Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

It was a place now called Teotihuacan (Tay-oh-tee-WA-kahn) that did so. The city rose out of the vacuum to such heights of power that even centuries after it fell, its ruins were known to Shield Flower and her people. When her ancestors came down from the north, they paused in their passage over the ring of mountains that encircled the central valley at the heart of the region and looked down at the panorama before them. All who came this way did this, and to a person of ordinary experience, it was a truly awe-inspiring vista. The valley was actually a basin without drainage. The damp earth of its frequently soaked plains was perfect for farming, and the encircling sweep of mountains formed a literal barricade against the outside world. It seemed to be the very center of the earth, created as a sort of enchanted place.

If he were of a philosophical turn of mind, he might have said that in order for the central valley to have such peace and space for their art, then the chaos of warfare and the predicament of hunger had to be expelled to the distant villages of strangers whom he himself would never see. Thus it had always been, and thus it would always be: the residents of great cities almost never saw the vulnerable, shattered peoples in distant lands who supported them—except briefly, in an almost unreal sense, as honored sacrifice victims in magisterial ceremonies. The people who lived in Tenochtitlan were convinced that they had built something worth protecting for whatever time on earth they could.

It was almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient Sumerians. The Mesopotamians were stunningly impressive—but they could not have defeated Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire working in combination with the Pope.

In July, in the town hall in Brussels, the artist Albrecht Dürer saw some of the tiny, lifelike animals the indigenous people had made out of gold. “All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I have seen among them wonderful works of art, and I have marveled at the subtle intellects of men in foreign parts.” The

During all these months, one young indigenous man had been listening 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 companion boarded a Spanish ship, one that was exploring the coast of North America.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.