him for failure to pay a miss- ing 170 pesos.61 At first don Luis claimed he did not owe the state these funds, but several weeks later, in order to secure his release, he arranged to have the money paid. He emerged from prison a profoundly weakened man. In December, the legal charges against him and the cabildo were finally dis- missed, but the news came too late to aid in don Luis’s recovery. He died at the end of the month. Then for a long time, there was no gobernador at all. With him the line of Mexica kings descended from Acamapichtli came to an end; the indigenous recorded the event in their annals. In the critical period between 1565 and 1567, while the Spaniards experienced their own cataclysm, don Luis’s people seem to have focused their energies not on fomenting fur- ther rebellion but on managing the fallout of the destructive new tax policies. Some worked hard at orchestrating and executing a new census, designed to demonstrate that the total tax bill, which was based on a head count, was too high and did not take into account the deaths in the most recent epidemics. Others worked on bridging the class- and neighborhood-based schisms that

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had surfaced during the 1564 crisis: the traditional ruling families partially gave way to allow other people to sit beside them on the cabildo.62 The nobil- ity, unable to agree on who among them should govern, eventually accepted the prospect of another eagle lord tlatoani. The gobernadors of Tenochtitlan would henceforth be outsiders, noblemen from other altepetls, appointed by the Spaniards.63

Still other men set about writing as complete a history of the disastrous events as they could. Just as in the performances of the old xiuhpohualli, the historical annals of years past, they made sure that different perspectives were given voice, one after another, although this time the record was in writing. They carefully transcribed the statements of men from different neighbor- hoods, which were still organized according to the old calpolli groupings. To them, truth was necessarily multiple; they knew that no single person could give a full account of an important moment. And they wanted posterity to understand the constraints they had faced and the reasons they had finally acquiesced. They filled dozens of pages, complete with dialogue, detail, anger, and hope.64 The Spaniards still dreaded the mighty Aztecs, but the Mexicas’ own fears in the night were of a different sort. After all the power they had once wielded, they feared that all true knowledge of the world they had inhabited would be lost. It was the prospect of oblivion that haunted them.

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The Grandchildren 1570s–1620s

The bells were chiming six o’clock in the evening of Thursday, May 3, 1612, as people began to gather at the Royal Accounting Office.1 The doors were unlocked. Inside the great stone chamber of the first floor, twenty-nine decapitated black bodies were piled. Relatives of the dead had been allowed to spread cloths over them earlier in the day, after they were cut down from the gallows from which they had been hanged and their heads placed on spikes, but the flies still swarmed around them. The people who had come now, at the hour spread about by word of mouth—black men and women and Spanish friars and a number of Indians, all of whom wanted to help—at first found themselves in shock. They said little. Don Domingo, or Chimalpahin, an Indian who worked at a nearby church, saw that they had no proper biers for so many, but the families had brought straw mats, taken from beds, floors, and walls, to help carry the bodies.2 They began to walk towards the Hospital of Our Lady of Mercy, where they had been told they would be allowed to bury the dead. Perhaps to give expression to their feelings, perhaps to prevent any hostile Spaniards from stopping them, the friars in the procession began to sing. The Christian hymns carried in the evening air.

***

Chimalpahin was a reserved and self-contained man, but he was none- theless an astute observer. He descended from a line of observers and social critics—it was a relative of one of his ancestors, Quecholcohuatzin, or

A grandmother speaks to her grandchildren. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1,folio 71r.

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Flamingo Snake, who had come from Chalco to this very spot more than a century earlier to protest the treatment that the Mexica were meting out to the Chalca people.3 The Chalca, despite being inhabitants of the central val- ley, had been treated like the most ordinary prisoners of war and sacrificed with little honor; his ancestors hadn’t liked it and had come to sing a protest song. Now the Spaniards were behaving comparably: they were abusing the power fate had given them, apparently without any sense of shame. Once again, a song, a hymn, that said implicitly, “We know that this is wrong, and you do, too,” was the only weapon available.

This was far from the first time that Chimalpahin, the Nahua, had walked side by side with a black man. As early as the 1570s, the decade in which he was born, the African slave trade to Mexico had emerged as a major phenomenon. Over the years, more and more enslaved people had been brought from the faraway continent. (The bookish Chimalpahin went to read about Africa in a popular almanac.)4 In fact, until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the New World.5 They were auctioned off in the port of Veracruz. Most were sent to work in the silver mines or on sugar plantations, but a sizable number were sold to the elite of Mexico City or to the nearby secondary city of Puebla de los Angeles. By the early 1600s, Mexico City had become one of the wealthiest and most impressive metropolises in the world, and every powerful Spaniard wished to be attended by a string of liveried black servants. Even more importantly, as the indigenous population declined and struggled even to subsist, urban businessmen found they could use enslaved labor in the incipient shoemaking and textile workshops, as well as the booming iron foundries and construction trades (including brickmak- ing, tile work, and masonry).6 An enormous and elegant baroque city was being built, and it required more labor than the beleaguered Indian popula- tion could provide. In the 1570s, there had been about as many African and African-descended men in the capital city as there were Spanish men— roughly eight thousand each.7 The number of Spanish settlers increased pro- portionately as time went on, but because of the scale of the trade in those decades, the percentage of black urbanites nevertheless remained large. At the start of the seventeenth century, there were at least twelve thousand Africans and mulattoes in a city with perhaps three times that many Spaniards.8

Meanwhile, between the 1570s and the early 1600s, the indigenous popu- lation of Mexico City, like that of New Spain as a whole, had dropped precip- itously. In 1570, there may still have been as many as sixty thousand Indian people in the city, but their resources were depleted after the tax law changes of the 1560s, leaving them more vulnerable than they had been. Then in

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1576/77 a horrifying epidemic struck. Hemorrhagic smallpox caused people to bleed from all the orifices, even the eyes, and in its wake, other diseases spread rampantly in the weakened population. “There were deaths all over New Spain,” Chimalpahin later wrote. “We Indians died, together with the blacks, but only a few Spaniards died.”9 The epidemic was followed by others. By 1610, there were only about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand indigenous left in what once had been Tenochtitlan.10 In short, the majority of the city’s people were no longer indigenous.

On a daily basis, the shrinking Mexica population probably interacted more frequently with the laboring Africans on the streets and at work than they did with the more numerous Spaniards. In some ways, the Africans would have seemed to them a thriving group. They were quite visible as skilled workers; they worshipped at certain churches where they founded their own confraternities, associations through which they could work together to cele- brate festival days or pay for the funeral of indigent comrades.11 And not all of the Africans or African descendants were enslaved. In a large and cosmopoli- tan city, many black men were incentivized to work hard by being allowed the right to purchase themselves, or they chose to have children by free indige- nous women, thus saving their offspring from slavery.12 After an initial period of confusion, it was determined that children would follow the legal condi- tion of the mother. For Chimalpahin and the other Indians, this was a new kind of slavery: the disaster that befell the mother when she was enslaved would be visited on her descendants forever. Before the conquest by the Spaniards, such a thing would have been unthinkable to them. But now they grew accustomed to the idea that in tliltique (“they who were black”) were tied to the condition of slavery if they were born to an enslaved mother. The Mexica lived and worked with their new African neighbors, sometimes resenting them as individuals, sometimes respecting them, sometimes pitying them, sometimes loving them, but probably almost never questioning the new order that held them all in its grip.13

What Chimalpahin had learned a few years earlier was that the very vibrancy of the urban black subculture sometimes exacerbated its vulnerabili- ties. On Christmas Eve, 1608, many dozens of the city’s black residents par- ticipated in a mock “coronation” of a black king and queen, giving them paper crowns and decorated thrones, and then partying through the night. This was in keeping with traditions of West Africa as well as Europe’s widespread car- nival. The frightened white population—which had long been nervous about the rising numbers of Africans in their midst—was not accustomed to the idea of anyone bowing to a local African king. They held an investigation, but

