Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

In the first week of October, indigenous officials began to move through the neighborhoods of the city, house by house, collecting the tax, or as much of it as they could. The city’s women now worked into the night, spinning yarn and thread. This work that had been their badge of honor during the time of their city’s power, when they did not have to do it and could buy the cloth if they chose, or demand it as tribute, now became a dire necessity.

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. He saw the violence and heard all the plans to try to get the Spanish overlords to change their minds, but it all came to nothing. 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.

In fact, until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the New World.5 They were auctioned off in the port of Veracruz. Most were sent to work in the silver mines or on sugar plantations, but a sizable number were sold to the elite of Mexico City or to the nearby secondary city of Puebla de los Angeles. By the early 1600s, Mexico City had become one of the wealthiest and most impressive metropolises in the world, and every powerful Spaniard wished to be attended by a string of liveried black servants.

In 1570, there may still have been as many as sixty thousand Indian people in the city, but their resources were depleted after the tax law changes of the 1560s, leaving them more vulnerable than they had been. Then in 1576/77 a horrifying epidemic struck. Hemorrhagic smallpox caused people to bleed from all the orifices, even the eyes, and in its wake, other diseases spread rampantly in the weakened population. “There were deaths all over New Spain,” Chimalpahin later wrote. “We Indians died, together with the blacks, but only a few Spaniards died.”9 The epidemic was followed by others. By 1610, there were only about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand indigenous left in what once had been Tenochtitlan.10 In short, the majority of the city’s people were no longer indigenous.

What Chimalpahin had learned a few years earlier was that the very vibrancy of the urban black subculture sometimes exacerbated its vulnerabilities. On Christmas Eve, 1608, many dozens of the city’s black residents participated in a mock “coronation” of a black king and queen, giving them paper crowns and decorated thrones, and then partying through the night. This was in keeping with traditions of West Africa as well as Europe’s widespread carnival. The frightened white population—which had long been nervous about the rising numbers of Africans in their midst—was not accustomed to the idea of anyone bowing to a local African king. They held an investigation, but could not prove that anyone had ever genuinely planned to initiate a monarquía Africana, except in fun.14 The Spaniards behind the investigation, however, did not let the matter drop. It was no accident that a few months later the ruling council of Mexico suddenly decided to organize a force to go out into the countryside and ferret out the so-called maroon communities. The word cimarrón had once referred to runaway cattle and other errant farm animals but was now shortened and applied to people. Over the years, first dozens and then hundreds of slaves on sugar plantations had run away and joined other escapees living in relatively unknown, unsettled lands, especially in the eastern lowlands. They made their living by robbing passersby on certain roads, hunting and trapping animals, and planting crops in tiny plot...

Then in the waning days of 1611 an enslaved African woman in Mexico City who had been beaten and tormented by her owner for years was murdered by him. The owner was Luis Moreno de Monroy, from a famous and wealthy family; today we do not even know the brutalized woman’s name. But the people knew her name then. The large black population—many of whose members had by now attained positions of great authority as supervisors and foremen—nearly rioted the day of her funeral. The organizers of the protest were said to be members of a black confraternity at the church of Nuestra Señora. Hundreds of people marched to the Royal Palace to demand that the murdered woman’s master be held accountable for his deed and then marched on to Moreno de Monroy’s house and shouted at him for several hours, but they hurt no one. The high court did not order an investigation of the woman’s death as the people had demanded. Instead, the authorities decided to attempt to calm the white population’s fears by ordering that the leaders of the protest be flogged. Fortunately for the latter, their powerful owners intervened and prevented the punishment from being carried out.16

On Sunday, April 1, the council sent guards to the church of Our Lady of Mercy where they arrested a number of black worshippers on the grounds that they had been fomenting rebellion against their Spanish masters. Chimalpahin heard all the details from someone who was there. “The sermon was being preached when the officers came,” he commented.19 Two weeks later, several edicts were read aloud by town criers all over the city. Henceforth, no black man was to carry a sword or wear a Spanish-style collar; no black woman was to wear a veil. And Spaniards owning more than two black slaves were to sell them, so that no household would have more than two black residents. No sitting viceroy would have alienated the city’s wealthiest white men in this way, but angry, lesser men were in power now. Finally, the council posted guards at all the major entries to the city, lest the maroons living to the east or west reenter the city to free their urban kin. Chimalpahin could see the guards stationed on the southern road from where he lived.20

On Wednesday, the Spaniards worked themselves up into a frenzy of fear. Chimalpahin remembered: “It was very dark because of clouds, and it rained, and it cannot be found out who went shouting all around the city of Mexico—was it not some mischievous Spanish youth?—shouting to people and going about saying at the corners of houses everywhere that the blacks had arrived, that they were not far away, that everyone should get equipped for fighting…. All night the Spaniards did not sleep and kept vigil.”23 Years later, a Spaniard, not wanting to blame a practical jokester, would say it was some roving pigs that had first frightened someone and generated the initial alarm.24 Be that as it may, Chimalpahin couldn’t help laughing. “We indigenous were not at all frightened by it but were just looking and listening, just marveling at how the Spaniards were being destroyed by their fear and didn’t appear as such great warriors [after all].”

Chimalpahin

He wanted deeply to believe in the elemental goodness of the world in which he lived—he had largely put the conquest behind him, and was moving matter-of-factly toward the future—but on that day, when he had witnessed an atrocity committed in the name of the law, the name of the king, and the name of God, he had no choice but to doubt the justice of the laws as well as the morality of the men who enforced them. He made no impassioned statements, but in his writings he subtly made it clear to posterity that there was a limit to the moral authority he would accord the Europeans who ruled his world.

