The conquest and colonization of the Americas have long been understood through compressed and singular narratives—decisive battles, heroic figures, clear lines between conqueror and conquered. Yet these foundational stories, however compelling, obscure far more complex realities. This panel interrogates how narratives of conquest were constructed, imagined, legitimized, and solidified into memory, revealing the instabilities, contradictions, and erasures beneath their seemingly definitive surfaces. In essence, conquest narratives derive their power from deliberate construction: through mythmaking that transforms peripheral spaces into exemplar of colonial success, through the compression of prolonged and contested processes into singular symbolic encounters, and through bureaucratic technologies that accrue authority via repetition and formula. These narratives perform crucial ideological work, imposing coherence on unstable colonial landscapes, legitimizing emerging hierarchies, and erasing the complex Indigenous participation, negotiation, and resistance that characterized colonization.

By examining cases across the colonial Americas, this panel demonstrates that what appears peripheral is often central to understand empire, that singular heroic clashes masks extended and collaborative process, and that narrative form itself functions as a technology of colonial governance. The teleological stories we inherit are not inevitable truths, but carefully constructed edifices built through selective memory, strategic erasure, and recursive storytelling. Unpacking these narratives reveals conquest as fundamentally contested, collaborative, and protracted—an ongoing process of construction and reconstruction. Ultimately, this panel exposes the multiplicity and instability that singular stories of conquest work to conceal challenging us to rethink foundational narratives that continue to shape how we understand colonization in the Americas.