What did “Discovery” mean for Indigenous Peoples?
Read: Chasteen, Chapter 2 (17 – 29, 38 – 53)
Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (W. W. Norton & Company; fifth edition, 2024)
Leon-Portilla, The Broken Spears, Chapter 8, 9, AND 15 see chapters attached.. Having trouble downloading chapter 15… will add shortly
Check Out: Conquest of MexicoLinks to an external site.
Do: Encounter or Conquest ?
“Encounter” & Conquest
Scholars have debated whether the meeting of Europeans and indigenous groups in what came to be known as “The Americas,” was an encounter (implying an equal exchange of knowledge, goods, and–unfortunately–pathogens) or a brutal conquest that completely vanquished indigenous peoples. Is this even a fair question?
The conquest/encounter of/in what we now call Latin America was a lengthy and complex process that differed from place to place and time to time. While the fall of Tenochtitlan, signaling the end of the Aztec empire, took a mere two years, European/Western presence didn’t come to parts of the Amazon rainforest until mid twentieth century. Even during the 1500s (and during the siege of Tenochtitlan), diseases often preceded the arrival of the conquistadors.
Moreover, the history of conquest has been told–and often continues to be told–from a Eurocentric perspective, painting the deeds of conquistadors like Hernan Cortez as heroic while leaving out the voices of the vanquished. You have two different assigned readings: one a textbook or what historians call a secondary source (Chasteen), the other Miguel Leon-Portilla’s Broken Spears – a gathering of primary sources.
For this forum, explore and explain how these sources are different. How do the Aztec/Mexica sources tell the story of the conquest? What do they include that the European-focused “history of the winners” often leave out?
Here you can think of the following questions:
1) How are the Spaniards portrayed in each source?
2) What do the Aztec/Mexica sources say about disease? Why is the importance of European diseases often left out of traditional European histories of the conquest?
3) What do we learn about the importance of cultural differences?
