history

6

Early Days 1520s–1550s

The walls of the adobe houses burned slowly, as the tongues of flame sought wooden beams. But the resistance of the humid mud did not effectively slow the disaster, for the thatched roofs went up in a great blaze, and then came crashing downwards, destroying everything in the homes below. The inhabitants had emerged screaming as the mounted Spaniards set their village alight. They stood and watched as all their worldly goods crackled and disappeared. Some cried; some were too stunned to react. The riders, whom everyone knew had been sent by the prior of the nearby Franciscan mission, thundered off into the distance.1

***

This was a moment in 1559, in a town to the east of Mexico City. The Spaniards had been in the region for more than thirty years, but until now their presence hadn’t been very meaningful to most of the villagers. One of the old men nearby had grown too blind to see much, but the sounds and smells told him everything. He was an aging chief, still known to his people as Chimalpopoca (“Smoking Shield,” like one of the Mexica kings of old), but years earlier he had taken the official name of don Alonso de Castañeda, after one of the first Spanish conquistadors to come to the area. He and a number of other community leaders had spent much of the last two years attempting

A boy paddles his acalli, or canoe. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1, folio 63r.

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to convince the local villagers that the Spaniards really meant it when they said the people must now leave their rural hamlets and move to the larger town of Cuauhtinchan (Kwow-TIN-chan), where they could be more effi- ciently turned into Christians, taxed, and generally kept in line. Those who resisted were to be burned out. Now it had happened in the little village of Amozoc. On this dreadful day, Chimalpopoca would have reflected on all the years of his life, both before and after the arrival of the Spaniards. Many in his generation faced comparable moments of crisis, of course, but Chimalpopoca is unique in that he left us records of his experiences and even, to some extent, his thoughts. A few others who came of age before the arrival of the Spaniards are quoted in the works of younger men, but Chimalpopoca orchestrated the writing of a book that survives to this day.2

The man’s anguish must have been intense, for over the years, Chimalpopoca—or don Alonso de Castañeda—had worked ever more closely with the Spaniards, on the firm understanding that if he did so, the perennial local warfare would end, and his people would cease to suffer. The burning of Amozoc was not exactly what he had had in mind. He did not lose control of  himself, however. He had lived many years and had a long memory; he knew that the morning would bring a new day. He would try to help his peo- ple get through these times. Their children and their children’s children still constituted the future of the altepetl, whatever they had lost in their village.

Political crises and war had predated the arrival of the Spaniards, and this was not the first time that don Alonso had been a witness to pain. One of his formative memories was of the murder of his father and uncle, long before the arrival of the “strangers to us people here.” It was a long story, and he was not averse to telling it on starlit evenings.3 His ancestors had come from a place far to the north at the invitation of other Nahuas who were already intermar- ried with the long-settled people of Cholula. His people helped the Cholulans defeat their enemies, and, as a reward, had been allowed to settle on the still wild lands to the east, where eagles soared but few people lived. They even named their new home Cuauhtinchan, meaning “Home of the Eagles.” Most of the clans continued to intermarry with the Cholulans, but a few, living on the far reaches of their new settlements, forged closer bonds with the peoples farther east who did not speak Nahuatl but a language called Pinotl (its speakers Pinome). Those eastern sub-altepetls were the minority voices in Cuauhtinchan, and they grew tired of their subordinate status. Eventually, in the second half of the 1400s, one of their chiefs made a strategic alliance with the Mexica of  Tlatelolco, asking them to come and intervene. Then the Pinome chief quickly gained the upper hand, and his group began to take over the lands of

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all the others and demand payments of tribute (part of which they in turn had to pay to their new godfathers, the Tlatelolcans).4

Chimalpopoca’s father, Cotatzin, was born into one of the Nahuatl- speaking chiefly families still closely allied with Cholula; they were among those who were weakened when the eastern upstart made his alliance with the Mexica. In 1510, when Cotatzin had only recently inherited the chieftainship of his family’s set of villages, he was invited to the home of Tozcocolli, the Pinome chief who was now the paramount chief of all of Cuauhtinchan, by a messenger who spoke with extreme courtesy. The optimistic Cotatzin went to Tozcocolli’s village. It turned out to be a mistake. “The murderers were already there,” his son later remembered, and they strangled him. Another brother— who apparently responded to the sight with belligerence—fared even worse. He was placed on the cutting stone but not treated with the honor of a true sacrifice to the gods. Chimalpopoca—a child then—always remembered, “When they cut his breast, they did not quickly take his heart out. They stopped in the middle. So he went into convulsions before he died.” Yet another brother of the murdered chief, Tecuanitzin (“Man Eater”), Chimalpopoca’s uncle, took over the rulership of the sub-altepetl and wisely said nothing about the lands of his people that Tozcocolli had usurped or about the murders. Most likely he had a different mother than Cotatzin, mak- ing it easier for him to accept the situation. Indeed, he might even have been in league with Tozcocolli.5

Ten years later, the ruler Tecuanitzin, too, was dead, but not from treach- ery. He died of the foul disease that spread not long after the mysterious strangers arrived in the land.6 When he died, no one in Chimalpopoca’s world had actually seen the newcomers, for the sickness moved faster than the for- eigners. However, gossip about them was already rife. The first concrete news that the people would have heard was that strangers had allied with the peo- ple of Tlaxcala to destroy their beloved Cholula, home of Chimalpopoca’s grandmothers. Then the new enemy moved on to Tenochtitlan, whence they were eventually ejected. Word of that event spread far and wide. Cholulans celebrated and with them, Cuauhtinchan. Not long after that, however, the great smallpox epidemic broke out, carrying off thousands from Cuauhtinchan, including the chief, Tecuanitzin. Chimalpopoca was a strong young man by then, and he survived the disease. In this time of trouble, he took his uncle’s place and became chief of his family’s set of villages, one of the major sub- altepetls of Cuauhtinchan.

Less than a year later, in 1521, word came that Tenochtitlan had fallen to the Spaniards. Like much of central Mexico, the people of Cuauhtinchan

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waited tensely, wondering what this would mean for them. It was not many months before the Spaniards arrived—alongside their battle-hardened Tlaxcalan allies, who were showing the newcomers the way to all the key alte- petls that needed to be defeated if their victory were to be considered secure.7 Some of the local chiefs might have celebrated the fall of the Mexica, but they could not celebrate the arrival of the Tlaxcalans, who had waged such brutal war against Cholula. The men of a number of altepetls in the region gathered together to make a stand. This was a subject upon which Chimalpopoca did not like to dwell in later years. “We were defeated,” he said tersely, using a form of the verb that implied absolute destruction. “We all withdrew to the marshlands.”8 As Nahuas had so often done in the past after great losses—as when Shield Flower’s father had been defeated in 1299—the people went to hide in the swamps. There, they elected emissaries to approach the Tlaxcalans and the strangers and thus sue for peace. They had already heard that their enemies were accompanied by a woman from the eastern lands who not only spoke their own language perfectly but could also communicate with the strangers. Yet they were not reassured by this, for in their experience commu- nication was not always effective in bringing peace. Sometimes, emissaries were simply killed.

