The Martyrdom to Cuauhtémoc, a 19th-century painting by Leandro Izaguirre.
I/IV
Episode I: August 13, 1521
A plaque stands on the outside wall of the Parroquia Concepción Tequipeuhcan in Tepito, the oldest barrio in Mexico City. It reads, “Aquí [Lugar donde empezó la esclavitud] fue hecho prisionero el Emperador Cuauhtemotzin la tarde del 13 de Agosto de 1521.” These few words locate the exact moment when the world of indigenous people began to be turned upside-down. A long historic era that was centuries in the making came to an abrupt and violent end on that afternoon. Without a moment of transition, it instantly heralded a new age, a dystopia of apocalyptic proportions for the indigenous people. The capture of Cuauhtémoc, the eleventh and last Mexica tlatoani (emperor), ended the sovereignty of his people, many of whom were immediately enslaved with the fall of México-Tenochtitlán.
In an instant the Mexicas passed from independent people to slaves, a fate that followed other indigenous people as the Spanish Conquest expanded to other parts of Mexico and Central America. So fast was this passage in human condition for the indigenous people that there was no moment for reflection nor time to prepare themselves for what they were about to lose and what awaited them. If August 13 symbolized the parting with their past, then the ensuing months turned out to be “sad and dreadful” for them, a time when “opaque clouds” covered their world, according to Fray Motolinía, one of the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in Mexico. The Conquest reached Yucatan in the 1540s, resulting in what the Maya called “tiempos locos,” for it had inverted their world from one where the “the course of humanity was orderly” to a new and disorderly world, one in which “sadness entered us.”
The Conquest initiated a long period of indigenous oppression that continues to our present day. Tzvetan Todorov, an acclaimed French social scientist, regards the Conquest of Mexico as “the most astonishing encounter of our history.” For him the Conquest “perpetuated the greatest genocide in human history.” JMG Le Clézio, the French Nobel literature laureate, shares Todorov’s view, considering it as “the greatest disaster in world history.” In the “greatest genocide” and “disaster” in “world history,” the indigenous people of Mexico came close to being wiped off the map, declining from approximately 25 million people in 1519 to 1.2 million a century later.
Besides the destruction of Mesoamerican civilizations and the demographic catastrophe that ensued, Todorov, Le Clézio, and others assert that the Conquest should be recorded as the starting point in the periodization of modern world history. Le Clézio wrote that the destruction of Mexico’s indigenous states “would be succeeded by what is called civilization: slavery, gold, the exploitation of land and men — everything that announced the industrial era.” In terms of economics, David Graeber argued in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) that the massive planetary increase of silver and gold bullion, especially from the mines of Mexico (and Peru), sparked the “Age of Great Capitalist Empires.” Regarding culture, Serge Gruzinski, a historian, claims that the encounter of peoples in Mexico yielded a new culture, “a new phenomenon called globalization.”
The Lust for Gold and Slavery
In the various significances on the meaning of the Conquest these contemporary writers and others of the past regard gold as the driving force behind the Spanish conquest of the Americas, beginning with Columbus in Hispaniola. A few examples on the Spanish desire for gold are in order. Before marching to Tenochtitlán Hernán Cortés wrote to Charles V, the Spanish monarch, that he did not have any doubts that this land contained as much gold “as in that from which Solomon is said to have taken the gold for the temple.” Later Cortés met with one of Moctezuma’s emissaries, informing him that he and his “companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can be cured only with gold.” A Nahua account informs that when the Mexicas offered gifts, including gold banners and necklaces, to the Spaniards, they grabbed the gold objects “like monkeys” and that “It was as though their hearts were put to rest, brightened, freshened. For gold was what they greatly thirsted for; they were gluttoned for it, starved for it, piggishly wanted it.”
In the many Spanish conquests of America, including Mexico, the conquistadores were in a rush to get as wealthy as possible, and the quickest way towards that goal was the gold acquired from the spoils of the wars they declared on indigenous peoples. The Conquest of the Inca serves as the best example. After capturing Atahualpa, the Inca emperor, Francisco Pizarro promised to free him once his ransom was met. After the Incas paid the ransom of eleven tons of gold objects, and twice that amount in silver, the conquistadores killed Atahualpa (Cuauhtémoc met the same fate in 1525).
Once the military conquests ended, they used coercive labor to extract gold and silver from the mines, such as the encomienda system and slavery. When gold was not available, Indian slavery turned out to be the next best profitable business. Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico, wrote on the Nuño de Guzmán’s campaign of conquest in northern Mexico, “when he began to govern this province, it contained 25,000 Indians, subjugated and peaceful. Of these he has sold 10,000 as slaves, and the others, fearing the same fate, have abandoned their villages.”