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could not prove that anyone had ever genuinely planned to initiate a monar- quía Africana, except in fun.14

The Spaniards behind the investigation, however, did not let the matter drop. It was no accident that a few months later the ruling council of Mexico suddenly decided to organize a force to go out into the countryside and ferret out the so-called maroon communities. The word cimarrón had once referred to runaway cattle and other errant farm animals but was now shortened and applied to people. Over the years, first dozens and then hundreds of slaves on sugar plantations had run away and joined other escapees living in relatively unknown, unsettled lands, especially in the eastern lowlands. They made their living by robbing passersby on certain roads, hunting and trapping animals, and planting crops in tiny plots hidden in the wilderness. In the early months of 1609, the Spanish authorities decided to send a force out after maroons liv- ing near the city of Puebla. The patrol was composed of several hundred men, including conscripted rural Indians still armed with their traditional bows, the same kinds of allies usually brought by the Spaniards when they went to conquer new territories. After a few months chasing the fugitives about the countryside without result, the authorities decided to declare victory and grant the renegades the right to establish a small, permanent town, on the condition that they not allow any new runaways to join them. This was the Europeans’ standard maneuver in such situations.15

Then in the waning days of 1611 an enslaved African woman in Mexico City who had been beaten and tormented by her owner for years was mur- dered by him. The owner was Luis Moreno de Monroy, from a famous and wealthy family; today we do not even know the brutalized woman’s name. But the people knew her name then. The large black population—many of whose members had by now attained positions of great authority as supervi- sors and foremen—nearly rioted the day of her funeral. The organizers of the protest were said to be members of a black confraternity at the church of Nuestra Señora. Hundreds of people marched to the Royal Palace to demand that the murdered woman’s master be held accountable for his deed and then marched on to Moreno de Monroy’s house and shouted at him for several hours, but they hurt no one. The high court did not order an investigation of the woman’s death as the people had demanded. Instead, the authorities decided to attempt to calm the white population’s fears by ordering that the leaders of the protest be flogged. Fortunately for the latter, their powerful owners intervened and prevented the punishment from being carried out.16

The Spanish population of Mexico City continued to feel jittery. There remained angry blacks in the countryside and angry blacks in the city. Then

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on February 22, the viceroy, don fray García Guerra, died of an infection.17 Without a highly responsible person in charge, the city was vulnerable to the manipulations of power-hungry and vicious men, just as it had been in the mid-1560s after don Luis de Velasco died unexpectedly. Members of the Audiencia, the ruling council that held supreme power in the absence of a viceroy, began to hear stories from whites who claimed to have overheard black people talking about an uprising, among them some Portuguese slave traders who said they could understand the Angolan language.18 On Sunday, April 1, the council sent guards to the church of Our Lady of Mercy where they arrested a number of black worshippers on the grounds that they had been fomenting rebellion against their Spanish masters. Chimalpahin heard all the details from someone who was there. “The sermon was being preached when the officers came,” he commented.19 Two weeks later, several edicts were read aloud by town criers all over the city. Henceforth, no black man was to carry a sword or wear a Spanish-style collar; no black woman was to wear a veil. And Spaniards owning more than two black slaves were to sell them, so that no household would have more than two black residents. No sitting vice- roy would have alienated the city’s wealthiest white men in this way, but angry, lesser men were in power now. Finally, the council posted guards at all the major entries to the city, lest the maroons living to the east or west reenter the city to free their urban kin. Chimalpahin could see the guards stationed on the southern road from where he lived.20

Two days later, on Monday of Holy Week in 1612, another proclamation was made: there would be no further processions or any public celebration of Easter week. These precautions were taken because it was rumored that the blacks were going to rise up on Thursday of Holy Week. At this, Chimalpahin became seriously irritated. A close friend of his had recently petitioned for and organized a new church organization, an indigenous confraternity, among the Mexica living up in Tlatelolco, and they had spent many hours planning and preparing for a grand procession that would bring honor to the Tlatelolca people. “But it was ruined,” Chimalpahin said.21 It had been an utter waste of effort. (Later, Chimalpahin would note, the Indians—those in Mexico City proper—were the only ones in the city who kept the faith and took the usual papier-mâché figure of Jesus down from the little wooden cross where it was hanging and buried it according to custom. They had to do this secretly in the garden, inside the wall surrounding their indigenous chapel, not out in public, as all events were supposed to be canceled.)22

On Wednesday, the Spaniards worked themselves up into a frenzy of fear. Chimalpahin remembered: “It was very dark because of clouds, and it rained,

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and it cannot be found out who went shouting all around the city of Mexico— was it not some mischievous Spanish youth?—shouting to people and going about saying at the corners of houses everywhere that the blacks had arrived, that they were not far away, that everyone should get equipped for fighting. . . . All night the Spaniards did not sleep and kept vigil.”23 Years later, a Spaniard, not wanting to blame a practical jokester, would say it was some roving pigs that had first frightened someone and generated the initial alarm.24 Be that as it may, Chimalpahin couldn’t help laughing. “We indigenous were not at all frightened by it but were just looking and listening, just marveling at how the Spaniards were being destroyed by their fear and didn’t appear as such great warriors [after all].”

He probably would not have found humor in the situation, however, had he known all that was going on. In the basement of the Royal Audiencia, doz- ens of the black men and women who had been arrested during Easter Week were being tortured on the rack, as well as by water boarding, just as Malintzin’s son had been. Don Martín Cortés, however, had been better prepared for it, and he still had his honor and high status left to lose, so he managed to refuse to give his tormentors what they most desired. This time, many of the victims apparently said what their torturers told them would bring an end to their sufferings—that there had been a plot. No records of the fast-paced sessions survive; probably none were kept. But we know how such events usually went: the victims merely had to answer “yes” as their torturers fed them details. In a final summary, the high court judge wrote that the blacks, free and slave together, had worked out a scheme in which some of them were to be given the titles of “duke” and “marquis,” and they had planned to distribute the Indian encomiendas among this new nobility. A woman named Isabel was to be queen. (The accused woman may have been a healer, for the Spaniards later said that witchcraft had also been involved.) Supposedly, the Spanish men were all to be killed, and their wives and daughters distributed among the black men—the same reversal so often feared by white enslavers, male and female, throughout the hemisphere.25

As word of what had been “confessed” began to circulate among the Mexica, the story took on a decidedly preconquest twist. It seemed the rebels had imagined future crises, revolving around who an individual’s mother was, and whether her lineage was being given its due respect. The younger Spanish women were purportedly to have been distributed among the victorious black men, and the older Spanish women either killed or sent to convents. When the Spanish women’s children were born, the boys (but not the girls) were to be taken away and killed. This would be necessary because “when the moriscos

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[the mixed-ancestry children] increased in number, they might remember that their mothers, on the female side, were Spanish women who came from splendid stock, splendid lineages, more splendid than they were on the side of their fathers, the blacks, so that perhaps then they would prepare for war against them, perhaps they would kill their fathers, the blacks.” Interestingly, the indigenous gossips also insisted that the blacks were going to keep the members of three religious orders alive as teachers—the humble Discalced (Barefoot) Carmelites and Discalced Franciscans, and the learned Jesuits. But even they, the scaremongers said, were to be castrated.26