Hiding with his surviving people among the reeds, Chimalpopoca waited. The messengers reappeared. They could all return to their homes, they announced, if they agreed to deliver annual tribute to an overlord, who would be one of the newcomers, people from a place called Castile. “What was the tribute?” they asked. A certain number of woven blankets, gold pieces, and turkeys, as well as a goodly supply of corn. Smoking Shield considered his options. He sent the emissaries back to get more specific numbers and to work out an exact measuring unit for the corn, a basket size that both parties recognized as the right amount.9 When he received clarification on the terms, he agreed. This was a tribute payment his people could realistically make. The survivors went home to their villages. They were hopeful that, after mourning their dead, they would be able to pick up their lives and carry on. And for a few years—like most of Mexico—they did just that.

***

At that point in the early 1520s, the eye of the storm was not the rural hinterland but Tenochtitlan, the City of Mexico as the Spaniards called it, and its immediate surroundings. The Spaniards still made their camp across the water from Tenochtitlan in the lakeshore town of Coyoacan, since Tenochtitlan itself was in shambles. “Our lords the Christians had not yet

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come to settle here,” a man who lived near the island’s marketplace remem- bered later. “They gave us consolation by staying for the time being in Coyoacan.”10 The level of chaos in the early months of foreign governance was horrifying. The Spaniards were only able to maintain some semblance of order by ruling through the indigenous elites; in Mexico City, this meant rul- ing through Cuauhtemoc. He was kept in a locked room and heated rods were applied to the soles of his feet when he claimed not to know where his forebears’ stores of gold were held. If Tecuichpotzin, or Isabel—still a girl but rapidly growing into a woman—had ever feared her husband, she could only pity him now. The two of them heard that in the beautiful towns of Texcoco and Xochimilco, the Spaniards loosed their giant dogs and even let the mas- tiffs kill some of the men when the people there likewise denied knowing where the treasure hoards were. In altepetl after altepetl, the translator Malintzin was made to stand on a parapet and shout orders to bring the treas- ure; then she had to watch the punishments meted out if the Spaniards judged that the orders were not obeyed.11

The conquerors seemed to be in a veritable frenzy to amass riches and gen- erally please themselves. When not enough gold and jewels were forthcom- ing, they began to brand prisoners of war they had collected—undoubtedly including some of Smoking Shield’s compatriots from the battle in Cuauhtinchan—and marched them to the coast for shipment to the Caribbean as slaves. In 1522, one-fifth of the profits of this venture (5,397 pesos, as the meticulous records specified) were set aside as tribute for King Charles. The Spaniards kept the prettiest of the captive young women for themselves; other starving girls whose families had been destroyed came to them voluntarily. In at least one case, a group of these girls was kept locked in a building in forced prostitution. Conscience-stricken observers of the treat- ment meted out to the girls told tales back in Spain, and in June of 1523, the king issued a plea to his people that they rein themselves in and cease their abuse of the native women.12

By then, the situation had calmed down somewhat; Cortés had begun to make progress in imposing order and constructing a new political apparatus. The market at Tlatelolco reopened and a relatively normal urban life resumed. Spanish artisans were training crews of indigenous men in Tenochtitlan—it was Cuauhtemoc and the translators who had to use their moral authority to make sure that the crews showed up—and the workers learned astonishingly quickly to construct fine examples of European Renaissance buildings. The great central square of Tenochtitlan became the Plaza Mayor, flanked by a newly rising cathedral, as well as a massive government building with battlemented

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towers at either end. The sound of hammering could be heard morning to evening. By 1524, the Spaniards would be ready to relocate their center of operations from Coyoacan to the City of Mexico.13

At the same time as the urban Mexica were dragooned into building a great European-style downtown, Cortés was distributing the surrounding rural altepetls as gifts to his followers. He did not receive official permission to do so until the end of 1523, but he began the process long before that.14 Each conquistador was awarded the villages of a particular altepetl or sub- altepetl as an encomienda, or “package.” This did not mean that the people living there became that conquistador’s chattel slaves. In theory, it meant that the conquistador was to guard their spiritual and political well-being, and in exchange, the people were to pay him tribute in goods and also labor on his behalf for part of each year.15 Cuauhtinchan, for example, was assigned to Juan Pérez de Arteaga, a conquistador who had spent long hours studying Nahuatl with Malintzin as an assistant interpreter.16 Malintzin often needed help in this period, for she was frequently called upon to help with more sophisticated negotiations than the war itself had necessitated. Rather than merely demanding submission and food supplies, she now had to convey the exact nature of the Spaniards’ political and economic demands, and then try to communicate the nature of indigenous political and economic realities to the Spaniards. It often had to be decided which chiefly line was to rule and which ones were to take a step back. Naturally, only those lines apparently sympathetic to the Spanish cause were to be supported. In Texcoco, for example, the power of Ixtlilxochitl was upheld and that of other family lines reduced.17

The Spaniards had the upper hand in all these arrangements, yet at no point did Cortés and his peers lose sight of the fragility of the peace. There were, after all, still millions more Indians than Europeans in this vast land. In early 1524, Cortés issued a new edict insisting that all Spanish men maintain a full set of arms. Each one was required to own a dagger, sword, and lance as well as a shield, helmet, and breastplate. Any man who did not acquire these goods within six months and then appear on command at military parades was subject to stiff fines. Those who had received encomiendas of up to five hundred Indians also had to arrange to purchase either a crossbow and bolts, or, failing that, a firelock musket and enough ammunition to fire two hun- dred times. If an encomienda contained between five hundred and one thou- sand Indians, the recipient additionally had to obtain a horse. Those who received even larger encomiendas had to purchase more such goods. If an encomendero did not comply, he stood to lose his grant in its entirety.18

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In 1524, not long after this new ordinance was issued to the Spanish pop- ulation, local indigenous leaders were summoned to meet in Tenochtitlan with the newly arrived “Twelve Apostles”—twelve Franciscan missionaries charged with launching the proselytization of Mexico. What the Indians were thinking when they first had Christian doctrines preached to them has long been a matter of great interest. Generally, Europeans have made their own assumptions without much evidence. At first the earliest friars enthusiasti- cally reported that the indigenous were deeply moved and that they, the friars, had been able to baptize many thousands right away. Later, they walked back their assertions that all the Indians had truly been devout converts from the moment they were sprinkled with holy water, but the friars also remained generally confident in their overall success. They convinced the whole world  that they had successfully converted Mexico to Catholicism in rela- tively short order. Only in the 1990s did it become commonplace for scholars to argue that this premise was indeed false—that in fact the indigenous had not simply rejected generations of belief and accepted Christian teachings without question.19

In these more recent discussions, scholars have had to rely upon indirect evidence—for instance, if the Nahuas didn’t have a word for “the Devil,” how could they possibly have come to believe in him so immediately? In their proselytizing efforts, the friars were reduced to using the word tlacatecolotl (tla-ka-te-KOL-ot) for a more generic type of “devil.” This term had been used before the conquest to refer to a type of malicious shaman who could take the shape of a horned owl and fly about casting spells and generally wreaking havoc in unsuspecting people’s lives. A tlacatecolotl generally came forth at night and was at all costs to be avoided. These creatures were hardly on par with Lucifer, but the friars decided that the word would have to do, as there was none better for their purposes. There are innumerable examples of such incommensurate cultural beliefs.20 One historian has argued that both sides were much too quick to assume they understood each other, leading to a kind of “double mistaken identity” that made it very difficult for true Christianity to spread with the rapidity the friars had once hoped for.21 This is indirect evidence for indigenous psychological resistance to the imposition of a European worldview, but it is nevertheless very real.