The lust for gold was not a uniquely Spaniard trait. Previous to the Conquest of America, the desire for gold had led other conquerors to commit atrocities as Todorov argues in his book, The Conquest of America. “What is new,” he emphasizes was, “the subordination of all other values to this one.” Their desire for gold was a “new phenomenon and it heralds the modern mentality, egalitarian and economic.” Stated another way, the desire to accumulate wealth, symbolized in gold and silver, became the primary force shaping society, human relations, values.
Engraving by Theodor de Bry, from Bartolome De Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, depicting atrocities wreaked by Columbus and his men on the idsland of Hispaniola.
The Ten Plagues
The indigenous people were the first people in the world to experience the “subordination of all values” for gold. Beginning with the enslavement of the Mexicas, the brutalization of Indians for the quest of wealth has been well recorded, especially by Spanish priests. Fray Motolinía completed Historia de los indios de la Nueva España in 1541. This work provides the best chronicle on the beginning of the “subordination of values” for gold. One of the original “twelve disciples” that arrived to do missionary work, this Franciscan began his book with the “ten plagues” that God sent to Mexico in order “to punish” the Indians for their past way of life. Accordingly, the first three plagues arrived during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlán in 1521: an epidemic (smallpox), famine, and death resulting from war. Thousands died as a result of these plagues that were sent “by the commandment of God.” According to Motolinía, the wrath of God destroyed Tenochtitlán in order to create “another Jerusalem” over it. Tenochtitlán was “once Babylon, full of confusion and evil.”
“Although God permitted them,” the other plagues were due to “the cruelty and depravity of men.” These man-made plagues were tied to the various forms of forced labor and demands made on indigenous people. The fourth plague involved the thousands of Indians who were mobilized in the rebuilding of Mexico City, “which, in the early years, required more people than the Temple of Jerusalem in the days of Solomon.” Thousands died in this endeavor. The remaining five plagues dealt with the Spaniards rush to get as wealthy and as quickly as possible. They forced many Indians into slavery and others paid taxes and tribute in the form of unpaid labor, goods, and money. In the following passage Motolinía demonstrated the correlation between tribute and slavery and how this relationship led to the loss of communal lands and increasing Indian poverty:
The tributes demanded of the Indians were so great that many towns, unable to pay, would sell to the money-lenders among them the lands and children of the poor and as the tributes were very frequent and they could not meet them by selling all that they had, some towns became entirely depopulated and others were losing their population.
This was a description of the destruction of the Indian’s social net. In the case of Indian slaves who died laboring in the mines, “their stench was such that it provoked the plagues” to spread to the surrounding communities.
In comparing the plagues God send first to Egypt and later to Mexico, Motolinía emphasized that the Mexican case was worse because the Egyptian, which lasted a few days, while “here” some lasted “a long time.” Some of the plagues lasted “a long time” because of the combination of the Spaniards’ rush to become wealthy and Mexico’s abundant Indian population that numbered 25 million in 1519, the year the conquistadores arrived. Therefore, the annihilation of Indians did not bother them because there were many others to replace them. Bartolomé de las Casas wrote in A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542) that “the reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate goal, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a brief times.” Two hundred years later, Jean François Marmontel wrote in his book, Le Inca (1777), that “all nations have their robbers and fanatics, their time of barbarousness, their attack of rabies.” The lust for gold, the desire to become wealthy quickly, infected the Spaniards with “rabies,” resulting in many catastrophes and the loss of millions of lives.
The brutalization of the Indian was the product of a new social and racial arrangement that measured people into inferior and superior beings. As inferior people that needed to be dominated, the conquerors had reduced Indians to a sub-human status — somewhere between beast and human. That is why working many of them to death did not bother them. In removing their humanity, Motolinía wrote that Spaniards treated them “in a beastly way and cared less for them than their animals and horses.” Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican who wrote the most damning accounts on the Spanish atrocities in the Americas, took it a step further than Motolinía in declaring that “thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement in a public square.”
The clergy was of the opinion that God had guided the Spaniards to the Americas for the purpose of spreading a Christian way of life. They used biblical passages to make sense of the brutalization of Indians, regarding it as God’s way of punishing them for having lived in sin. Their punishment was the first step before the beginning of their cleansing. Therefore the clergy participated in the destruction of Indian religions and mobilized them towards building a new “Jerusalem” in Mexico City.
What bothered the missionaries were the man-made “plagues,” the catastrophes afflicting Indians due to the Spaniard’s quest for instant wealth. These plagues caused a high percentage of Indian deaths. Although we will never know exactly how many, De Las Casas claims that most Indians in the Caribbean died in the hands of the Spaniards. Unknowingly, the missionaries were reporting on the birth of the modern age, an era that was born in Mexico. They reported on the first step toward the “modern age”: the subjugation of all values and social arrangements to a new God called gold (later renamed as “the market”) and this included the brutalization of a people that had been reduced to sub-humans.
