FIFTH SUN - CAMILLA TOWNSEND

Fucking amazing. Very, very helpful and insightful. As someone who’s been interested in “Aztec” (you can tell the book is on the right track by using the introduction to point out that there never was a group that called themselves that and the word most people are looking for when they say Aztec is Mexica) for as long as I can remember and who lived in Mexico City, the fabled Tenochtitlan, and who spend countless hours at the various museums and temple ruins thinking about what this world must have been like, this book is a real godsend. I’ve read countless other accounts, including the first-hand Spanish ones as well as more scholarly histories but this is the clearest and most illuminating one I’ve read. The book traces the Mexica people specifically but the larger central Mexican world from early human settlement to about 100 years after Cortez. It really focuses on about a 200 year span that places Cortez right in the middle. You often think about the “Aztec” as being a static timeless empire, hated by those around them until the Spanish showed up and upended everything. This book does a good job showing how recent their accent had been and how things worked more generally in their world. The real insight is the number of Nauhl sources Townsend is able to use, as a speaker, and the appendix at the end, where she explains where the various sources come from and how much she trusts them and why, is some of the best stuff. I won’t rehash the whole book but I’ll point out some highlights. La Malinche, come off as one of the most vital people in human history, given how in the right place at the right time and being exactly the right person, given the languages she already knew, (and you have to keep in mind that the elites in this world spoke a separate version of Nauhl that she also knew) and how quickly she was able to pick up Spanish. Even her name itself is interesting. The Spanish called her Marina, the natives had no “r” sound so called her Malina+tzin (which is an honorific), the Spanish assumed that was her name but since they didn’t have a “tz” sound they settled on Malinchi/Malinche. One of the most important people in human history’s name is a the result of a sort of cross-cultural game of telephone. I was also taken by the story of Paquiquineo who was a kidnapped kinfolk of Powhatan (in Virginia) who lived in Spanish, learned Spanish, was sent to Mexico City and saw how the Spanish were treating the Natives and eventually convinced the Spanish to take an expedition North to the Chesapeake bay, with him as a translator. At which point he convinced the Natives to kill all the Spanish and returned to live with his family. The Spanish decided these northern Indians weren’t worth it, leaving an opening for the English to set up Jamestown. There’s a lot of wonderful stuff about pre-Colombian Political history though sadly less about the Nahua religious worldview, which Townsend points out what the heaviest target of Spanish oppression. Townsend does this strange thing where she more than once credits the European advantage with 10k of settlement in Europe vs. only about 3k in the New World which is a strange way to explain the lopsidedness of what happened. Especially since it doesn’t seem that amount of settlement equals military might. We aren’t all under the sway of the Aboriginals, despite their 60k of settlement. It seems much more likely that they, again and again, underestimated their brutality, despite being from brutal societies themselves. It seems like, again and again, the Natives assumed that these knew Spanish would be powerful players in the complicated violent world of allegiances and subjection that already existed. I don’t think they could have envisioned the genocide, mass rape and cultural annihilation that the Spanish had in mind. The sections about how the Spanish ruled the central valley after the initial conquest were also illuminating and new to me. I finished reading this book on a beach near La Paz, Baja California Sur. La Paz was one of the last places that Cortez “discovered” in Mexico, still pushing west, still murderously obsessed with gold. 1519 altepetls