Yet there is in fact a surviving source that quotes the words of deeply religious Mexica men at the 1524 meeting, apparently giving direct insight into what they thought at first. Bernardino de Sahagún, the famous Franciscan friar who spoke Nahuatl and orchestrated the production of the Florentine Codex, left a record of the exchange, which he called “the

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Colloquies.” It is, however, a somewhat problematic source. First of all, Sahagún himself was not there; he had to have been working with someone else’s notes. Second, the Indians were actually summoned on numerous occasions; the text that has come down to us today is a set of notes purport- edly taken on one day, but the document likely represents a crystallization of what observers heard at several different meetings. Furthermore, the notes must have been taken in Spanish and the translation back to Nahuatl done years later, for no one alive in 1524 could possibly have written in Nahuatl with the fluency that the document exhibits. There were, in short, numerous opportunities for European editors to adjust the record. Yet despite these problems, the source remains credible in essence, for what it quotes both sides as saying is in keeping with assertions they made else- where. And what it claims the Indians said is in no way what the Spaniards would have wished them to say.22

The interpreter—almost certainly Malintzin, though it could conceivably have been one of her apprentices—did her best to translate as the friars expa- tiated for hours on the basic tenets of the Christian faith. When they fin- ished, one of the indigenous leaders present stepped forward and in the most courtly Nahuatl speech offered a welcome to the strangers who had come from afar, thanking them for their precious words, like precious jades, pre- cious feathers, he said, using the Mexicas’ favorite cultural similes. Then he transitioned to express his anguish that most of the wise men who had once ruled in this city had died and that those who survived were their predeces- sors’ inferiors in knowledge and experience. He said that it would be best if they called together the wisest of the surviving priests and let them determine how best to respond.23

That evening, the governing noblemen spoke to the priests and made the necessary arrangements. They must have insisted that they needed help: they were attempting to maintain order among their people in virtually impossible circumstances, and they could not risk making any politically inflammatory, dangerous religious statements themselves. If the Mexica were to defend their faith, someone who was not in a political hot seat would have to do it. So it was that in the morning, a collection of priests from the ancien régime came to hear the Christians speak of their beliefs. They asked to hear from the beginning all that had been uttered the previous day, and the Franciscans were only too happy to comply. “One of the twelve, using the interpreter, repeated everything that they had said to the lords the day before.” If the interpreter was growing tired, no one made any mention of it. Finally, the leading Nahua priest rose and began to speak. He began, as was customary, in the most polite

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of tones, saying that he was overwhelmed by the honor of meeting the new- comers. But then at length he changed direction:

You have told us that we do not know the One who gives us life and being, who is Lord of the heavens and of the earth. You also say that those we worship are not gods. This way of speaking is entirely new to us, and very scandalous. We are frightened by this way of speaking, because our forebears who engendered and governed us never said any- thing like this. On the contrary . . . they taught us how to honor the gods. . . . And they told us that through our gods we live and exist, and that we are beholden to them.  .  . . They said that these gods that we worship give us everything we need for our physical existence. We appeal to them for the rain to make the things of the earth grow.24

The priest spelled out the myriad reasons they had to be grateful to their gods and concluded, “It would be a fickle, foolish thing for us to destroy the most ancient laws and customs left by the first inhabitants of this land.” He added that if the Spaniards were so daring as to insist on the destruction of the old gods, they would be courting political disaster. He spoke as if he were giving friendly advice, but he conveyed a threat. “Beware,” he said, “lest the common people rise up against us if we were to tell them that the gods they have always understood to be such are not gods at all.” Eventually he came to his climax: “All of us together feel that it is enough to have lost, enough that the reed mats, the thrones [political power, the royal jurisdiction] have been taken from us. As for our gods, we will die before giving up serving and worshipping them. This is our determination; do with us what you will. This will serve in reply and contradiction to what you have said. We have no more to say, lords.” A more literal translation of his last words was, “That is all with which we return, with which we answer, your breath, your words, O our lords.” It was a typical way to end a political speech that had wended its way from a courte- ous opening to the stark and angry statement the speaker really wanted to make. In another context some years later, an angry Mexica prisoner would end a speech to his Spanish judges on behalf of himself and a friend with the same sentiment, albeit in less flowery terms, in the style of a commoner: “That is all we have to say!”25

One of the twelve friars muttered under his breath something to the effect that they would just have to wait for these old men to die; the young people would be better listeners.26 And that is more or less what the Spaniards pro- ceeded to do. They decided they had no interest in causing a huge upheaval by

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tormenting these recalcitrant pagans. Indeed, they reminded themselves, the Indians were not actually rejecting Jesus. Some seemed quite willing to add him to their pantheon. They were simply adamant about not replacing their old gods. It made most sense to wait, the friars concluded, and continue with their teachings and explanations. The so-called twelve apostles went to estab- lish missions in the four places where the Spaniards had greatest control: Tenochtitlan and nearby Texcoco, as well as Tlaxcala and its neighbor, Huexotzinco. There they would begin the work of more effectively proselytiz- ing the people of Mexico, largely by working with young people.

***

In mid-1524, the exhausted Malintzin was also preparing to travel, but not in order to accompany the friars to any of their missions. Instead, she was to accompany Cortés overland to Honduras. Cortés had heard that one of his captains, Cristóbal de Olid, who had been sent on an exploratory mission, had set up a rival government in Central America, and he was determined to root him out. Cuauhtemoc and several other indigenous lords were forced to come along as hostages, so that their people would not rebel in Cortés’s absence. Tecuichpotzin, however, was to stay home and guard the interests of the Mexica royal household. If Tecuichpotzin saw Malintzin during the weeks of preparation for the expedition, she must have pitied the older girl—though that was something she was not in the habit of doing. Both young women knew the trip would be futile and likely to be deadly.

