April 22 is the 500^th anniversary of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’ landing at Veracruz, Mexico, in 1519. Cortes’ small army and a growing corps of Indian allies, the coastal Totonacs and the Tlaxcaltecans of central Mexico, marched to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City and conquered the Aztecs in a two-year titanic struggle. From their empire’s ashes was born modern Mexico. But modern Mexicans are ambivalent about Cortes, and neither Mexico nor Spain is commemorating the anniversary.

This tremendous story, as John Derbyshire recently called it, is filled with unforgettable personages, including the Aztec emperor Montezuma, reigning when Cortes arrived, and the last emperor, Cuauhtémoc, who resisted the Spaniards in the culminating siege of Tenochtitlan.

Cortes’ Spanish foes included Diego Velasquez, Spanish governor of Cuba. When Cortes arrived in Veracruz he was an outlaw. Cortes formed a new municipal government at Veracruz—"True Cross,” Cortes has landed on Good Friday. That ended the authority of Velasquez, and left as Cortes’ only authority the Spanish King, conveniently thousands of miles away across the ocean.

Then Cortes sent a ship back to Spain and scuttled the rest of his vessels to motivate his men. It was conquer…or die.

In Tenochtitlan, Montezuma invited Cortes as guest, but later, the Spaniard seized the emperor as a hostage. Cortes had to leave the city when Velasquez sent another Spaniard, Panfilo de Narvaez, with a larger army to arrest Cortes. But the clever conquistador defeated Narvaez and absorbed most of his army into this own.

Back in Tenochtitlan, the delicate relationship with the Aztecs broke down when the man Cortes left in charge, Pedro de Alvarado, attacked them. So Cortes had to rescue the Spaniards from the city. His next step toward conquering the city was an all-out siege. On August 13, 1521, the city fell to the Spaniards and their Indian allies.

Many Mexicans identify emotionally with the Aztecs. When I lived in Mexico and taught English, even Mexicans of Spanish descent  talked about how “the Spaniards conquered us.” A class of mostly white Mexican students told me Cortes was bad and the Aztecs were “cool.”

That’s amusing given that most Mexicans are mestizos, with both Indian and Spanish ancestry. If it weren’t for Cortes and other Spaniards, then most contemporary Mexicans would not exist. So bashing Spaniards who lived 500 years ago, particularly in Spanish, is sort of silly.

Cortes is quite literally the father of modern Mexico— La Malinche, Cortes’ Indian interpreter and right-hand woman, was mother of his son, the first mestizo. Anti-Cortes Mexicans characterize La Malinche as a traitor. But to whom? Mexico did not exist in 1519. She was a slave, given to the Spaniards by a group of defeated Indians in the present-day state of Tabasco.

Far from celebrating Cortes’ landing, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrado (“AMLO”)r, wrote a much-ridiculed letter to King Felipe VI of Spain, asking him to apologize, not for the conquest itself but for human rights violations visited upon the natives. Showing surprising backbone, the Spanish government brushed him off:  “The arrival 500 years ago of the Spaniards on territory that is now Mexican,” it said, “cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations”. [Mexico asked Spain to Apologize For its Conquest. Spain said no, by Jack Herrera, Pacific Standard, March 26, 2019]

AMLO does plan to commemorate the fall of Tenochtitlan, but that’s not until 2021. On March 14, he and his wife commemorated the Battle of Centla, where Cortes fought the Mayans before he set out for Veracruz.

Academics of both countries, including those of Mexico’s National Autonomous University and the University of Salamanca, the oldest and most prestigious in Spain, are staging joint symposia.  [Universities to mark 500th anniversary of Cortes' arrival in Mexico, EFE, April 5, 2019]

And then we have Jesusa Rodriguez, a lesbian senator from the ruling leftist MORENA party, who recorded a video about the conquest.

Hace 500 años inició la Conquista de México. pic.twitter.com/HYwcBtLiXH

— Jesusa Rodríguez (@jesusardgz) March 15, 2019

“With this conquest the Catholic religion arrived, imposed by blood and fire by fanatics and murderers to plunder our territory and culture,” she said. “They also brought us a violent diet”. ['Cuando comes tacos de carnitas festejas la caída de Tenochtitlán' (When you eat ‘tacos de carnitas’ you celebrate the fall of Tenochtitlan) Excelsior, March 18^th, 2019]

That diet is tacos de carnitas, or tacos of little meats, a popular pork dish combining tortillas, an Indian invention, and pork, introduced by the Spaniards. Eating such a dish, she opined, celebrates the fall of the Aztec capital in 1521.

That nonsense was so over the top that former Mexican President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) responded on Twitter, tweeted that her rant was delirious and that he liked tacos de carnitas.