This was so clear and visible for the missionaries that it was impossible not to notice. This subjugation of all things and relations to money would disguise itself over time. Today it is called the rule of liberal democracy and the market. Walter Benjamin reminds us that, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The Conquest of Mexico provides one of the clearest examples on how “civilization” is rooted in barbarism.
Indian Land, Debts, and Rebellions
The origins of present day inequality in Mexico are to found in the Conquest. From the Conquest to end of colonialism in 1821, the primary tie between Indian and Spaniard was based on “debt,” beginning with enslaved Indians who owed their lives to their masters. Non-slaves owed tribute, a debt paid in labor, goods, and money to individuals, Church, and colonial government. They received nothing in return. For the most part, Indian slavery came to an end in most parts of Mexico during the second half of the 16th century when the Spanish monarchy declared them wards of crown. As wards of the crown and reduced to slightly over a million people by the early 1600s, Indians continued to be bound to Spaniards by way of debts. Natives paid tribute to the monarchy, first in goods and later in cash. They also had labor obligations to pay, the repartimiento. Later some communities were forced to purchase goods that they did not need (repartimiento de comercio), forcing them further into debt.
The weight of debt became part of Indian history. When they could not pay their tribute, for example, they often borrowed from money lenders and landlords. In the case of landlords, Indians paid their debts with work. More often than not, Indians became indebted to landlords, creating a new social group in Mexico, the indentured servants, whose numbers grew by leaps and bounds from the late colonial period to the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.
The fact that Indian pueblos retained a good portion of their communal lands softened the burdens of tribute, taxes, tithe, and labor obligations. Considering the wealth that was extracted from them in the form of labor, taxes, and tribute, their lands were the only resources they had to provide them with subsistence. Even though they retained most of their lands during the colonial era, Indian pueblos began losing land with the expansion of commercial agriculture, mainly to encroaching haciendas. Landless Indians and peasants worked in haciendas as indentured laborers, tenants (paying rents on land), and sharecropping (a portion of their harvests went to the landlords).
Motolinía’s tenth plague dealt with divisions among Spaniards as they fought among themselves for control of Mexico and over the Indians. Recognizing these divisions amongst the Spaniards, Native people took advantage of it by revolting. Motolinía wrote his book in the midst of the Mixtón war, the first large-scale Indian rebellion against the Spaniards in Mexico. As Motolinía indicated, the tenth plague involved the violence Indians received as a result of their failed rebellions, leaving many dead, as in the case of the Mixtón war. In spite of their many defeats, Indian pueblos and peasants continued to take advantage of divisions among competing elites and this included their participation in the main emancipatory movements in Mexico, the War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution.
In the case of indigenous groups that retained much of their collective identity as a people, the memory of the Mesoamerican past nourished their identities and reasons for resistance. In the book of Chilam Balam, for example, the Maya claimed they had a golden past when “there was no sin . . . there was then no sickness . . . they had no smallpox . . . At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came here.” Then the Conquest happened, initiating the “tiempos locos,” the moment of “the beginning of our misery. It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues . . . the beginning of robbery with violence, the beginning of forced debts, the beginning of debts enforced by false testimony, the beginning of individual strife.”
In other words, tribute, taxes, the tithe, and debt were part and parcel of Indian domination and exploitation. Land would be added to the Mayan list of grievances against the “foreigners.” In the case of Yucatan Maya, the landlords encroached on public and communal lands in the 1840s with expansion of henequen and sugar production. Landless Mayas became indentured servants. Taking advantage of elite divisions, the Maya revolted in 1847 in one of the greatest indigenous uprisings of the Americas. Among their key demands, they called for an end to abusive taxes, the liberation of indenture peons from debts, and the right to retain their ejidos (communal lands) and use of public lands. David Graeber noted in Debt that Moses Finley, the great historian of classical antiquity, emphasized that all revolutionary movements of the past had a single program: “cancel the debts and redistribute the lands.” Crucial to the history of Mexico, and Latin America more broadly, yet often ignored by historians, the “debt question” has been an important element in the making of Mexico’s main popular rebellions.
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Juan Mora-Torres Associate Professor of Latin American History at DePaul University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Wayne State University (Detroit). His research and writings focus on the history of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, Mexican migration, popular culture, working class formations, and Mexicans in Chicago. He is the author of The Making of the Mexican Border (University of Texas Press, 2001). The Making of the Mexican Border won the Jim Parish Book Award. He’s currently working on Me voy pa’l norte: The First Great Mexican Migration, 1890-1940. Mora-Torres is the Board President of El BeiSMan.
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