Tecuichpotzin had not been in the habit of pitying Malintzin, because in the past three years, while Tecuichpotzin herself languished in virtual impris- onment alongside her beleaguered husband, the former concubine Malintzin, from a once tribute-paying land in the east, had grown startlingly powerful. It wasn’t merely that as translator, she was at the heart of all negotiations as they unfolded. As soon as the acute strain of the war of conquest had ended, Malintzin had conceived a child by Cortés. It was a boy, Cortés’s first son, and they named him Martín, after Cortés’s father. In letters to others, Cortés revealed how much he loved the child, and for a while he even considered him his heir. He did not, however, live with the boy and his mother. Malintzin had been removed to her own household, for Cortés had a Spanish wife in Cuba, and as soon as the peace was made, she traveled to Mexico to join her hus- band. Theirs was not, it seemed, a happy marriage. Cortés and doña Catalina fought in public and in private. Later, when Catalina died suddenly, people whispered that Cortés had strangled her, but he was never indicted for the crime, and it was never proven.

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Probably even Malintzin herself did not know the truth of the matter. She was so preoccupied with other matters that she may not have thought about it much, especially since she no longer had to live with the hot-tempered Cortés. She was translating in multiple venues, high and low, and was committed to training other translators. She ran her own household, earning money to main- tain herself, her son, and her staff through small business ventures that her lan- guage skills and connections rendered it possible for her to operate. She wore an elaborately embroidered huipilli, or blouse, over a fine skirt, as well as sandals— unlike other women, who mostly went barefoot. All of this signaled her status, but she never grew overbearing or boastful. Nor did she ever choose to switch to Spanish dress. Everyone who had dealings with her liked her—except perhaps for Jerónimo de Aguilar, who was no longer needed in a translation chain, since the young woman had become so adept in Spanish. He later bitterly accused Malintzin of promiscuity, after she herself was dead, but no one supported this idea. Others remembered her as a cheerful, honorable, and extraordinarily com- petent person who had done her best to help establish order in the nearly lawless early months. They did recall that Cortés at one point went into a rage when he imagined that Jerónimo de Aguilar himself had been eyeing Malintzin.27

When Cortés came to Malintzin and demanded that she leave her son behind and accompany him as translator on a massive overland expedition through the jungles and mountains of Maya country, the land where she had been enslaved, she would have been far from overjoyed. She had a great deal to lose and nothing to gain. Cortés, likewise, had far more to lose than gain, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. Some have assumed that Malintzin was wildly in love with the conqueror and made his desires her desires. However, concubines in the world she came from knew better than to expect lasting romantic love from their masters. And Cortés in recent months had bedded so many women—and enraged so many mothers and husbands—that it would have been impossible for Malintzin to believe that there was a special bond between them. If, reminding him of their son, Malintzin ever spoke of marriage, Cortés would have made it clear that he was determined to marry a fine lady from Spain, not an indigenous slave girl; it was the only way he could be certain of maintaining his present power and influence. And the boy, Martín, could be legitimized by petitioning the pope.28

One might assume that Cortés simply forced Malintzin to accompany him, but this cannot reflect reality. All the records of the expedition indicate that Malintzin did more than go through the motions. For the next two years, she actively, energetically, and good humoredly pursued the entourage’s best interests at every turn, and Cortés, remarkably for him, even expressed in

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writing some veiled gratitude for the dedication she demonstrated. Why did she behave so? What could a Nahua woman hope to gain from fulfilling the whims of the apparently addled conqueror?

Malintzin, like other indigenous people at the time of conquest, left behind no diaries, no letters, no explicit record either of her motivations or of the concessions she demanded. But the events that unfolded tell us that she bargained hard and astutely to secure protection for herself, her children, and her people in the best way she could. The expedition was first to travel through Coatzacoalcos, the land of her birth. Significantly, just before they crossed the river that bordered that territory, the enormous cavalcade came to a grinding halt for a full week. There Malintzin was suddenly married to a high-ranking lieutenant of Cortés’s named Juan Jaramillo. Of the few single men in Cortés’s circle at that time, there were only two others equally or more highly ranked, and one of them preferred to live with a young man he called his “nephew.” Malintzin, married to Jaramillo, henceforth would have the legal protections of a Spanish lady. In addition, Cortés gave a significant wedding present, the kind of gesture he would never have made of his own accord; she had to have made the demand herself. Malintzin was assigned her natal village of Olutla as an encomienda. She would rule there, rather than a Spaniard. Legal docu- ments were signed, though they were later lost in the disastrous expedition.29

As soon as these arrangements were made, the cavalcade moved forward. The river was higher than they had hoped, and much of the baggage was lost in the current, though no lives were. In a few days, Malintzin came face-to- face with her kin. It was an emotional greeting, Bernal Díaz later said.30 The words she uttered are lost to us, as is so much of the indigenous experience of the immediate upheaval of conquest. We see this phenomenon everywhere in the history of the Americas. Sacajawea, for instance, another war captive who was traded away to white newcomers, would later meet her birth family as well, on the overland trek with Lewis and Clark. No one recorded her feel- ings, either, before she was pressed back into service as a translator for the travelers making their way to the Pacific. Letters and diaries sometimes bring us close to grand moments or touching scenes in the history of Euro- Americans, but harkening back to the thoughts and feelings of the less power- ful, we meet only silence.

In any case, after all the years apart, Malintzin’s time with her family and friends was brief, for she had a promise to Cortés to keep; for the sake of her- self, her children, and her people, she would not break that promise. In a mat- ter of days, they moved on toward their goal of Honduras. It was to be a long slog; weeks in the dark forest turned into months.

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In a town called Acalan (“Land of Boats”), about fifty miles inland from the Gulf Coast, at the head waters of the River Candelaria, Cortés made a decision that has traumatized Mexicans to this day: he executed Cuauhtemoc. Accounts of what happened differ. Cortés later claimed that an indigenous informer revealed a plot hatched by the Mexica ruler: he had purportedly sug- gested that the Indians rise against the Spaniards in the midst of the jungle and free themselves, then return to the central valley in secret to inspire a rebellion there as well. Others, including a number of Spaniards, believed it was all a misunderstanding. Cuauhtemoc and his companions had merely been celebrating a rumor they had heard that Cortés had at last come to his senses and was ready to turn back. They joked and said things they perhaps should not have said—that they would prefer to die at once, for instance, rather than perish slowly of starvation, leaving their bodies scattered along this accursed route. Cortés had each of the men involved tortured separately. Malintzin had to translate the words they uttered in their agony. When Cortés had the evidence he sought, he had Cuauhtemoc hanged from a ceiba tree, along with at least one of his cousins, the ruler of Tlatelolco, and proba- bly one other nobleman. Was Cortés truly in a panic, and was it only the efforts of Malintzin and others to translate what they understood to have been sarcastic comments and jokes that saved at least a dozen others? Or had Cortés always planned to rid himself of these two Mexica preconquest rulers when he was far from Tenochtitlan, where their deaths could not cause riot- ing and unrest among the people? In either case, Malintzin and numerous indigenous men were forced to watch and even to participate. It comes as no surprise that the event is referenced both directly and obliquely in several indigenous texts produced later. Cortés left nothing in writing that might illuminate the situation. Indeed, no writings survived the trek; almost no bag- gage of any kind did. A good proportion of the people were left dead along the route, just as Cuauhtemoc had apparently sarcastically predicted.31

When what was left of the cavalcade emerged from the forest on the shores of the Atlantic coast, they found that Cristóbal de Olid had been killed by Spaniards loyal to Cortés months earlier. As it turned out, the expedition had been entirely unnecessary. What was worse, the Spaniards living there on the coast were almost as hungry as those who had survived the overland trek from Mexico City. Once again, Cortés began coercing the local Indians to promise to offer tribute in the form of food and other valuable goods. He used the settlement’s lone ship to send messages to the Caribbean seeking support. Soon enough, he received word in response that the power vacuum in the Mexican capital had given rise to a period of chaotic in-fighting among the

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Spaniards, which the Indians were watching with interest. Rumors of Cortés’s own death had been rampant in the city.