Chimalpahin, however, does not seem to have believed any of it. Nothing indicates that he could not believe in tliltique, the blacks, to be angry.27 He understood their anger. He simply could not believe that so many had partici- pated in creating such a farfetched plot, or that they would have wanted to bring on an unwinnable war. Instead, he saw them as victims and began to refer to them by a word only he seems to have used, in tliltzitzin, something akin to “the poor blacks.” In ordinary life, the suffix -tzin was not so much an honorific as an expression of empathy or affection. Technically, he should have said, in tlilticatzitzin, but since he had generated the word on his own, he could say whatever he liked. On Wednesday, May 2, after only a few weeks of investigation, twenty-eight men and seven women were hanged in one day. “It took three full hours to hang them,” he said.28 Eight new gallows were con- structed for the occasion. He noticed that when the condemned faced death, even at the last moment, when they could have cursed the world that had been so cruel to them or, if the stories were true, gained a probable ticket to heaven by confessing, they did neither. They utterly denied having partici- pated in a plot. “We do not know what we are accused of, what we are being punished for,” they shouted. As they died, they “cried out to their redeemer our lord God.”29 The authorities’ plan, Chimalpahin said, had been to quarter them all and leave their body parts on display on the roads radiating out of the city, but a group of priests and doctors went to remonstrate with the high court judges, reminding them that such a step would create a health hazard. That was the only reason, sniffed Chimalpahin, that they decided the next day to quarter only six of them. The decapitated bodies of the other twenty- nine were deposited in the nearby chambers of the Royal Accounting Office.30

On Thursday evening, Chimalpahin helped with the work of the burial at the Hospital of Our Lady of Mercy. Later he went home to his room at the church of San Antonio Abad, at the southern gate of the city. He wanted deeply to believe in the elemental goodness of the world in which he lived— he had largely put the conquest behind him, and was moving matter-of-factly

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toward the future—but on that day, when he had witnessed an atrocity com- mitted in the name of the law, the name of the king, and the name of God, he had no choice but to doubt the justice of the laws as well as the morality of the men who enforced them. He made no impassioned statements, but in his writings he subtly made it clear to posterity that there was a limit to the moral authority he would accord the Europeans who ruled his world.

***

Understanding the reaction of this observant Nahua—his ability to critique the Spaniards, and yet his hesitation to rage at them—requires a comprehension of the range of his life experiences from his childhood on. The infant Chimalpahin was born in the countryside on May 26, 1579.31 His town, Amaquemecan, for many generations had been part of the greater alte- petl of Chalco, which had been founded long before the Mexica established themselves on their reedy island. Chimalpahin’s people were also Nahua migrants who had come down from the north, and they shared a language, religion, and many cultural sensibilities with the Mexica. However, they had been in the central valley longer, and in Chimalpahin’s day, they still had not forgotten it. In the 1200s, they had come down from the north and conquered their kingdom on the south side of the great lake at the center of the valley, and they had defended it successfully against all comers until the 1460s, when the Mexica proved too much for them.

When Domingo—as the boy was christened—was growing up in the 1580s, the conquest of Chalco by the Mexica seems to have filled his imagina- tion as much or more than the one by the Spaniards did. He was raised on stories of the old days, of the deep past as well as the recent past, for his family was proud of their noble lineage and counted backward nine generations to the time of their arrival in the region in the 1200s. Domingo’s father was born in 1550, and his beloved grandmother in 1535,32 just as the Spanish govern- ment was becoming fully established in the area. His grandmother apparently knew—almost certainly was related to—the Amaquemecan musician who was baptized “don Jerónimo” as an aging man in his sixties, the one who had been known before the conquest as Quecholcohuatzin, Flamingo Snake.33 Chimalpahin loved to hear stories about this man who had been a famous drummer, singer, and dancer; he had helped Chalco speak back to power when Axayacatl was king. Sometimes the stories of the past were sad—like those of the adolescent children who left home during the great famine of the 1450s, but then died by the roadside and were picked apart by vultures. Even then, sad as they were, the stories spoke to him, and he remembered them.

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At some point in his youth, he learned about the tradition of the xiuhpo- hualli, or year count, and in his head, he began to construct timelines with stories attached.34

Domingo grew up in a doctrina (or parish) run by the Dominicans, and it is likely that one of the friars became his teacher. Or perhaps he was taught by an indigenous man who had himself been educated by friars, for by now, the Roman alphabet circulated in the indigenous world independently of Europeans. The worlds of educated Spanish families and the indigenous nobility were by no means entirely separate: in fact, a man only a bit younger than Chimalpahin, who chose to become a Dominican, had a Spaniard as his father and the granddaughter of a notable Amaquemecan chief as his mother.35 However Domingo came by his education, he learned fast and impressed those who knew him. By the time he was eleven, he had been sent to live in Mexico City, possibly with relatives, possibly with friars, but almost certainly in order to further his education and apprentice himself within the clerical world.36 Judging from the record he kept at the time—less a diary than a xiuhpohualli—he lived from that young age near the center of town. He was a frequent visitor to the indigenous chapel of San Josef de los Naturales, near the Church of San Francisco, and he liked to go to the zoo at the indigenous community center. On Sunday, April 26, 1592, he reported that two jaguars who had lived there were taken to Spain, and on another day, that a horde of grasshoppers arrived at exactly four o’clock.37

Meanwhile, in 1591, as the city was growing rapidly, a new church was completed at the edge of the old Tenochtitlan, in the barrio of Xoloco, at the start of the road going south to Itztapalapan and then Chalco.38 The road was at first a causeway, for it had to pass over the lake before continuing. The site was exactly the place where Moctezuma had walked out to meet the arriving Hernando Cortés. The church was named for San Antonio Abad (Saint Anthony of Egypt, who wandered in the desert), and its patron was don Sancho Sánchez de Muñón, a leading member of the cathedral council who in the 1580s had even served briefly as acting archbishop. Through the church’s network, this prominent cleric heard of the promising young Indian boy; he could help him cope with the burgeoning tasks associated with running a busy place of worship. Two years after the church was consecrated, when Domingo was fourteen years old, he “entered the church of San Antonio Abad,” as he put it. He would live and work there for many years. Not long after he got there, when he was about sixteen, he was made the mayoral, the general manager of all matters related to the indigenous congregation and probably of the physical plant as well. The church trusted this boy, who

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already behaved as a man. He became known as don Domingo de San Antón. Scholars later began to call him Chimalpahin, one of the family names he tacked onto his usual moniker, and the name stuck.

Domingo was still relatively new in the city when he experienced his first horrendous epidemic. It began in 1595. It was measles and would abate but then return. In 1597 the disease exploded even more virulently. “The epidemic raged terribly, there was a great deal of death. Infants who could already raise themselves up well and crawl, youths and maidens, grown men, mature men and women, and old men and women, all died.”39 In this time of sadness, Chimalpahin’s language echoed the prayers of his people for generations. His words were reminiscent of those once addressed to Tlaloc in times of famine: “With pallid eyes live the babies, the children [of all ages]—those who totter, those who crawl, those who spend their time turning dirt and potsherds, those who live sitting on the ground.”40 Fortunately for Chimalpahin, as part of a well-funded church community, he received good care and good food. He survived this scourge and would survive numerous others.

