The Conquest of Mexico

According to a recent article in the New York Times entitled “Demoting the Conquest: How the Denver Art Museum Kicked Columbus Out the Door,” a Colorado art museum “obliterated all references to the canceled hero from its collections.”1 Regardless of how one views Columbus, the effort to “cancel” historical figures and events that have resonated for good and ill over the centuries is far from straightforward. In our continuing fascination with the conquest of Mexico, as with Columbus, the actual history can seem to take second place to the many interpretations that have colored our understandings of it.The conquest of Mexico usually is assumed to have been a singular, transformative episode in which the lands and peoples of what is now modern Mexico were brought definitively under Spanish rule. Scholars who have examined the events leading up to, resulting in, and following the fall of the Aztec (Mexica) capital of Tenochtitlan to the Spanish-Indigenous forces led by Hernando Cortés, however, paint a different picture of events. Over time, most have concluded that the ostensible conquest was far less definitive than generally thought, that Indigenous forces played a far greater role in the apparent Spanish victory over the Mexica than long assumed, and that the immediate impact of Cortés’ victory was limited to a relatively small area even within central Mexico, with large swaths of peoples and territories remaining outside the scope of Spanish domination, in some cases for years, decades, or even centuries.The chapters in this volume survey how the conquest of Mexico has been depicted, studied, understood, and portrayed in everything from history books to literature and opera. The editors write that the contributors consider the conquest of Mexico through an Atlantic lens, rather than an exclusively Mexican or even Spanish-American one. Thus, although chapters in the first part of the volume trace changing views and uses of the conquest in Mexico itself over time, contributors to the second part address such topics as the English response to the conquest, representations of the conquest in Enlightenment-era French and Italian opera, and the impact of William Prescott’s enormously influential mid-nineteenth century history of the conquest in the United States.Scholars and other readers with a solid command of Mexican history likely will not find a great deal that is new in the first part of the volume, although the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions, which range from Terraciano’s discussion of revisionist scholarship to Myers’ use of oral history to understand contemporary views of the conquest, should be noted. The second part, however, broadens considerably our understanding of the range of responses that the history of the conquest has evoked, in perhaps surprising ways.Altogether, this is a very readable and enjoyable volume—a useful reminder of the value of addressing historiography in conjunction with history. As Villella writes in the conclusion, “cultural observers and political leaders in Mexico and beyond repeatedly reinterpreted the events of 1519–21 to both reflect and influence contemporary values and concerns.” The result is what he calls the “Eternal Conquest,” “a poignant example of the perpetual contemporaneity of history” (295)

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