In desperate need of cash to solve his many problems, Cortés instructed his underlings to sell some local indigenous people into slavery in the Caribbean. In order to avoid being accused of wrongdoing, he insisted that they sell only those who had been enslaved by other indigenous peoples prior to the conquest. To do this they asked the indigenous people to identify them in Spanish: no arrangements were made for a translator.32 Malintzin would have learned of these plans around the time she gave birth to Jaramillo’s child, roughly nine months after their arrival on the Atlantic shores. This time, she had a girl, named María, after the Virgin. Shortly afterwards, they embarked for Veracruz; from there they would head for the capital. Other departing boats were loaded with human cargo that had been branded for sale in the Caribbean. Such, Malintzin knew, could so easily have been her fate or her daughter’s. If she had ever harbored any doubts about her course of action, this would have convinced her that she had made the right decisions in her life, given her limited options. Her baby daughter, if she lived, was one girl who would never be sold as a slave, either by the Mexica or the Europeans.

***

Meanwhile, the postconquest political storms in Tenochtitlan continued to rage. Once returned to the city, Cortés found himself embroiled in a struggle to regain his former power. Even his lands and encomienda Indians had been taken over by others, the interim government having believed the rumors that he was dead. One of his first acts was to officially inform Tecuichpotzin, now the lady Isabel, of the death of her husband, Cuauhtemoc. Then he brokered a marriage between her and Alonso de Grado, another conquistador. He gave de Grado the office “Protector of Indians”—which was rather ironic, given that de Grado had been known for brutalities toward Indians during the conquest—and he gave Isabel the large encomienda of Tlacopan, one of the three cities of the so-called Aztec Triple Alliance, where she had maternal relatives. The couple would thus be both rich and powerful. Cortés thought to please both the indigenous nobility and the Spanish Crown, as well as gain a loyal and wealthy sup- porter in de Grado. But a year and a half later, in early 1528, the elderly de Grado was dead.33

Cortés was feeling ever more besieged by his enemies and detractors. It was uncertain whether the king would ultimately side with him or punish him for having caused the tumult in the first place by decamping to Honduras

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to continue his adventures. “I am in purgatory,” Cortés agonized to his father. “And the only reason it’s not hell is that I still have hope of redress.”34 In his desperation, Cortés grew ever more rebellious and even reckless. When de Grado died, Cortés told the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter of Moctezuma that because she was a wealthy, highly desirable widow, he was going to move her into his own household “for her own protection.” He was already in the habit of telling the Spanish world that Moctezuma, on his deathbed (struck down by rocks thrown by his own people, according to Cortés), had tearfully asked Cortés to protect his daughters.35 It was only a bit more fantastical to pose before Isabel herself as her protector.

Isabel really had no choice. Her friends and family in the indigenous world could not afford to confront Cortés. Perhaps she believed his promises that she would be safe with him. She allowed herself and her few worldly goods to be taken to Cortés’s home. Once there, she had no defenses. A close friend of Cortés’s once commented laconically that “he had no more conscience than a dog.”36 Isabel became pregnant almost immediately.37

Cortés decided that he would travel to Spain himself to speak directly with the king about his affairs. He would take along young Martín, his son by Malintzin, and have the child legitimized by the pope in case he never pro- duced other male children. Then he would leave Martín in Spain as a page to the young Prince Philip. Before he left, it was essential that he solve the awk- ward problem of Isabel’s pregnancy. He would not have seriously considered marrying her himself. He dreamed of a Spanish noblewoman as a spouse, but there was an additional reason as well. If there were ever an indigenous woman whose social position might have made him consider a match, Isabel was that woman, but her high position meant that marriage to her would fuel rumors that Cortés was trying to establish a fiefdom in Mexico. He could easily alien- ate the king. Pedro Gallego de Andrade, a follower of Cortés, stated that he had no objections to marrying Isabel in her present condition, provided she still kept the extensive encomienda of Tlacopan, which Cortés assured him she would. Indeed, it was important to the Spanish government that she keep it, as her possession of it encapsulated the idea that the Mexica royal family was recognized as such by the Spaniards, and that they in turn accepted Spanish legal jurisdiction over themselves and their people. Cortés saw Isabel married to Gallego, and then he and his young son sailed away.38

Four months later, Isabel faced childbirth, what she thought of as nomi- quizpan, “my moment of death.” Among her servants, there were Nahua women, which was fortunate at this time of pain and uncertainty. “Beloved daughter,” they would have comforted her in her own language, “exert

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yourself ! What are we to do with you? Here are your old mothers. This is your responsibility. Grab hold of the shield. My daughter, young one, be a brave woman. Face it .  .  . bear down. Imitate the brave goddess Cihuacoatl.”39 All her life, Isabel-Tecuichpotzin, had thought of a woman giving birth as a war- rior who had the opportunity to win honor, not as someone who begged for mercy in the face of a great punishment inflicted by the deity on all her sex, as the Spaniards did. But in her case, pride did not accompany whatever courage she showed. She was not capturing a spirit and bringing it home to her family to carry on their traditions. When the child was born—a girl—it was taken from her and carried to the home of one of Cortés’s cousins, who had prom- ised to raise the child for him.40

In her misery, Isabel found to her surprise that her husband, Pedro Gallego, was kind to her and sympathized, and she came to value him. The next year, she bore him a son, named Juan. They held a great baptismal party in honor of Moctezuma’s first grandson born in Christian matrimony, a child who would enter the Spanish world. Church bells rang, and the people lit bonfires to celebrate. Two months after the baby’s birth, Pedro Gallego died suddenly, and Isabel seemed devastated. She turned even more fully to the child. All her life, she loved Juan best among her children; her next marriage to a Spaniard named Juan Cano lasted more than twenty years and seemed a happy one, but her other children never displaced Juan.41

Isabel—always known as Tecuichpotzin by the indigenous city folk42— was known for her quiet demeanor. She was never entirely comfortable with the symbolic role the Spaniards had carved out for her. She gave as many of the profits from her encomienda as she could to a favored Augustinian friary. She breathed the suggestion to both of her daughters that they could become nuns if they wanted to, rather than the wives of Spanish men, and this is what they later did. In her will, she freed all the Indian slaves who served in her husband’s household.43 We cannot know if she envied her sister, christened “Francisca”—the one who had not been presented to the Spaniards as an emissary wife but was instead sent to her mother’s birthplace, in the country- side of Ecatepec, near Azcapotzalco. The Spaniards never even knew about this royal daughter in the early years. Her fate more closely resembled that of the majority of indigenous people, who lived their lives beyond the direct observation of the Spaniards. Most, after all, were not initially caught up in the maelstrom, like Malintzin and Tecuichpotzin.