Surely the young man often felt vulnerable, not only to sickness and death but also to the great fast-paced city in which he lived alone, without his blood family, who were in Chalco. At the same time, it is clear that he also felt pro- foundly empowered. He believed deeply in Christianity, in the radical equality of all souls before God, and he was proud to be part of the New World formed by the merger of his people with the worldwide kingdom of Christ. He saw himself as part of a far-flung network of brave Christian men who left their homes and traveled great distances to work on behalf of the souls of all the earth’s people. He mentioned it in 1591 when hundreds of Tlaxcalans, who had taken it upon themselves since the conquest to be the Spaniards’ ablest lieuten- ants, departed for the northern wildlands, from which point they would later aid in the conquest of New Mexico. They themselves did not want to go, and in their writings they raised a cry of suffering,41 but Chimalpahin wrote opti- mistically, “The Tlaxcalans left for New Mexico. . . . People went out to meet them and feted them and encouraged them with good food.”42 He likewise wrote with delight in 1598 when the friars in the city received word of the suc- cessful founding of Santa Fe. Indeed, he knew personally three of the Indians who had gone north, two musicians and a lay brother. The latter was from his hometown of Amaquemecan.43 A few months later, he reported with rever- ence on the deaths of some martyred Christians even farther away, in Japan:

Sunday, the 6th of the month of December of the year 1598, in the afternoon, was when the bones of the Discalced fathers who died in

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Japan in the land of China arrived. It was afternoon when the friars arrived; they came carrying them enclosed in chests. All the religious who are here in Mexico went to meet them; when they reached [the church of ] San Diego, the guns were discharged. How they died and what happened there was painted on four cloths which were hung at the [indigenous] church of San Josef; everyone saw and admired them, the Spaniards and we indigenous.44

In subsequent years, Chimalpahin reported avidly on all contacts the Spaniards made with Japan and the Philippines. There were many of these contacts as the Pacific trade grew. And to a great extent, he seemed to under- stand the political situation in that part of Asia. At one point, he even referred to the “indigenous” people of the Philippines, using the same word he used to indicate that his own people were indigenous.45 He called them the macehu- altin, which at one point had meant “commoners” but these days could be put to use to distinguish those who did not have the highest political power from those who did, separating lineages that were native to a land from lineages that were powerful newcomers or invaders. Perhaps Chimalpahin under- stood much of what he heard mentioned in Spanish churchmen’s circles because he knew some Asians himself: in those years, there were many unfor- tunate souls from India and the Philippines who were kidnapped, sold in the Manila slave market, then brought to Mexico’s western port of Acapulco. They were called chinos, and many hundreds of them labored in Mexico City as domestic servants. Some even staffed a monastery run by the Dominicans.46

Chimalpahin could not have believed that everything Christian people did as they spread throughout the world was a positive good. But he clearly did believe that the word of God was worth hearing. He was proud of all Christians, whatever color they were, who helped to spread it. He never thought that Spaniards or any other Europeans had a monopoly on the com- prehension of God’s truths; on the contrary, it was the universality of the human soul’s worth that seems to have drawn him. He insisted repeatedly that all humans were the descendants of Adam and Eve; all were equally the pur- poseful creation of God. One of his favorite books was The Confessions of Saint Augustine. He liked Book 1 best, which closed, “The God who made me must be good, and all the good in me is his. I thank him and praise him for all the good in my life.”47

It may seem surprising that a thoughtful indigenous man living about a century after the conquest found his life satisfying, often invigorating and exciting. But have any of the world’s peoples ever allowed themselves to be

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flattened by crisis forever? Certainly the Native Americans did not. In the City of Mexico, Chimalpahin was surrounded by the Mexica—and other Indians who, like him, had migrated from the countryside—who spent their days working, laughing, and arguing, much as they had always done. There were fewer of them than there once had been—the devastating epidemics saw to that—and far more of them lived hand to mouth than had been the case before—extractive Spanish taxation policies guaranteed that—but neither the 1520s nor the 1560s, as hard as they had been, had turned out to be the end of all things. The people were still here, and they still knew how to seek hap- piness. There were even specific elements of the new life that they liked very much—chicken’s eggs, cow’s milk, wax candles, and boxes with locks, they sometimes said, for instance.48 And there were more subtle winds of change that many liked—the new strands of music being played in the streets, from Africa and Europe, as well as the colors first seen on the silks brought from Asia on the Manila galleons.49 Some must have liked the sense of being at the heart of things: an elegant city of monumental architecture was growing up all around them, its rulers in constant contact with the rulers of Europe and of Asia.

Yet Chimalpahin and his fellows did experience nostalgia and were often aware of a sense of loss. At the start of the year 1600, when Chimalpahin was not quite twenty-one years old, he suddenly came face-to-face with the past. Juan Cano de Moctezuma decided to stage a great pageant. He was a one- quarter Indian grandson of Moctezuma’s daughter, Tecuichpotzin, as the peo- ple still referred to her,50 or Isabel, as the Spaniards called her. The Spaniards wanted to mark the opening of a new century with a grand celebration, and Juan Cano the Younger in particular was glad to sponsor a show that would underscore his own family’s remarkable history. He wanted a tableau of some sort surrounding the figure of the Moctezuma who had been in power a cen- tury earlier. To find someone to play the key role, he turned to surviving mem- bers of the royal family. Who could do this job and be taken seriously?51

Not since the downfall of don Luis Cipac had a member of that family been allowed to assume the role of tlatoani, but the family line still existed. In 1566, in the midst of the political crisis of the Spaniards, a son of the late gov- ernor don Diego Tehuetzquititzin named don Pedro Dionisio had put him- self forward as a potential ruler, but he was immediately accused of having molested women and girls in his household.52 In the midst of the chaos, the city folk decided to accept the rule of a quauhtlatoani, an outsider, a noble- man from the town of Tecamachalco, don Francisco Jiménez.

Other scions of the royal family still lived in the city, even though they no longer ruled. A number of them were descended from don Diego de Alvarado

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Huanitzin, the first of the royal line to have been made gobernador, the nephew of Moctezuma who had been married to doña Francisca of Ecatepec— that daughter of Moctezuma who had been kept out of the view of the Spaniards. When Huanitzin died in 1541, he left behind a number of children. His youngest son could have been no more than a few years old at the time.53 He was named Hernando (probably for Cortés) Alvarado (for his father) Tezozomoc (for his father’s father, Moctezuma’s brother, who was himself named for his grandfather, the son of Itzcoatl). In 1600, this junior Tezozomoc still lived in Mexico City and was at least sixty years old. He was famous in his day for being Moctezuma’s grandson through his mother and his grand- nephew through his father. Juan Cano invited him to play the role of Moctezuma of the ancien régime, and he accepted. In full traditional regalia, he perched on a litter with a canopy and was carried through the streets. Before him went a troupe of musicians and dancers. They could no longer perform the old dances as deftly as people did in the 1560s at don Luis Cipac’s wedding, for instance, but they used their talents and new ideas to improvise, and they impressed Chimalpahin and all the other spectators.54

What some in the audience undoubtedly thought, however, was that it had been eighty years since the fall of Tenochtitlan, which meant that sud- denly there was almost no one left alive who could remember with clarity any of the comparable celebrations prior to 1519, or who had heard such great events described by their own parents. The people who knew about the old days were dead or dying. Even the first generation of young people who had worked with the friars and guided their people ever since were passing away. One of Huanitzin’s younger daughters, for example, Tezozomoc’s sister Isabel, had been married to a nobleman from Azcapotzalco named Antonio Valeriano, who had been one of the first friars’ most talented students, known for his work in Spanish, Nahuatl, and Latin, as well as his musical composi- tions. He had worked at the school in Tlatelolco, and later became goberna- dor in the City of Mexico after don Francisco Jiménez left—an arrangement that satisfied everybody, for he was the perfect quauhpilli, eagle lord, if ever there was one—an outsider, true, but a nobleman from within the Triple Alliance, married to a daughter of Huanitzin, and a scholar beloved by the Spaniards. Now he was growing deaf and a little senile and had to have a young man aid him in all things.55

Years went by in which Chimalpahin continued much as usual. Then in 1606–7, a series of events occurred that seem to have convinced him that he should set about writing the history of the Nahua peoples. First, in 1606, typhus came to the central valley; thousands died. In July, the sickness took

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his father, and in October, his grandmother.56 In the rainy season of 1607, overwhelming flooding began. The city, in the center of a geological basin, often experienced flooding problems, but that year the scale was far beyond what had been experienced before. In the downtown area, the waters rose about a foot above street level, making transporting goods and removing waste almost impossible. The common people living at the edges of town suf- fered most. “Adobe houses got soaked at the base, so that they fell inwards,” explained Chimalpahin.57 The people had to leave their homes and thus became wanderers in that filthy, watery world.

