LAWRENCE — The “Conquest of Mexico” is both a misnomer and an oversimplified depiction of history, according to John Schwaller.
“People think there was a plucky group of Spanish swashbucklers who defeated an empire of millions of natives,” said Schwaller, a research adjunct in Latin American studies and history at the University of Kansas and a Hays native.
“That’s not exactly accurate.”
His new book titled “Beyond Cortés and Montezuma: The Conquest of Mexico Revisited” was written to set the record straight. The multiauthor effort gathers a diverse collection of scholars from the U.S., Mexico and Europe to examine both European and Nahuatl works, revealing the complex narrative of Spanish contact with the New World and the ensuing conflict, negotiation and cooperation. The book is published by the University Press of Colorado.
Co-edited by Schwaller and Vitus Huber of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the book revolves around Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of Montezuma’s Aztec Empire and brought portions of mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile in the early 16th century.
This account is part of what scholars now term the “new conquest history.”
“It’s where we stop, step back and look at the other aspects of this story. Let’s look at the guys in the trenches. Let’s look at the participation of the natives. Let’s look at these larger cultural issues. How does that inform our understanding of what went on?” Schwaller said.
Even the word “conquest” is a loaded term.
“My chapter, which is the summary in the book, explores the various monikers. My colleague, Vitus, was strongly in favor of calling it ‘Conquista’ — keep it in scare quotes and call it that because of what the Spaniards did,” he said. “I personally prefer calling it the Spanish Invasion of 1519. We have to put the date on it since there were other Spanish invasions, especially in the 19th century.”
Schwaller said he hopes the book “wakes people up to the fact the myths they learned back in fourth or fifth grade by and large aren’t true.”
For instance, he cites a celebrated (albeit apocryphal) moment in which Cortés rebels against Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba. To ensure there is no dissension among his own troops, Cortés burns their ships.
“Except it didn’t quite happen that way,” Schwaller said.
“These ships were probably built in Cuba. They’d been in the water for over two years, which means they had only about 6-8 months left before they would have to be keelhauled and essentially rebuilt. That’s because the tropical waters just destroy the timbers due to all the little beasties that live in it. So they grounded all the ships. They took everything important: the sails, the rope, the nails, the cannons — anything made of metal — and they saved it. The rest was just timber, so they burned it.”
“Beyond Cortés” is based on a series of symposia that Schwaller organized at four different conferences. One of these, the International Congress of Americanists slated to meet in Paris in 2020, was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and moved to online. This same group of scholars in the U.S., Mexico and Europe became the book’s contributors.
How did these legendary events of 500 years ago shape the world of today?
“Well, obviously they speak Spanish in Mexico,” said Schwaller, a native of Hays.
“But we must understand that the colonial enterprise the Spaniards launched was built upon the labor of native peoples. There were just never enough Spaniards to get everything done that they wanted to get done. Also, Spaniards didn’t cross the Atlantic in order to go to Mexico to raise pigs. They wanted to become filthy, stinking rich. So they provided a ‘land of opportunity,’ if you will. And the colonial regime which Cortés and the others established was very much built upon the exploitation of native labor and local resources.”
Schwaller returned to Kansas to join KU’s faculty in 2021 after a lengthy career in academia that included serving as president of State University of New York at Potsdam. His past books include “Stations of the Cross in Colonial Mexico: The Via crucis en mexicano by Fray Agustin de Vetancurt and the Spread of a Devotion,” “The Fifteenth Month: Aztec History in the Rituals of Panquetzaliztli” and “The First Letter from New Spain: The Lost Petition of Cortés and His Company, June 20, 1519.”
“My work started with studies of the Catholic Church, and then I learned the Aztec language as a graduate student and started really focusing on language documents,” Schwaller said.
“When you put it all into a blender, what comes out is this nexus of religion, religious practice, language and culture that defines my research.”