Rodriguez’s complaint is of a piece with the mythology about Indians up and down the Americas, from the Dakota Sioux to Peru’s Incas: until the whites showed up, the Noble Savages were peacefully coexisting, living off the land and sleeping peacefully under the watchful Eye of the Night. “Hate was just a legend and War was never known” sang Neil Young of the pre-Conquest Aztecs in his song “Cortez the Killer.”

Unhappily for the mythologists, witnesses to the events 500 years ago tell a different tale. Perhaps the best historical source for the Cortes saga is Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the soldiers who accompanied Cortes and wrote the vivid account, True History of the Conquest of New Spain (online in Spanish and English).

When my Mexican wife and traveled to Mexico in the spring of 1998 to follow the route of Cortes, we took a bus from coastal Veracruz to Mexico City, formerly Tenochtitlan. True History helped us find some places, and left me with the impression that he told the story accurately. And I wasn’t the only one who thought that. In Quiahuitzlan, near the coast, a guide asked us how we’d found out about the place. True History, we replied, and lo and behold the guide pulled his own copy.

Diaz’s’ first-person account shows that Cortes was a ruthless warrior, but not a genocidal maniac, and a master negotiator who forged alliances with Indians either subject to or enemies of the Aztecs.  

His original plan was not to overthrow the Aztec empire  or destroy Tenochtitlan, but to annex it and leave Montezuma and the Aztec elite as vassals or satraps of the Spanish Empire. A fervent Catholic, Cortes also wanted all the Indians to convert.

Cortes was a hugger. True History depicts his embracing Aztec officials, and he even tried to hug Montezuma, but the Aztec grandees stopped him.  Need I point out that contemporary Mexicans are huggers?

Of course, the Aztecs are fascinating. Tenochtitlan, situated on a lake, was a spectacular engineering achievement. In Chapter LXXXVII, Bernal Diaz del Castillo described the Spaniards’ reaction to it:

Our astonishment was indeed raised to the highest pitch, and we could not help remarking to each other, that all these buildings resembled the fairy castles we read of in Amadis de Gaul [a chivalric romance]; so high, majestic, and splendid.

And contrary to what Neil Young sang, the Aztecs were ferocious imperialists, driven by a supremacist ideology. Their polytheistic religion told them they were the favored people of a war god,  Huitzilopochtli. The empire was constantly expanding. When Cortes arrived, it covered 20-25 percent of modern Mexico. True History describes a massive Aztec slave market in their capital.

Human sacrifice was part of the Aztec religion, although some Mexicans have, with a straight face, claimed that the Aztecs were actually practicing advanced surgery that the Spaniards misinterpreted. It was “surgery” all right, hardly advanced but good enough to get the job done, particularly when the Aztec elites got the munchies.

Aztecs were cannibals, and they didn’t just grab a piece of human flesh and wolf it down. They ate it in a civilized fashion, preparing it with condiments. For the benefit of our lesbian senator, a note about those tasty tacos carnitas with pork: in his review of Hugh Thomas’  Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico, Stephen Cox observed that “pork became a favorite dish of the former Aztec nobility, ‘since it had a slight taste of human flesh’”. [I Left My Heart in Tenochtitlan, Liberty Magazine, November 1995] Today, you can still see in Mexico City the Aztec ruins of the Templo Mayor, the great temple where the Aztecs butchered their victims.

CHAPTER LXXXIII of True History details event in Cholula, when the Aztecs nearly killed and ate the Spaniards and their Indian allies: “They wished to murder us, and eat our flesh, for which purpose they had already prepared the dishes, the salt, the pepper, and the tomatoes.” Cortes launched a massive pre-emptive strike.

For the subject peoples, the Aztecs were tyrants and Cortes a liberator. In Chapter XLVI, True History describes Cortes’ meeting with leaders of the coastal Totonacs, among them one the Spaniards dubbed the “Cacique Gordo,” the Fat Chief:

He related so much of the cruelties and oppression they had to suffer, and thereby sobbed and sighed so bitterly that we could not help being affected. At the time when they were subdued, they had already been greatly ill-used; Montezuma then demanded annually a great number of their sons and daughters, a portion of whom were sacrificed to the idols, and the rest were employed in his household and for tilling his grounds. His tax-gatherers took their wives and daughters without any ceremony if they were handsome, merely to satisfy their lusts. The Totonaques, whose territory consisted of upwards of thirty townships, suffered like violence.

At the ruins of Tlatelolco, where the Aztecs surrendered in 1521, an anonymously-written inscription by someone with a good grasp of history puts the fall of the city in perspective:

Heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc,
Tlatelolco fell to the power of Hernan Cortes.
It was neither a triumph nor a defeat.
It was the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is the Mexico of today.

American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.