Faced with this emergency, the Spanish government decided to take steps toward the permanent drainage of the central basin.58 This was work that the Indians would be required to do. Every altepetl would contribute materials, food, or labor. The massive project that became known as the “Desagüe (drainage) of Huehuetoca” began almost at once. First, the Spaniards demanded that thousands of people work on digging a great channel that would direct the melting snows from the surrounding mountaintops away from the city. It soon became evident, however, that the project was ineffec- tive, and it was abandoned. Then the engineers conceived of a plan of exca- vating a massive, V-shaped ditch that would fill with excess water in certain years at certain seasons. As Chimalpahin described it, “There was an excava- tion so that the mountain was opened up, cut into, and a hole made in it. And they removed the bones of the dead from there; some of their bones resembled those who lived formerly here on earth. . . . So many indigenous people died there [at the drainage works], and some of the people from the various altepetl fell sick or got hurt.”59 It was rumored that thousands were dying. Once again, it seemed that the end had come for the indigenous peo- ples of Mexico.

As the death toll rose and Chimalpahin went about his work in the church, he came across two books that had just been printed in 1606 on one of the city’s printing presses.60 From 1539 on, friars in Mexico had been publishing books, generally for their own use in the field: indigenous-language dictionar- ies and grammars, as well as catechistic texts, including not only catechisms in indigenous languages but also confessional manuals and collections of ser- mons.61 They wrote and edited these works with the help of Nahua assistants who often remained anonymous. There had been a slight tapering off later in the century, as the ideas of the Counter-Reformation gained sway, and the church fathers began to discourage the use of the vernacular, seeing it as too dangerous to the souls of the ignorant. But recently, such warnings almost seemed to have been forgotten, at least in Mexico. Although the first Anglo

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colony far to the north at Jamestown still consisted of a primitive fort, the colo- nists in Spanish America were in the midst of a new burst of publications.62

Two of the latest works impressed don Domingo. One was quite different from those by the religious authors that he was accustomed to reading. It was by a newly arrived Spaniard, Enrico Martínez, who used his knowledge of European almanacs and encyclopedias to write about his new home— Reportorio de los tiempos e historia natural de esta Nueva España (“Report on the History and Natural History of New Spain”). He included a little about everything—though his knowledge of the history of the Americas was quite limited compared to Chimalpahin’s. The work was theoretically a compen- dium of knowledge about the New World, but it lacked an indigenous per- spective. The other book was by a prolific (and to Chimalpahin, quite familiar) Franciscan friar Juan Bautista Viseo, and was called Sermonario en lengua Mexicana (“Sermons in the Mexican Language”). On its smooth pages where word after word was printed in Nahuatl, fray Juan gave credit in the introductory pages to the eight Nahuas who had worked with him, undoubt- edly almost all known to Chimalpahin, among them don Antonio Valeriano.63

In 1608, Chimalpahin began the project of writing his people’s history on a grand scale.64 It would be a xiuhpohualli, or a collection of multiple xiuhpo- hualli, in the old tradition. He would record the history of the Mexica, of the Chalca people, and of anyone else for whom he could find sources, perhaps Azcapotzalco, Texcoco, and others. And he would do it before it was too late.

In some ways, Chimalpahin had been researching this project for years. He had always been interested in his people’s past, and his friends and acquaintances often showed him materials or shared stories with him. It had probably started with his learning about the nine known generations of his family’s heritage. When he began to write, he styled himself “don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin.” The “San Antón” and the “Muñón” were in honor of his church and its patron, but the last two names commemorated the family lines from which he was descended. “Chimalpahin” meant “Ran-with-a-Shield,” and it was the name of a great- great grandfather on his father’s side, the younger brother of a reigning tla- toani. Cuauhtlehuanitzin, or “Rises-Like-an-Eagle,” was the name of the elder brother king himself, and don Domingo was descended from him through his mother’s line.

Chimalpahin had long collected his family’s genealogies and paid atten- tion to stories that aging family members could recount to him, but he also sought written documents. In the final section of his great work, he wrote a great deal about where he had obtained them—for, he said, like the scholar

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that he was, he thought his readers might someday want to know.65 A number of friends and relatives among the Amaquemecan nobility were able to give or loan him aging folios, documents created decades earlier when the use of the Roman alphabet was new and young students were eagerly writing down what their elders told them. The best of all came from don Vicente de la Anunciación, a cousin of his maternal grandfather. He had copied it from a book that had been in the possession of his father-in-law, don Rodrigo de Rosas Huecatzin. When don Rodrigo was a child, he had been among the very first generation to learn the alphabet, and in the 1540s, as a young adult, he became Amaquemecan’s scribe. This turned out to be important, because the five subsections of the altepetl were squabbling about which of them, in this new postconquest world, should provide the altepetl’s tlatoani. In 1547, the viceroy, don Antonio de Mendoza, sent an indigenous judge from Xochimilco to settle the dispute. The people held a great public meeting about the issue.

In order that the judge could investigate all the ancient pronounce- ments of all five segments of the altepetl, those who were the noble elders deliberated over it in a great gathering and put forth certain ancient statements. And they put down in written form, in a book, how the five segments had been organized, so that they could present it to the judge. What the elders sought to present was really a true account, just like it had been, because it was impossible to lie before the others.66

Don Rodrigo was the scribe at this great event. Through him Chimalpahin had direct access to the rich, detailed language of the history performances of past times. Each section of the altepetl would have presented their remem- bered history, one after the other, as was traditional, but this time the statements were phonetically transcribed and preserved in a book. Thus Chimalpahin could step back in time to the 1540s, to the days of his grand- mother’s childhood, and actually hear the elders speaking, giving him nearly unique access to the past.

Don Vicente had copied only part of the book. Realizing the value of what he had after speaking with Chimalpahin, he went back to his father-in- law’s house where the book had been stored in the attic. But sadly, someone in the intervening years had disposed of the disintegrating and possibly worm- eaten object. All that remained of it was the part he had copied, which Chimalpahin now possessed.67

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Meanwhile, in Mexico City, Chimalpahin let it be known among his many Mexica friends that he was working on a grand historical project and would be grateful to be allowed to borrow and copy any writings that the peo- ple had. He got word of numerous documents and copied them all tirelessly. Relatively early in the process, in 1609, he went to speak to Tezozomoc of the royal line, who had played the role of Moctezuma at the celebration of 1600.68 Tezozomoc, too, was a bookish man, a history-keeper. In his head, and in rolls of paper in boxes and baskets, he held dozens of detailed, highly specific Mexica genealogies involving people of the sixteenth century both before and after the conquest. He knew what was solid information and where there were gaps. When he couldn’t remember, for example, the name of someone’s third daughter, or whom she had married, he said so, rather than making something up. He was also acquainted with stories, remote apocryphal tales that were significant in a different way, important for what they revealed about people’s beliefs, even if they were not literally accurate. Some of what he knew he had already written down: “I, don Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, write this on this day,” he recorded occasionally. Tezozomoc was at least seventy years old, and he knew these papers needed a safe home where they would be rec- ognized as valuable and useful. Other material still existed only in his head, and he needed an amanuensis who cared about historical memory.69