As the Spaniards fanned out in the countryside, however, every community eventually faced its moment of crisis. In 1529, about the time Malintzin at last succumbed to one of the European microbes and died,44 and in 1530, as Isabel

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sang Nahuatl lullabies to her newborn, it was Cuauhtinchan’s turn to face such a crisis.

***

Smoking Shield guided his people through most of the 1520s without major incident. The Spaniards built a little church in the neighboring town of Tepeaca, and a priest visited as often as he could. He told the people of Cuauhtinchan that they should attend mass in Tepeaca, but few did and no one came to make any trouble about it. The requisite tribute gradually became more of a problem as it increased over time, and Smoking Shield was con- vinced there would be trouble if they ignored that mandate as well. By the end of the decade, Cuauhtinchan was committed to providing 24,000 woven blankets every four years, as well as twenty turkeys, six thousand bushels of corn, sixteen baskets of beans, eighty of chile, sixteen of chia, and sixteen of salt.45

In addition, thirty Indians had to provide domestic services to the enco- mendero and various Spanish officials: they could rotate that duty among themselves in any way they liked, as long as able-bodied workers presented themselves to the right people at the right time. The tasks were growing more onerous than the town could handle, especially in the wake of so many deaths from the new diseases. It was becoming more and more difficult to plant and harvest their own crops—without which their children starved and became more vulnerable to disease.46

Just as Smoking Shield must have been considering the possibility of pro- testing in some way, a large force of armed Spaniards arrived in the region and made camp; he was forced to relinquish any ambitions he harbored of becom- ing a renegade. It was 1529, and Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, who would soon launch a war of conquest in the west of Mexico, had just been named to pre- side over the governing high court in Tenochtitlan.47 Cortés was absent in Spain, and it was not yet clear who would be named viceroy, the representa- tive of the king. In the meantime, Guzmán was in charge. He made the deci- sion to arrest Ixtlilxochitl, the Texcocan nobleman whose family line had benefited from the arrival of the Spaniards. Throughout the 1520s, he had made the most of his alliance with Cortés and waged war against his neigh- bors when he deemed it necessary. Now Ixtlilxochitl was deposited in a dun- geon cell in a Franciscan monastery, where he languished and died.48 Next, Guzmán sent his henchmen out into the countryside east of the city with instructions to conscript several thousand indigenous warriors for the mili- tary campaign he was planning.

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In Cuauhtinchan, the Spaniards demanded that the local nobles attend a meeting, and through an interpreter they made it clear that only those who immediately converted to Christianity and promised to cooperate would be able to retain their seats. Although Smoking Shield did not mention the mat- ter in the book of history he later wrote, other sources reveal that the local chiefs did indeed decide to accept baptism at that time.49 He accepted as his patron and godfather a man in the Spaniards’ company named Alonso de Castañeda. Chimalpopoca (now Alonso) bowed his head; a priest splashed water on him and his fellows, praying as he did so and turning them all into namesakes of Spaniards. Smoking Shield was presumably a good performer and a talented negotiator: when the Spanish force moved on, he had managed to prevent most of his men from being conscripted. Their population was not devastated. He led his people to church and tried to look interested, as he understood that this was of central importance if he wished the Spaniards to treat his people with any respect. “But no one knew yet what was happening, if it was ‘Sunday’ or some other day [in the new calendar],” one of his connec- tions later recalled. “We were really new at it. . . . We didn’t know what was going on.”50

With the arrival of Christianity, noblemen began to feel some pressure to choose only one among their several wives—as if they would somehow be willing to expel the ones not chosen. At first they could ignore the hints and requests, but it wasn’t clear how long that situation would last. The writers of the annals in the next generation touched on the subject of conjugal dis- cord only gingerly, never giving any details. The whole subject was extraordi- narily painful, not only for the potentially rejected women but also for their children. In the long run, only generational change brought the noblemen around to monogamy. In the meantime, there were more public issues to contend with.51

In 1531, two bedraggled and exhausted chiefs appeared in Cuauhtinchan, begging for succor. They were the leaders of nineteen families who had fled desperate situations; their former chiefs had apparently been less effective than Smoking Shield at staving off the effects of conquest by the Spaniards. Perhaps they had simply been unlucky. The people came from different back- grounds—some were not even Nahuas but Otomí and Pinome—but in their mutual need they had come together under the leadership of two charismatic men named Elohuehue (Eh-lo-WAY-way) and Apiancatl (ah-pee-AHN-kat), who had promised to try to care for them all. The name of the first meant “Old Man Like a Fresh Ear of Corn”; the second was a stylized traditional title, the meaning of which is now lost, but it conveyed authority. “They were

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suffering people who came from distant lands,” Smoking Shield remem- bered.52 According to custom, all the Cuauhtinchan leaders came together to decide what to do. They agreed to offer the newcomers some unoccupied lands at the start of the road to Tepeaca. As in the old days, these arrange- ments were rendered permanent through formal public statements repeated by multiple parties; then a designated person painted a representation of the agreement, with known symbols for water, hills, and roads indicating the boundaries of the land. To this the people now added another ingredient: they brought with them to the meeting a young man who had learned the Roman letters from one of the Christians, and he wrote out the statements they made using symbols that he manipulated adeptly. Smoking Shield used his Nahuatl name, but to it he added “Alonso de Castañeda,” and also included a title that the Spaniards had told him indicated he was a nobleman. So he became “don Alonso de Castañeda Chimalpopoca.”53

Don Alonso and the other chiefs explained to the newcomers that in order to render the agreement binding in the eyes of the Christian authorities, the people needed to build a thatch-roofed temple where they could honor the Christian god; a priest would soon come from Tepeaca to bless their endeavor. The grateful settlers called their new village Amozoc and promised themselves they would never abandon it. Their resolve was to cost them dearly when the Franciscans later ordered everybody to leave the countryside and move to the town of Cuauhtinchan. It was the people of Amozoc, stubbornly devoted to their new home, who were burned out of their houses in 1558.

