Imagined Conquests: Indigenous Allies of the Spaniards in the War on Mexico Tenochtitlan

This paper examines how some indigenous and mestizo writers in the 16th and 17th centuries looked back to the conquest period in order to claim territories or privileges in their own present day.  They constructed a past in which their ancestors made strategic alliances with the Spaniards and helped them conquer Mexico Tenochtitlan, center of the Mexica empire, and other indigenous groups of Mesoamerica.  In doing so, their ancestors never renounced the primordial rights that they possessed as original inhabitants of the land because they never were conquered.  On the contrary, they conquered alongside the Spaniards and deserved recognition and reward for their victories.  These claims proceeded from Mesoamerican concepts of alliance and warfare and also appealed to Spanish laws and customs respecting ancestral claims to territories and rewarding service to the Crown.  However, the claims were often accompanied by grievances about the present state of affairs, when indigenous territories and rights were being challenged or forsaken by colonial authorities and institutions.  The triumphant tone of the conquest narratives belies the problems that beset the writers, and the elusive spoils of victory for so many allied communities.  This paper examines the narratives in the light of other conquest stories from Mexico and in the colonial context in which they were written, offering new perspectives on old claims.  The texts considered here are pictographic and alphabetic, written in Nahuatl and Spanish, including:  the Lienzo of Tlaxcala; letters written to the crown from several native communities, such as Xochimilco and Huexotzinco; histories written by prominent mestizos who claimed to belong to lordly establishments, including Diego Muñoz Camargo of Tlaxcala and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl of Tetzcoco; and the many títulos primordiales that were written in various languages, especially after the mid-17th century.