When Chimalpahin and Tezozomoc met, the two men must have looked with interest at each other. One was a scion of the Mexica royal household, a wealthy man in his own right, and the other a lesser nobleman from the once- subject state of Chalco, the mayoral of a local church. Their great-grandfathers had once been at war with each other. Quecholcohuatl from Amaquemecan had knelt in fear before Axayacatl. But those days were gone, and in that fact the two found their common purpose. Neither of them wanted the complex Nahua world of the central valley, as it had existed before the arrival of the Europeans, to be forgotten, or “erased,” to use their grandfathers’ word. In their writings, both men made passionate promises, almost certainly reiterat- ing what used to be said on the days of great historical performances, using highly traditional metaphors. “It will never be forgotten,” Chimalpahin said. “It will always be preserved. We will preserve it, we who are the younger brothers, the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great- grandchildren, we who are the [family extensions]—the hair, eyebrows, nails—the color and the blood, we who are the descendants . . . we who have been born and lived where lived and governed all the precious ancient Chichimeca kings.”70 Tezozomoc murmured much the same. “What the ancestors came to do, what they came to establish, their writings, their

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renown, this history, their memory, will never perish, will never be forgotten in times to come. . . . We shall always keep them, we sons, grandsons, younger brothers, great- great-grandchildren, great- grandchildren, we their descen- dants . . . and those yet to live, yet to be born, will go on telling of them, will go on celebrating them.”71

The religion of the two men’s grandparents was premised on the notion of a carefully maintained record of a succession of imploding and renewing worlds, none of which was ever to be entirely forgotten. They themselves lived not in an original setting, but under a Fifth Sun, and since the fifth world’s beginnings, people had been remembering the story of how it came to be and coping with changes in it by reiterating all that had passed before. They did this not just through oral retellings, but through oral history guided by writings. “Here it will be said and told, the relations about the ancient way of life, the painted words about the ancient kingships.” It was a tradition that could not be broken without breaking faith with many generations past. “They left us, spoken and painted, their ancient words, the elder men and the elder women, the kings and nobles, our grandfathers and grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, our ancestors who came to live here. Such is the relation that they made, that they left for us. This relation of the altepetl and of the altepetl’s kingly lines, painted and written on paper in red and black, will never be lost, never be forgotten. It will be preserved forever.”72

Perhaps the two men prayed together in this very way. Or perhaps they were too busy and too practical. But they understood each other nonetheless.

***

As Chimalpahin sat down to write his great work, he imagined an audience not of Spaniards or other Europeans but of Native Americans of the future. He envisioned readers who were indigenous and in danger of losing touch with their ancestors’ experiences on earth. He said to his readers of the future that he knew, if they were reading his work, that they had become Christians, and he acknowledged that the Christians had brought a great deal of scientific and technological knowledge with them (mentioning eclipses, for instance). But their own people had had a wealth of knowledge, too, which they had preserved as best they could in the early days, and he would explain how he had come by these writings, “so that you the reader, you who are Christian, may not doubt or waver.”73 As he proceeded, on occasion, he would also explain terms and phenomena. For example, when he mentioned a god named Ome Tochtli (Two Rabbit), he knew that a seventeenth-century

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reader, even an indigenous one, might not know what he was talking about. He asked his readers to recall their school days and compared Ome Tochtli to the Roman god Bacchus.74 He hoped that with this sort of scaffolding, his writings might be accessible. He would write only a little in Spanish; mostly the work would be in Nahuatl, the language of their people.

In his final compilation of his various works, he began at the beginning, with Adam and Eve. He could imagine some of his audience objecting that this was irrelevant, but he was adamant that this was the place to start:

Even if it doesn’t seem relevant to treat it here, it is necessary that all of us people here—we indigenous people from New Spain—that we know that what is called the first human generation was created from the earth, from the mud, and was created only one time. From it we all come and are born. From it all of us people on earth descend, even though there have been [two groups], gentiles and idolaters—[including] those who engendered us, we the people here in Mexico Tenochtitlan, and all the altepetls of New Spain.75

In the next section, Chimalpahin gave a brief synopsis of Old World history, drawing freely from Plato, the Bible, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and other foundational Western texts. He theorized that the peoples from the edge of Europe, from the Baltic, who had given the medieval Christians the most trouble in their conquest, might have been the Nahuas’ ancestors.76 Someone from the Old World, he was sure, had constructed boats and some- how made it to the (then unknown) New World. However it had happened, people had somehow ended up at Aztlan, at the Seven Caves, and from there had begun to wend their way south.

Now Chimalpahin could begin to write the histories he knew so well. Before long, Shield Flower was shouting at her captors, daring them to attempt to extinguish her. Her people, she warned them, including those yet unborn, would never waver. Individuals would perish, but her people would never die. They would experience loss, but it would never be permanent. Life was not easy, but it was nevertheless profoundly good. It was too simple to say that any enemies, including the Europeans, could ever bring pure evil or utter devastation to the land.

***

Yet one May evening in 1612, Chimalpahin’s steadiness of purpose and eternal optimism seem to have wavered. Even before the events that had

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ended in the brutal killing of thirty-five people, he had been struggling. In that period, the indigenous chapel of San Josef had as chaplain a vicious and corrupt man, fray Gerónimo de Zárate. He had tormented the city’s indige- nous people for years. Then one day in January 1612, the chaplain decided to extract money from the head of one of the confraternities, a man named Juan Pérez. “He stood him up against a stone pillar, naked and quite ill, where by the order of the priest they gave him a lashing. They left him almost dead, hav- ing fainted from the lashing. And [the chaplain] preached about him, saying in the pulpit that he dissipated much money that had been given to the con- fraternity. And then he had people take him to jail and lock him up, so that he would pay it back.”77 When Juan’s wife learned what had happened, she went mad with rage and found the courage to go the office of the viceroy. Several others went after her and told their own awful stories about Zárate. Chimalpahin wrote of what he knew, summarizing, “[Zárate] thought noth- ing of the Mexica. He even thought nothing of some Spaniards, when they implored him on someone’s behalf about something.” Chimalpahin evinced the greatest admiration for Juan’s wife. “The people thought [Zárate] very evil, but although the Mexica were angry about the priest because he treated them like this, they had patience, they kept it inside, no one dared to make it public and make complaint to the Royal Audiencia.” These were remarkable words for the seventeenth century, a direct avowal of hidden feelings: They kept it inside, no one dared to make it public. And Chimalpahin added that it would have remained thus “if it hadn’t been for María López, who was so bold as to accuse him before the lord judges.” It took months before the chaplain was permanently ousted, and by the time he was, the viceroy had died and the arrests of the black city folk had begun, so there was little celebration.

In his writings, Chimalpahin had always fallen back on the idea that the world might be largely good, largely the work of a benevolent God, yet have within it certain evil individuals. That was how he thought of Zárate. “Let him alone give an accounting [of his actions] to our lord God.” And he added, “Let him not be talked about.”78 By that phrase, “to be talked about,” he meant “to be honored, to be known.” He wanted Zárate erased from the people’s memories; he counted on God to punish him in the hereafter, based on a full accounting of his deeds.

But in May 1612, Chimalpahin seemed to reach a kind of turning point. He was not satisfied simply to dismiss the high court judges who sentenced thirty-five black people to death in one day as people who were best forgot- ten. In a unique move for him, he very carefully listed the names of every single one of the fourteen Spanish royal officers who had condemned them, as

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if he wanted their names recorded so that justice could one day be done, before God if before no one else. The vertical column of names and titles was long, dominating the page. He ended his list: “These were the councilors who administered the law upon the thirty-five blacks, so that they were hanged on this day.”79 Chimalpahin, whose imagination was drenched in biblical imagery, would have remembered the haunting text from the book of Revelation: “I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, accord- ing to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them, and they were judged every man according to their works.”80

***

Yet Chimalpahin may not have found sufficient comfort in keeping his book of records, for only a few years later, he ceased to work on it. The prob- lem was deeper than the existence of certain evil individuals who would one day meet their maker and pay for their sins. The problem lay in the existence ever since the Spanish conquest of extreme power imbalances. In their daily lives, the Indians and the free blacks and mixed-ancestry people and even the enslaved could often live happily—loving each other, arguing, telling stories, laughing at a good joke. But when the Europeans in their lives chose to strike, the disempowered had almost no recourse. It could happen anytime, and fighting back could sometimes make the situation worse. So it was that “they kept it inside,” as Chimalpahin said regarding the events surrounding the chaplain Zárate. It was an old story, as Chimalpahin the Chalcan knew, pre- dating the arrival of the strangers, but it had grown worse due to the greater imbalances that now existed. Human sacrifice had ended, as had been prom- ised, but other forms of abuse proliferated. In some ways, violence was even more pervasive than it had been, because a small group of people had the legal right—born of might—to denigrate so many.

