Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

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.

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.

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.

Valderrama and the Audiencia pursued the possibility of having encomiendas return to the Crown wherever there was no male heir.

encomenderos to become enraged and to flock to the young marquis, the son of Cortés,

The encomenderos lived with a great deal of power over the Indians in their lives, and they were a lengthy sea voyage away from the authority figures of Spain. Some began to say they should think of secession, that no one in New Spain needed anything from the mother country any longer. Don Martín, Malintzin’s son, knew these young men well, so he was likely speaking truth when he said that none of them were capable of planning and executing a complex political coup, but were only strutting a...

Spaniards everywhere still shuddered when they thought of that terrifying Thursday in July 1564, when the Mexica had poured into the streets en masse, armed with anything they could lay their hands on.

indigenous records reveal that he had broken under the stress by that time.

Then for a long time, there was no gobernador at all. With him the line of Mexica kings descended from Acamapichtli came to an end; the indigenous recorded the event in their annals. In the critical period between 1565 and 1567, while the Spaniards experienced their own cataclysm, don Luis’s people seem to have focused their energies not on fomenting further rebellion but on managing the fallout of the destructive new tax policies.

Some worked hard at orchestrating and executing a new census, designed to demonstrate that the total tax bill, which was based on a head count, was too high and did not take into account the deaths in the most recent epidemics.

Still other men set about writing as complete a history of the disastrous events as they could. Just as in the performances of the old xiuhpohualli, the historical annals of years past, they made sure that different perspectives were given voice, one after another, although this time the record was in writing. They carefully transcribed the statements of men from different neighborhoods, which were still organized according to the old calpolli groupings.

To them, truth was necessarily multiple; they knew that no single person could give a full account of an important moment.

Inside the great stone chamber of the first floor, twenty-nine decapitated black bodies were piled. Relatives of the dead had been allowed to spread cloths over them earlier in the day, after they were cut down from the gallows from which they had been hanged and their heads placed on spikes, but the flies still swarmed around them. The people who had come now, at the hour spread about by word of mouth—black men and women and Spanish friars and a number of Indians, all of whom wanted to help—at first found themselves in shock.

Now the Spaniards were behaving comparably: they were abusing the power fate had given them, apparently without any sense of shame. Once again, a song, a hymn, that said implicitly, “We know that this is wrong, and you do, too,” was the only weapon available.

far from the first time that Chimalpahin, the Nahua, had walked side by side with a black man. As early as the 1570s, the decade in which he was born, the African slave trade to Mexico had emerged as a major phenomenon.

until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the New World.

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 the 1570s, there had been about as many African and African-descended men in the capital city as there were Spanish men—roughly eight thousand each.

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.

“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.

the shrinking Mexica population probably interacted more frequently with the laboring Africans on the streets and at work than they did with the more numerous Spaniards.

After an initial period of confusion, it was determined that children would follow the legal condition of the mother. For Chimalpahin and the other Indians, this was a new kind of slavery: the disaster that befell the mother when she was enslaved would be visited on her descendants forever. Before the conquest by the Spaniards, such a thing would have been unthinkable to them.

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 plots hidden in the wilderness.

After a few months chasing the fugitives about the countryside without result, the authorities decided to declare victory and grant the renegades the right to establish a small, permanent town, on the condition that they not allow any new runaways to join them.

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 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 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.

Henceforth, no black man was to carry a sword or wear a Spanish-style collar; no black woman was to wear a veil.

Spaniards owning more than two black slaves were to sell them, so that no household would have more than two black residents.

(Later, Chimalpahin would note, the Indians—those in Mexico City proper—were the only ones in the city who kept the faith and took the usual papier-mâché figure of Jesus down from the little wooden cross where it was hanging and buried it according to custom.

In the basement of the Royal Audiencia, dozens of the black men and women who had been arrested during Easter Week were being tortured on the rack, as well as by water boarding, just as Malintzin’s son had been.

The younger Spanish women were purportedly to have been distributed among the victorious black men, and the older Spanish women either killed or sent to convents. When the Spanish women’s children were born, the boys (but not the girls) were to be taken away and killed.

they might remember that their mothers, on the female side, were Spanish women who came from splendid stock, splendid lineages, more splendid than they were on the side of their fathers, the blacks, so that perhaps then they would prepare for war against them, perhaps they would kill their fathers, the blacks.”

He noticed that when the condemned faced death, even at the last moment, when they could have cursed the world that had been so cruel to them or, if the stories were true, gained a probable ticket to heaven by confessing, they did neither.

As they died, they “cried out to their redeemer our lord God.”

Two years after the church was consecrated, when Domingo was fourteen years old, he “entered the church of San Antonio Abad,” as he put it. He would live and work there for many years.

epidemic. It began in 1595. It was measles and would abate but then return. In 1597 the disease exploded even more virulently.

He believed deeply in Christianity, in the radical equality of all souls before God,

He mentioned it in 1591 when hundreds of Tlaxcalans, who had taken it upon themselves since the conquest to be the Spaniards’ ablest lieutenants, departed for the northern wildlands, from which point they would later aid in the conquest of New Mexico. They themselves did not want to go, and in their writings they raised a cry of suffering,

A few months later, he reported with reverence on the deaths of some martyred Christians even farther away, in Japan:

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.

It may seem surprising that a thoughtful indigenous man living about a century after the conquest found his life satisfying, often invigorating and exciting. But have any of the world’s peoples ever allowed themselves to be flattened by crisis forever? Certainly the Native Americans did not.

In 1566, in the midst of the political crisis of the Spaniards, a son of the late governor don Diego Tehuetzquititzin named don Pedro Dionisio had put himself forward as a potential ruler, but he was immediately accused of having molested women and girls in his household.52 In the midst of the chaos, the city folk decided to accept the rule of a quauhtlatoani,

They could no longer perform the old dances as deftly as people did in the 1560s at don Luis Cipac’s wedding, for instance, but they used their talents and new ideas to improvise,

Then in 1606–7, a series of events occurred that seem to have convinced him that he should set about writing the history of the Nahua peoples. First, in 1606, typhus came to the central valley; thousands died. In July, the sickness took his father, and in October, his grandmother.56 In the rainy season of 1607, overwhelming flooding began.

Faced with this emergency, the Spanish government decided to take steps toward the permanent drainage of the central basin.58 This was work that the Indians would be required to do.

So many indigenous people died there [at the drainage works],

It was rumored that thousands were dying. Once again, it seemed that the end had come for the indigenous peoples of Mexico.

In 1608, Chimalpahin began the project of writing his people’s history on a grand scale.64 It would be a xiuhpohualli, or a collection of multiple xiuhpohualli, in the old tradition. He would record the history of the Mexica, of the Chalca people, and of anyone else for whom he could find sources, perhaps Azcapotzalco, Texcoco, and others. And he would do it before it was too late.

Chimalpahin had long collected his family’s genealogies and paid attention to stories that aging family members could recount to him, but he also sought written documents. In the final section of his great work, he wrote a great deal about where he had obtained them—for, he said, like the scholar that he was, he thought his readers might someday want to know.