7. The Middle Ground and the In-Betweens (the woman who helped Cortés Conquer Mexico)

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The improbable Spanish conquest over the Mexica empire has been a focal point for many Latin American historians. With little resources or men and even less support from the royals, Hernán Cortés’s expedition into what is now Mexico should have been a sure failure. And yet, Cortés is often considered one of the biggest successes in the conquests of the New World. This view has been held since the 16th century. What created the success of the ill prepared Cortes and earned him his place in the historical hall of fame? How does language play an intricate role in colonization, even when the colonizers want to stomp out the existing cultures? What if Cortes’ conquest over the Mexica empire was only possible because of the collaboration of two “insiders” that worked as Cortes’s interpreter clear up until the moment Mexica’s “capital”, Tenochtitlan, fell?

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SOURCES

The one full of primary sources: eds. Stuart B. Schwartz and Tatiana Seijas, Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Fall of the Mexica Empire: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd Edition (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2018)

Adorno, Rolena. The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

Brinkerhoff, Thomas J. “Reexamining the Lore of the “Archetypal Conquistador”: Hernán Cortés and the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, 1519-1521.” The History Teacher 49, no. 2 (February 2016): 169-187.

Candelaria, Cordelia. “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 1-6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346027.

Cervantes, Fernando. Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest. New York: Viking, 2020.

Greer, Julie Johnson. “Bernal Dias and the Women of the Conquest.” Hispanófila, no. 82 (September 1984): 67-77. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43808106.

Metcalf, Alida C. “Go-betweens.” In Go Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600, 1-15. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico. Montezuma ed. 4 vols. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1843.

Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Waldemer, Thomas P. “Lost and Found in Translation: Carlos Fuentes’s “Las Dos Orillas.”” Romance Notes 39, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 145-151. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4380 29 84.

White, Richard. “2. The Middle Ground.” In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, 50-93. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexica (Don't tell on me)

https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/the-history-of-the-americas/the-conquest-of-mexico/narrative-overviews/the-narvaez-expedition

https://www.history.com/news/hernan-cortes-conquered-aztec-empire