Whether or not Chimalpahin ever thought this way on a conscious level, some Indians in the former Tenochtitlan definitely did. When Chimalpahin was a child, probably around the time he moved to the city, the remaining indigenous students at the school in Tlatelolco put on a play. There were few of them left, for public opinion had turned against the school since its early founding, and it was starved for funds.81 The students wrote the play’s dia- logue themselves. One character commented, “According to the opinion of many, we the Indians of New Spain are shams, like magpies and parrots, birds

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that with great effort learn to talk, and soon forget what they have been taught.”82 The youthful playwright was angry, and he did not “keep it inside.” Few others, however, gave voice to any rage they felt. It was safer not to. The closest Chimalpahin ever came, even in his private writing, was to say about certain mestizos: “They just try to be Spaniards, belittling us and mocking us, as some Spaniards do.”83 But then he concluded by reminding himself that whatever these arrogant people might think or do, Adam was father and Eve mother to all living people.

In 1624, Chimalpahin left San Antonio Abad after thirty years there. The church had been closed down. Its patron died, and a bitter legal fight over the inheritance ensued.84 In the same period, the entire city was engulfed in what is now called “the tumult of 1624.” Crop failures and rising deaths—especially of children—from a terrible epidemic of whooping cough sent people into the streets. The crisis brought political fissures at the highest levels to the fore; the viceroy and the archbishop found themselves very nearly at war with one another.85 On top of this came serious flooding. One indigenous writer com- mented wryly that “the viceroy became a fish,” as he had to travel around by boat.86 We do not know what Chimalpahin thought of these events, for he had stopped keeping his record. Comments in the text of his great book of his people’s ancient history indicate that he was still working on that project in the 1620s—his last dated comment there is made in 1631—but in 1615, Chimalpahin seems to have entirely given up keeping a record of current events.87 Perhaps he did not have time and energy for both works. Perhaps he found the record of his own times depressing and the record of the Nahua past energizing.

From what Chimalpahin had written before, it is clear that he foresaw cer- tain dangers and envisioned certain battles he wanted to see waged. Like some who had gone before him, he feared collective amnesia—the loss not just of the Nahuas’ cultural knowledge but even of any genuine belief that his people had ever had a complicated history or experienced subtle and shifting reac- tions to it. To counteract this, he used his quill to transcribe and organize all the stories that he could find.

***

When Chimalpahin died, his papers passed into the hands of a direct descendant of king Nezahualpilli of Texcoco, in whose reign great poetry had been sung to rapt audiences. This was don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (Eesh-tlil-SHO-cheet), whose name referenced an orchid-flowering vine. Like Chimalpahin, he had added an Aztec ancestor’s name to the Christian

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one he had been baptized with as a youth. The ancestral Ixtlilxochitl had been the son of Nezahualpilli, the one who refused to be bought off by Tenochtitlan’s preferred heir and who joined the Spaniards out of expedience. The living Ixtlilxochitl’s mother was the great-granddaughter of that famous conquest- era figure. The living man’s father, a Spaniard, was for a while the municipal overseer of Mexico City’s construction projects. As a mestizo child of a wealthy Spanish man, Ixtlilxochitl lived largely in the Spanish world, yet he was deeply proud of his mother’s antecedents and embraced them as his own. He, too, was a writer of history, but his work was in Spanish and addressed itself to a Spanish audience. He had long wanted to make a point to his Spanish-speaking tutors and schoolmates, explaining, “From my adolescence, I had a great desire to know the events that befell in this New World, which were not lesser than those of the Romans, Greeks, Meads and other Gentile republics famed to the world.”88 To educate himself, Ixtlilxochitl sought out texts from the still-vibrant world of Nahua intellectuals. Chimalpahin was the most prolific writer, but he was by no means the only one. Ixtlilxochitl collected all the texts he could and used them to produce multiple volumes of history.89

There is indirect evidence that Ixtlilxochitl and Chimalpahin—who were almost exactly the same age—knew each other personally, though they never mentioned each other in their writings, and one was fully indigenous and perceived as such and the other almost lived the life of a Spaniard. Chimalpahin said that he knew and liked Ixtlilxochitl’s Spanish grandfather. The two men were both good friends of the Franciscan scholar fray Juan de Torquemada, and Ixtlilxochitl’s children referred to Chimalpahin as “the good don Domingo.” The existence of some sort of friendship between the two seems even likelier, given the fact that Ixtlilxochitl received Chimalpahin’s papers at his death.90

Ixtlilxochitl’s son, don Juan, lived entirely in the Spanish world, and when he died, his papers went to his longtime companion, the Spanish intellectual Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora. Through him, Chimalpahin’s work came to be known to European scholars who soon began to delve into all things Aztec. They understood relatively little of the material and at first took whatever pieces they wanted from Chimalpahin’s texts as well as Ixtlilxochitl’s and oth- ers’. They used bits of the material to suit their own purposes, creating a vision of ancient Mexico that strayed widely from the reality.91 It was in their hands that the story of Cortés having been mistaken for Quetzalcoatl, for instance, took on such sturdy life. Chimalpahin, had he known, might have made one of his dry comments. Yet it is possible that he would not have minded. He had

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a fine sense of irony and tended to remain relatively unflappable, except in the very worst of crises. He might well have told himself that as long as his works were cared for and protected, it did not matter for the time being if few peo- ple grappled with what they actually said. The papers would still be there when people were ready to hear what the ancient Nahuas themselves had to say about the world they once inhabited.

Then would Shield Flower cry aloud from her pyre once again and Itzcoatl reveal the political strategies of a rising altepetl. King Axayacatl and Flamingo Snake might yet dance and play the drum together in a moment of creativity and joy. Moctezuma would walk straight-backed toward a looming pyramid for a grisly ceremony, intent on frightening all others, while Malintzin called out a warning to him from a distance. The Mexicas’ extraordinary efforts to defend their realm would be in vain, for the high king and his people would lose a great war. Then Moctezuma’s daughter Tecuichpotzin would cry bitter tears, some for herself, some for the people running out of their burning houses, some for the newly arrived Africans. The next generation would do the best they could for posterity, doing everything possible to try to fend off the worst results of conquest, including a lasting, grinding poverty. Don Luis Cipac, the last tlatoani, and don Martín Cortés, son of the brilliant slave girl Malintzin, would both meet tragic ends, but their stories would survive and be handed down, albeit in fragmented pieces. Then Tezozomoc of the royal line and Chimalpahin of the conquered altepetl of Chalco would come together to create books of history—books that, contrary to all expectations, would defiantly remain a part of the world of the Fifth Sun for as long as it might last.