But all that was still in the future. At the moment, don Alonso was facing another crisis. In early 1532, a fellow Cuauhtinchan chief named Huilacapitzin (Wee-la-ka-PEE-tzeen), or Heart of a Snail Shell, was accused by the Spaniards of practicing human sacrifice and executed. Don Alonso had appeared along- side him only recently, at the meeting where land was gifted to the settlers of Amozoc. There, Huilacapitzin had used both his Nahuatl name and his new Spanish name “don Tomás.” On the surface, at least, he seemed to be adjusting to the new ways just as Smoking Shield was, but apparently this was less true behind the scenes. He was the heir of the leading Pinome dynasty, a member of the family that had arranged to have Smoking Shield’s father killed some twenty years earlier. But Smoking Shield did not seem to hold this fact against him, at least not since having fought together in their failed attempt to defend Cuauhtinchan from the outsiders. When Smoking Shield spoke of Heart of a Snail Shell, he used the Nahuatl honorific “-tzin” at the end of his name, which he withheld from the man who had actually ordered his father killed. He tried to avoid mentioning the events of 1532 altogether: in later years,

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when he was dictating a history of his people, a questioner apparently forced him to return to that moment and mention the matter, as it appears as an insert. He spoke very succinctly, saying only that don Tomás was hanged that year.54 If his children wanted to know more, they had no choice but to ask someone else who had been involved. It turned out it was a young Tlaxcalan aide to the Spanish friars who had informed the representatives of the new religion of what was going on. The Franciscans arrested Heart of a Snail Shell, whom they persisted in calling Tomás, and tried him and sentenced him to death.

The Franciscans ordered the nobility of all the sub-altepetls of Cuauhtinchan and other neighboring towns to attend the hanging, and the images of what they saw that day remained burned into their memories. The man’s legs kicked until all life was driven from his body. Even then, one who mourned him did not give up hope: “His dog, white with black spots, stayed lying there beside his hanged master.”55 Then two other men who had been accused of assisting Tomás—presumably native priests—were hanged, after which their bodies were drawn and quartered. Finally, the men and women said to have been present at the sacrificial ceremony were tied up to be shamed in the hot sun.

Probably even Smoking Shield and other near neighbors of don Tomás and his people did not know exactly what had really transpired. Each village— or close-knit set of villages—struggled on its own to make sense of the new religion and to decide how to comply with the authorities’ expectations with- out being disrespectful of the ancient gods. Rumors swirled through the countryside of varying activities and varying Spanish responses. Don Tomás Huilacapitzin was not the only indigenous lord in Mexico to face a death sentence because he had been accused of spiritual crimes. There were many who still held rituals honoring the old gods.56

In this environment, Smoking Shield don Alonso received instructions that he and his people were to participate in building a stone church in Cuauhtinchan. They threw themselves into the project with enthusiasm, determined that if they were going to do it, they would certainly show some pride in their altepetl. Their church would rival that of Tepeaca, a neighboring town and longtime rival. A friar by the name of Juan de Rivas explained that the building was not to be shaped like a pyramid mountain like the temples of old, but instead like a great cube, with a tower rising from it. The people painted the insides with swirling flowers, placing a jaguar and an eagle in prominent positions. These were the characters of the ancient Nahua story— the ordinary animals who bravely jumped into the fire at the creation of the Fifth Sun and who had symbolized the qualities of warriors ever since.57

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One Sunday in 1536, when the people of Cuauhtinchan were still in the midst of the building project, a Franciscan who had come to preach told them he had an important announcement to make.58 His order was going to estab- lish a school for the sons of the indigenous nobility. It would be in the coun- try of the Mexica, in Tlatelolco, where the Franciscans had their great convento. They wanted boys who were ten to twelve years old—old enough not to require constant supervision like small children but still young enough to mold and educate in the Christian tradition. At the school, they would study religious precepts, as well as reading and writing, Spanish, Latin, music, and the illumination of manuscripts.

So it was that Cristóbal,59 a son (or perhaps a young cousin) of don Alonso’s named for an Old World saint—a Canaanite who converted to Christianity and helped travelers cross a river—found himself with a passel of other boys being conducted by one of the friars to the Franciscan establish- ment at Tlatelolco. He had his most precious possessions packed in a wooden chest with a lock and key, and a rolled-up mat for sleeping. When the boys arrived, they were told to place their belongings in the long dormitory cham- ber, and then were given something to eat in the refectory.60

In the coming weeks and months, Cristóbal apparently found the lessons to his liking. The friars showed them a “Cartilla” or letter primer, which the religious men had copied out themselves—later they would have copies of the little textbook printed up—and the boys rapidly learned the sounds associ- ated with the symbols (ba be bi bo bu, bam bem bim bom bun, fa fe fi fo fu, fam fem fim fom fum). In a matter of weeks, several of them were reading the new phonetic code. The teacher, fray Bernardino de Sahagún, promised the stellar students that if they kept it up, they could soon begin their study of Latin. Then they would be able to access all the knowledge of the ancient world. He showed them the venerable books kept in the school library and promised them the keys to that kingdom. The drawing master hurt the group by speaking scathingly of the paintings their forebears had done, but in the eyes of some of the boys, he made it up to them when he taught them how to introduce perspective; they were soon entertaining themselves drawing true- to-life animals: dogs, birds, and horses. The study of Christian theology proved much easier for Cristóbal than his elders had thought it would. The depth of commitment to the doctrines that shone in the eyes of his teachers convinced him the material was as much worth learning as the religious les- sons he had learned at home, and when the boys were brought together to offer thanks to God in the form of song, he felt that for long moments, he was lifted into another world; he heard the music of the divine.61

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Of course, school wasn’t always so uplifting. Sometimes the students argued with each other or told raunchy jokes in Nahuatl, and to their amaze- ment, some of the friars actually understood and punished them.62 And sometimes their teachers entertained themselves by gossiping about European politics. Henry VIII, the king of England, had lost control of his passions only a few years earlier and set aside his Christian wife, Catherine, daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel, in favor of a young English woman, Anne Boleyn—shameless, the friars called her. Now came the news that, hav- ing grown tired of Anne Boleyn, Henry had had her imprisoned and then beheaded. All of this he had done to prove that he could break away from the Roman Catholic authority of the pope; as a king, Henry had set a very bad example, something the teachers hoped their own students would never do when they grew up to become chiefs. They should never behave as English monarchs did—or as their forebears had done, the teachers sometimes added. Whether the students were shamed, or rather were heartened by the idea that European politics sometimes resembled their own, their later writings do not make clear.63

When Cristóbal returned home a few years later, he had become a fluent writer, a master of a beautiful handwriting, and an expert in grammar and punctuation.64 He prayed to the Christian god and dressed in Spanish cloth- ing. Not surprisingly, he found himself dragged into the tensions between those families who had chosen to have their sons educated in Spanish ways and those who had not. A relative of his wrote a sly comment in Spanish in the margins of a book: “Well-born noblemen who do not know their letters have no understanding. They are noble beasts.”65 Useful tamed animals were often called “noble beasts” and were worthy of mankind’s sympathy and kind- ness; but calling indigenous noblemen “noble beasts” was in effect a vicious insult. It was even worse than calling them animals. It was a pun, as “bestia” (beast) also meant “stupid”—thus the phrase could mean “noble beasts,” but it could also mean “stupid noblemen.” Sometimes these tensions made them- selves felt not just between families but even within families, between gener- ations. Young don Felipe de Mendoza from one of the Pinome lineages, a connection of the hanged don Tomás, was invited without his respected father to another nobleman’s house specifically because he was, like his host, “raised afterwards, educated in the church.”66 That only he was welcome, not the elders in his family, apparently gave young Felipe pain, since he remem- bered the words and repeated them later.