Perhaps Chimalpahin understood much of what he heard mentioned in Spanish churchmen’s circles because he knew some Asians himself: in those years, there were many unfortunate souls from India and the Philippines who were kidnapped, sold in the Manila slave market, then brought to Mexico’s western port of Acapulco. They were called chinos, and many hundreds of them labored in Mexico City as domestic servants. Some even staffed a monastery run by the Dominicans.46

Chimalpahin gave a brief synopsis of Old World history, drawing freely from Plato, the Bible, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and other foundational Western texts. He theorized that the peoples from the edge of Europe, from the Baltic, who had given the medieval Christians the most trouble in their conquest, might have been the Nahuas’ ancestors.76 Someone from the Old World, he was sure, had constructed boats and somehow made it to the (then unknown) New World. However it had happened, people had somehow ended up at Aztlan, at the Seven Caves, and from there had begun to wend their way south.

Descendant plot point

Chimalpahin, whose imagination was drenched in biblical imagery, would have remembered the haunting text from the book of Revelation: “I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them, and they were judged every man according to their works.”80

When Chimalpahin was a child, probably around the time he moved to the city, the remaining indigenous students at the school in Tlatelolco put on a play. There were few of them left, for public opinion had turned against the school since its early founding, and it was starved for funds.81 The students wrote the play’s dialogue themselves. One character commented, “According to the opinion of many, we the Indians of New Spain are shams, like magpies and parrots, birds that with great effort learn to talk, and soon forget what they have been taught.”82 The youthful playwright was angry, and he did not “keep it inside.” Few others, however, gave voice to any rage they felt. It was safer not to. The closest Chimalpahin ever came, even in his private writing, was to say about certain mestizos: “They just try to be Spaniards, belittling us and mocking us, as some Spaniards do.”83 But then he concluded by reminding himself that whatever these arrogant people might think or do, Adam was father and Eve mother to all living people.

Then would Shield Flower cry aloud from her pyre once again and Itzcoatl reveal the political strategies of a rising altepetl. King Axayacatl and Flamingo Snake might yet dance and play the drum together in a moment of creativity and joy. Moctezuma would walk straight-backed toward a looming pyramid for a grisly ceremony, intent on frightening all others, while Malintzin called out a warning to him from a distance. The Mexicas’ extraordinary efforts to defend their realm would be in vain, for the high king and his people would lose a great war. Then Moctezuma’s daughter Tecuichpotzin would cry bitter tears, some for herself, some for the people running out of their burning houses, some for the newly arrived Africans. The next generation would do the best they could for posterity, doing everything possible to try to fend off the worst results of conquest, including a lasting, grinding poverty. Don Luis Cipac, the last tlatoani, and don Martín Cortés, son of the brilliant slave girl Malintzin, would both meet tragic ends, but their stories would survive and be handed down, albeit in fragmented pieces. Then Tezozomoc of the royal line and Chimalpahin of the conquered altepetl of Chalco would come together to create books of history—books that, contrary to all expectations, would defiantly remain a part of the world of the Fifth Sun for as long as it might last.

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. With all people suddenly equal in the eyes of the law, it seemed counterproductive to persist in encouraging indigenous peoples to speak their own language. No longer could a native person go to court and find a translator: that person would need to speak Spanish. No longer could a native person say she preferred to be educated by her parents in the old way: such a person would need to learn Spanish. No longer could native people say they preferred to own their land in common and let the chiefs decide how to distribute it: they were told it would be best if they owned individual family farms. If they needed to prove title, they could go to court—and do their business in Spanish.5

Under such circumstances, indigenous poverty grew in the nineteenth century. Eventually a government came to power that did not even pretend to care for the rights of ordinary people. And when resentments against the dictator Porfirio Díaz spread throughout the land, many indigenous people joined the fight against him and helped to bring him down. One of the great heroes of the Mexican Revolution was the Nahuatl-speaking Emiliano Zapata from Morelos. Photos of him leading his men to victory or convening a council where his people sat down to make their own laws, still grace the pages of textbooks and the walls of bars and restaurants. In the decades after the revolution, progress did not move in a straight line—but there was progress, and often native peoples were in the vanguard. The Maya who came out of the forest to protest NAFTA in the 1990s called themselves the Zapatistas after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s indigenous people were thoroughly engaged in their own struggles to seek out their history and define and protect their ancestral heritage, much like disempowered peoples elsewhere.

Today, more than a million Mexicans still speak Nahuatl. Among them are those who are promoting scholarship in Nahuatl; they have even written a Nahuatl-Nahuatl dictionary, for instance. They do not want all work with Nahuatl texts to have as the only goal translation into a European language. They prefer to participate in creative and critical thinking in terms their own language allows for. Among the Nahuatl speakers there are not only scholars but also artists and writers. They have published plays, stories, and books, some written entirely in their own language, some with Spanish text as well. They write in workshops, and they write alone; they paint on traditional maguey-plant paper, or they type at keyboards, as they choose. Perhaps, say the poets, given all the changes, we have now embarked on life under the Sixth Sun.6

And yet, for every Nahuatl speaker who writes defiant poems, there is another who lives in poverty so oppressive that poetry is out of the question: for every person who is able to give a paper in Nahuatl at an international conference, there is another whose only hope is to leave home and try to start over somewhere else. He may move to a large town in Mexico, where at one time the Mexica founded a trading post at a merchant crossroads that later became a city. Or she may choose to go north, to the land of her remote ancestors, the forebears of Shield Flower and Itzcoatl, who came from the American Southwest, and hope that she may not be turned away. In either case, it can only be to the good for such people, and all who come to know them and respect them, to be acquainted with their deep history—a legible past that renders them human and envisions them as equals in the drama of the world’s history.