CCHS 480/580 WKSP: HISTORY OF MEXICO BEFORE CORTEZ

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Scholar in Residence

UNIT IINTRODUCTION AND THEORIES OF MIGRATION
Session 1
Introduction to the Course

he Spaniards did not bring civilization to Mexico; they brought

Spanish civilization to Mexico. This is not a criticism or repudiation
of Spanish civilization, just an emendation to the history of Mexico
and a boost for our indigenous ancestors who are a part of our
blended evolution as mestizos and mejicanos. There was civilization in
Mexico before Cortez (BC).
Until the 20th century, history has tended to blur the presence (and progress)
of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, favoring instead the template of
Spanish civilization overlain on the pre-Cortesian past of the Americas
especially Mexico. The Spanish contributions to Mexican life are everywhere
evident. And as mejicanos (either in Mexico or the United States) to disavow
those contributions is to disavow our identity. Spain is an important part of
who we are. So is pre-Cortesian Mexico.
A further emendation explains that the indigenous peoples of Mexico did not
disappear upon the arrival of the Spaniards. Descendents of those people are
everywhere in Mexico. The Aztecs are still there, so are the Maya, the Toltecs
(Chichimecas), and the Otom. My maternal grandfather Atilano Campos was
a Huastecan, and he is with us today in the homologous presence of his
grandchildren and their children. His wife Eufracia Gasca, my maternal
grandmother, was of Basque origins, and she is with us today in the blended
presence of her grandchildren and their children in a sort of DNA half-life.
One of the first European observations about the Aztec civilization came from
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, chronicler of Cortez conquest of Tenochtitlan
(present day Mexico City):
We saw so many cities and towns built on the water, and other cities on the
surrounding land, and that straight and level causeway which entered the city,
we were amazed and said that it was like the enchanted places recounted in
Amadis de Gaula, because of the great towers and buildings which grew out of
the water, all made of stone and mortar, and some of our soldiers even asked
whether what they saw was not a dream, and so no wonder that I write in this
way, for there is so much to ponder in all these things that I do not know how to

describe them. We saw things never heard or dreamed about before (True
History of the Conquest of New Spain, Maudslay translation, lxxxvii, 1958).

In other words, there was nothing comparable in Spain or Europe to what

they beheld. What would account for such marvels in the Americas? Theories
abound about this phenomenon, many of them attributing it to external
influences, dismissing the possibility that indigenous cultures and societies
could have evolved to such a high state of evolution on their own. Thinking
of themselves as the torchbearers of the ancient Toltec civilization
(sometimes identified as the Chichimeca civilization), the Aztecs added to
that foundation. The Aztecs felt both spiritually and biologically tied to the
Toltec's. By the time the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs had
centuries of development behind them.
This
development
engendered
a
multicultural
and
multiethnic
conglomeration of people in Tenochtitlanthe capital city of the Aztecs
whose lingua franca was Nahuatl. The model of social and human evolution
for the Aztecs was based on ethnic blending (genetic mixing /intergroup
gene flow) which is why the Spaniards experienced little or no difficulty in
sexual blending with the indigenous peoples.
In 1519 when the Spaniards marched into the Valley of Mexico, the
population of the Valley has been estimated at 50 million (Woodrow Borah
and Sherburne F. Cook, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the
Eve of the Spanish Conquest, University of California Press, 1963, 4). This
was just one parcel of the Americas.

n the Popol Vuh (the light that came from beside the sea), the
ancient/sacred book of the Maya which details their genesis on earth
and in the terrain they lived on, we get the history of the Maya and their
progress on earth. It was this progress that the Aztecs encapsulated into
their world view and their belief in a unified humanity. For the Aztecs, life on
earth was temporal, its travails to be endured in order to reap the rewards of
the life after death, in a world that was not this world.
The Aztecs believed they were living in a world of the Fifth Sun (Quinto Sol),
each sun signifying a world born anew. Four times previously the world had
been destroyed by catastrophes and end-of-days cataclysms that wiped out
the human race; each new sun birthed its own human beings. This mytho-

cultural view of the Aztecs and their relation to creation and being was
central to their philosophy of life and their comportment.
That comportment was clearly defined in the Aztec legal and social system.
Infractions were dealt with severity and consonant with the great chain of
being that governed Aztec existence. Research calculates that the average
height of indigenous man in the Valley of Mexico was 5 feet 7 inches. The
average height of Spaniards was 5 feet 4 inches. At 5 feet 6 inches, Cortez
was a giant. The Aztecs were not a race of pygmies. Seeing the enormous
stone monuments and buildings, the Spaniards thought they could only have
been built by giants.
According to Aztec creation stories of birth and rebirth, the people of the First
Sun were giants destroyed by floods. The people of the Second Sun were
monsters of unusual dimensions and ate bread made with the fruit of the
mesquite (Bernal, 57). This world was destroyed by fire. The people of the
Third Sun ate a hydroponic graintheir world was destroyed by fire and
gravel. The people of the Fourth Sun, cultivators of flowers, were destroyed
by a great hurricane that blew the people off the face of the earth. The
people of the Fifth Sun are propagators of corn and will be destroyed by
earthquakes.
The most egregious slander of the Aztecs by the Spaniards was their
characterization of the Aztec religionthat it was based on human sacrifice
and slaughter of thousands of Aztecs in blood-letting ceremonies in which
priests cut out the pulsating heart of victims with obsidian knives on alters
thick with the dried blood of those who had been sacrificed to insatiable
gods.
The question for me is: what happened to the bodies? Historians suggest
they were dumped into the cenotes that abound in the Valley of Mexico. In
1980 and 1981 when I was conducting research for my play Madre del Sol /
Mother of the Sun, story of the encounter between Moctezuma and Cortez,
the Mexican government was excavating throughout Mexico City for the
construction of its subway system. This excavation cut through most of the
cenotes of the city. If the bodies of the sacrificial victims of the Aztecs had
been thrown into the cenotes, where were the skulls?
I ask about the skulls because in the Olduvai Gorge of the Eastern Serengeti
Plains of Northern Tanzania, Africa, the anthropologists Louis and Louise
Leakey found a trove of skulls from antiquity, skulls that revealed blunt force
trauma.
If
those
skulls
in
the
Olduvai
3

Gorge had perdured over millennia, would not the skulls of the Aztec
sacrificial victims in the cenotes have also perdured over a lesser period of
time? There were no skulls. The stories of the skulls and the cenotes were
made up by Spaniards in their zeal to denigrate the Aztecs as savages and
uncivilized. In other words, the Aztecs received bad press from the
Spaniards.
This is not to say there were no sacrificial rites in Aztec religion. The
Spaniards hyperbolized the practiceperhaps the better word is
exaggerated or distorted the practice. There were many rites of the
Spanish religion that are considered barbaric by todays standards. Ignacio
Bernal reports that by the end of the sixteenth century there was not a
single monument of ancient Tenochtitlan (Mexico Before Cortez: Art, History
& Legend, Dolphin Books, 1963, 3).
Theres much we dont know about Mexico BC (Before Cortez), but as we
decipher the hieroglyphics and symbolic languages of indigenous Mexico that
illumination gives us a clearer picture of Mexico before Cortez.