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Epilogue

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin worried that posterity might not remember the Aztecs and their achievements. At the time, they were right to be concerned. All around them, the two men found young people who could no longer read the glyphs and possessed no alphabetic annals, who knew little of their own history and understood even less of that history’s context. The situation grew even more dire after the deaths of Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin. By the end of the seven- teenth century, only people from the place called Tlaxcala still understood clearly how a xiuhpohualli was supposed to be organized and could still write one in Nahuatl. The Tlaxcalans had the advantage as far as cultural survival was concerned because, as a reward for siding with Hernando Cortés early on, the Crown had ordered that they not be given out in encomienda, and rela- tively few Spaniards lived among them. Dozens of Tlaxcalans maintained tra- ditional annals, and one author, don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, devoted much of his life to writing hundreds of pages. But they were the last of their kind. By the second half of the eighteenth century, virtually no one remembered how to write (or even read) a xiuhpohualli. Indeed, when an indigenous community needed papers with a flavor of “ye olden tyme” in order to protect their lands, they often had to pay a workshop to produce them. Many of those documents were very beautiful, and they were most cer- tainly indigenous, but they bore almost no resemblance to the histories that

A bird takes flight. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 46r.

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were once written. All detailed knowledge of a remarkable way of life and a style of complex thinking seemed to have disappeared.1

In a certain sense, one might ask, did it matter? The rest of the people who lived in the Americas crossed the ocean in order to get there, whether by choice or in chains. In neither case did their great-grandchildren understand much about the world of their ancestors, yet they remained proud of where their people came from.

The same was true of the Mexicans. On one level, it turned out that Chimalpahin and Tezozomoc had absolutely nothing to fear. Their people’s sense of being indigenous never even came close to dying away. Throughout the colonial era, native people’s sense of themselves thrived. The Spanish Crown established a system of “two republics”: two self-governing entities, that of the creole Spaniards, and that of the indigenous. The native peoples were, in theory, to stay in their communities and contribute part of their labor to the Spanish world, at first through the encomienda, and later through other institutions and practices. Sometimes those duties grew onerous to the point of being devastating; at that point an indigenous family or two might take to the road, taking risks on behalf of their children in the hope of finding a place where they might live in peace and where their hard work would ben- efit them. Sometimes their paths led them to a city, sometimes to a private hacienda; in either place, if they stayed, they gradually became Hispanized. But the indigenous who remained in their villages numbered in the millions, and there they continued to speak the languages of their ancestors and to organize their mental worlds at least partly along traditional lines.2

In the City of Mexico, once Tenochtitlan, a sense of being specifically Mexica did fade among the majority, but a sense of being descended from a great empire full of vibrant people did not die away, even after numerous cul- tures came to call the city home. The indigenous population remained large and significant. Africans intermarried happily with Native Americans to such an extent that their own phenotype was mostly lost; their descendants, too, thought of themselves as largely Indian. Well-to-do indigenous men remained visible in the city, living as the neighbors of Spaniards. They sent some of their sons to the university to become priests and founded convents for their daughters.3

At the same time, the mestizo as well as the Spanish creole populations took pleasure in imagining their city as heir to the Aztec tradition. In the middle of the seventeenth century, pilgrimages to the Virgin of Guadalupe became a full-fledged phenomenon, and people told the story that she had first appeared to an Aztec Indian named Juan Diego in 1528 on the outskirts

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of the city. It didn’t matter that the story was a relatively new invention; what mattered was that everybody, rich and poor, wanted it to be true. At the end of the seventeenth century, one of the greatest Mexican minds of the era, the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, took pride in writing some of her poetry in Nahuatl. Her grammar was dreadful, and it is clear she never spoke the lan- guage well, but her determination to try is intriguing, as is the delight that her Spanish-speaking readers took in such work.4

Arguably only in the wake of the War of Independence (1810–1821) did indigenous identity truly suffer. In one of the greatest ironies of history, it was the efforts of the humanitarian and progress-oriented liberals that struck a significant blow at Mexico’s indigenous peoples. With all people suddenly equal in the eyes of the law, it seemed counterproductive to persist in encour- aging indigenous peoples to speak their own language. No longer could a native person go to court and find a translator: that person would need to speak Spanish. No longer could a native person say she preferred to be educated by her parents in the old way: such a person would need to learn Spanish. No longer could native people say they preferred to own their land in common and let the chiefs decide how to distribute it: they were told it would be best if they owned individual family farms. If they needed to prove title, they could go to court—and do their business in Spanish.5

Under such circumstances, indigenous poverty grew in the nineteenth century. Eventually a government came to power that did not even pretend to care for the rights of ordinary people. And when resentments against the dictator Porfirio Díaz spread throughout the land, many indigenous people joined the fight against him and helped to bring him down. One of the great heroes of the Mexican Revolution was the Nahuatl-speaking Emiliano Zapata from Morelos. Photos of him leading his men to victory or convening a coun- cil where his people sat down to make their own laws, still grace the pages of textbooks and the walls of bars and restaurants. In the decades after the revo- lution, progress did not move in a straight line—but there was progress, and often native peoples were in the vanguard. The Maya who came out of the forest to protest NAFTA in the 1990s called themselves the Zapatistas after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s indigenous people were thoroughly engaged in their own struggles to seek out their history and define and protect their ancestral heritage, much like disempowered peoples elsewhere.

Today, more than a million Mexicans still speak Nahuatl. Among them are those who are promoting scholarship in Nahuatl; they have even written a Nahuatl-Nahuatl dictionary, for instance. They do not want all work with

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Nahuatl texts to have as the only goal translation into a European language. They prefer to participate in creative and critical thinking in terms their own language allows for. Among the Nahuatl speakers there are not only scholars but also artists and writers. They have published plays, stories, and books, some written entirely in their own language, some with Spanish text as well. They write in workshops, and they write alone; they paint on traditional maguey- plant paper, or they type at keyboards, as they choose. Perhaps, say the poets, given all the changes, we have now embarked on life under the Sixth Sun.6

And yet, for every Nahuatl speaker who writes defiant poems, there is another who lives in poverty so oppressive that poetry is out of the question: for every person who is able to give a paper in Nahuatl at an international conference, there is another whose only hope is to leave home and try to start over somewhere else. He may move to a large town in Mexico, where at one time the Mexica founded a trading post at a merchant crossroads that later became a city. Or she may choose to go north, to the land of her remote ances- tors, the forebears of Shield Flower and Itzcoatl, who came from the American Southwest, and hope that she may not be turned away. In either case, it can only be to the good for such people, and all who come to know them and respect them, to be acquainted with their deep history—a legible past that renders them human and envisions them as equals in the drama of the world’s history.

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Appendix

How Scholars Study the Aztecs

For many years, scholars accepted the idea that very limited sources were available for the study of ancient Native Americans. They examined the buildings and objects uncovered in archaeological digs,1 as well as the words of Europeans who began to write about Indians almost as soon as they met them. Columbus, for instance, wrote in his log on the first day he met some Taino people in the Caribbean in October 1492, and Hernando Cortés in Mexico lost little time before he started sending letters home.2 These sources weren’t nearly enough, yet researchers made do because they thought they had no choice. These texts were what was available.

Over the years, two groups of scholars came closer than others to hearing what ancient Native Americans themselves had to say, at least in Mesoamerica. Mayanist epigraphers worked tirelessly, attempting to read the glyphs carved on ancient stelae and on buildings. Eventually they realized that certain ele- ments were phonetic and that they would need to learn Mayan languages in order to make sense of the writing.3 What had once been thought to be the highly individualized spiritual expressions of artists and priests turned out to be political narratives about the births, marriages, and deaths of kings and queens. One long statement began, for instance, “At 29 days, 14 yaxkin [on July 7, 674], she was born, Lady Katun Ahau, noblewoman from the place called Man.”4 Meanwhile, art historians and anthropologists carefully stud- ied the sixteenth-century painted codices prepared by the Aztecs (and other Mesoamerican peoples), often at the request of curious Europeans and usually

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