Before long, a much larger crisis trumped whatever agonies were caused by  these social rifts. It had been more than twenty years since the terrible

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epidemic of 1520, and now a whole new generation had arisen that lacked immunities. Then, in 1544, worms ate the corn crop and people starved; and in 1545, the most terrible epidemic since the time of the conquest devastated the land. Cristóbal and his father must have lost family members—everyone did—but no record of the names of their dead has survived.67

Many lands on the outskirts of Cuauhtinchan lay fallow, as the villagers assigned to work them were dying or dead, and the people of Tepeaca, a popu- lous town, decided to move in and live in those areas. They were old enemies, and rage smote Smoking Shield. Part of him wanted to go by night and attack the intruders and drive them away as he once would have done, but that era was past: now he was don Alonso de Castañeda. In March 1546, instead of launching a war, he and his fellow chiefs decided to make the most of their sons’ new style of literacy. They would sue the people of Tepeaca in a Spanish court of law. At root, this was a concept easily understood, as the Mexica over- lords had been arbiters in their local affairs for many years.68

Don Alonso and his entourage made their way to Mexico City. Old pre- conquest roads led to the city they themselves still called Tenochtitlan. These paths were familiar to chiefs, but the terrain seemed strange in other ways. Travelers no longer had to worry about being attacked by those who perceived them as enemies. There would always be robbers, but no one would imagine the travelers as bringing war. They made their way to the center of the valley and crossed the lake to the island city. Although the outskirts of the town still belonged to indigenous fisherfolk and chinampa farmers, new Spanish-style buildings rose everywhere in the bustling downtown area. Don Alonso’s little group made their way to Tlatelolco, where they had acquaintances from the days of their sons’ being at school there. They found acceptable lodgings, but soon discovered that they had to spend frightening amounts of money to maintain themselves in the metropole. They were not, however, going to be beaten back now. They pursued their case, determined not to leave until they had conducted enough of the business to feel that it could be safely left in the hands of a representative.69

From May to August 1546, they made their way regularly to and from the court. When they entered the first time, the great stone walls and the darkness within intimidated them, but they soon grew accustomed to it. That first day, the leader of Cuauhtinchan’s indigenous governing cabildo, or council, spoke for the group, but don Alonso’s personality was so much more forceful that he soon took over. In their records, the Spaniards took to referring simply to “don Alonso and the other nobles.” It was he who demanded that certain witnesses from Tepeaca be made to appear, and he also organized the presentation of

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witnesses from his side. After the words of each witness were transcribed, he would ask to have the statement read back to him by the court interpreter and then nod his assent.70

Don Alonso was eagerly absorbing lessons about the European world. This City of Mexico, whatever else it was, was a place of grandeur and a center of visible power. Here, in the chambers of the High Court, he saw for himself how power was enacted in the world the Europeans were making. Just as in his world, power was wielded through statements made publicly, gravely, and with ritualistic language, then commemorated on paper. But he also noted a significant difference. Here, decisions were rendered permanent through the medium of a certain kind of writing. This was not the pictographic writing that he knew so well but which younger men in his world could no longer read easily. He was observing the process of alphabetic writing, of phonetic transcription of spoken language. These marks on paper encoded the human voice. In court, his exact words were read back to him smoothly. Young men like Cristóbal assured him that anyone could learn to interpret the sounds of the letters; they were not the special province of priests who spent decades memorizing hundreds of pic- tographic symbols and creating others, and then took much of their knowledge with them to the grave. Even if a terrible epidemic were to strike dead all the specially trained men of the High Court tomorrow, others would be able to read these documents fully. It would be possible for men to hear his exact words generations later. That was certainly worth thinking about.71

In August, don Alonso was ready to leave the lawsuit in the hands of a lawyer and return home with his entourage. He then turned his attention to a new project: he had decided to orchestrate the writing of a great work of his people’s history, one using the new letters. In some ways, the book he had in mind would look like a collection of the old-style painted documents, repre- senting important historic moments and the establishment of the boundaries to various altepetls’ lands with glyphs and drawings. But in other ways, it would be quite different, for year by year, it would present a full verbal perfor- mance of his people’s history. All that would once have been said out loud around the communal fire would be written down, transcribed using the new letters. His son and other young people could help him. He and others of his generation would provide the information, and the young ones would do the writing. The pictorial elements they could work on together. It would be a history of all the Tolteca Chichimeca, focusing most specifically on those who had eventually settled in Cuauhtinchan.72

Don Alonso envisioned concrete uses for the volume over the years—it could provide evidence in Spanish courtrooms regarding traditional landholding

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arrangements, for example, or it could be carried to indigenous ceremonies as a sacred object lending authenticity to the procedures. But don Alonso dedicated untold hours of his family’s time to this project for deeper reasons than these. He  foresaw that once his people’s memory of the meaning of the glyphs had faded, and their communities had sunk into the poverty that Spanish demands were pushing them toward, narrowing their horizons and forcing them to focus on survival, a great social amnesia would ensue. And if they could not remember their past, how could they articulate demands for their future?

Cristóbal picked up the quill, ready to write. And don Alonso de Castañeda Chimalpopoca began to speak. He told an ancient tale, about the breakup of a happy community centuries earlier. It was a story his people had been telling for many, many years, since they were wanderers. “When Huemac became a young man, he gave orders that the Nonohualca tend to his home. Then the Nonohualca said to him, ‘So be it, my lord. May we do what you desire.’ The Nonohualca came to tend to his home. And then he demanded women of them. He said to the Nonohualca, ‘You are to give me women. I order that the buttocks be four spans wide.’” Surely don Alonso stopped here to have a good laugh at the preposterous arrogance of the man. But then he would have faced the cultural divide that was beginning to form between him and his descen- dants. Was young Cristóbal’s Nahuatl still good enough for him to get the joke? Did don Alonso have to explain everything to the younger man, brought up in a different time? Did he tell him that the story was particularly rich because “Huemac” meant “Big Gift”? He had been a foundling and was sup- posedly a gift from the gods. Some “Big Gift” he turned out to be! It was because of him that all the discord between the ancestors originally arose. “Huemac” indeed! He had been no gift, but he certainly had brought the unexpected—like so much of life, don Alonso must have thought, as one who had seen one world give way to another and who had survived with his humor intact. He was living proof that the New World in which he and his people found themselves would not obliterate the old one.

Later, when the houses of Amozoc burned, don Alonso de Castañeda Chimalpopoca would be ready to comfort the afflicted. It had long been a Nahua leader’s role to shoulder responsibilities on behalf of the people: he would not shirk his duty. His people would survive these times of trouble, he was determined.

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