Victors and VanquishedEssay Preview: Victors and VanquishedReport this essayThe fifteenth-century Renaissance and the beginnings of European exploration, conquest, and colonization are part of the same narrative–one in which culture, science, religion, politics, and power are inextricably intertwined. Innovations in science and technology made long-distance travel and exploration possible. The desire of rulers for wealth and power financed conquest, and the desire of the Roman Catholic church for converts provided religious motivation for the subjection of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Upon reaching Central Mexico, Spanish explorers found themselves confronted with the Nahua people, commonly known as Aztecs, of whom the largest tribe was the Mexica. Stuart B. Schwartzs Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico contains opposing versions of the defeat and destruction of the flourishing sixteenth-century civilization of the Nahua.
By presenting both indigenous and European sources in each chapter, Schwartz attempts to present both sides of the story, although he warns that cross-cultural influence sometimes makes it difficult to group the documents with one culture. The account of Bernal Dнaz in Schwartzs second set of documents will be of particular interest to students. Dнaz stresses the importance of communication and the good fortune of the Spanish in having translators. He also discusses both the culture of the Nahua and Spanish military equipment and tactics. What were the technological advantages and disadvantages of the Spanish and the indigenous peoples? Did knowledge of science and geography favor the Europeans?
Chapters 14 and 15 of The Making of the West provide a general historical context for Schwartzs Victors and Vanquished, which explores European history within a world-history context integrating Latin American and early-modern historiography. Schwartz fills in that general background with a collection of documents that illustrate the clash of two cultures and how this conflict created a new environment for the Nahua and the Spanish, for other Native Americans and other Europeans. Both the Spanish and the Mexica were “renaissance conquerors” and strongly religious, and Victors and Vanquished reveals the shared complexity, violence, pride, and prejudice of these seemingly different societies and peoples.
Schwartzs Victors and Vanquished explores the conflict between the inhabitants of The Cairn and the inhabitants of Oaxaca. One family of the Nahua tribe (Cairn Naga) was a major contributor in the development of the city’s commercial, industrial, and cultural status. In the mid-1750s, though their culture has remained relatively underdeveloped. Many of their possessions were made in Mexico and Mexico, although many of its land was often managed by slaves. Some became wealthy on land, others in land without owners. A few of the lands were administered by the state of La Paz to some degree, but many were controlled by tribes from whose area a large majority of native Cairn immigrants were born. The Cairn tribes, however, were able to create, through an organized enterprise, a community structure that provided land to a part of the population of the surrounding territories, without the fear of the state governing them, that was the basis for the modern economy, and, as such, has been one of the primary sources of funding for this government.
In a conversation in the spring of 2015, Richard A. Strossi, the dean of St Louis College’s history department, suggested that there was “serious consideration” to include more than only the Nahua in any effort to further the education of “the majority of Native Americans as subjects in this history.” The proposal was supported by both scholars and by a number of historians (including Ira L. Wright, who writes the book) who say that “[o]ur work has taken into account the various indigenous issues involved and the complexity of Native Americans, especially Native American Americans of the American Southwest who are not part of the Western cultures, and in favor of including the Nahua, along with their culture, as subjects of our school curriculum for future generations. As such, we need to consider incorporating the native peoples and other Native Americans in our curriculum. This is what the New Media Studies College’s (NAMCS), the New Asian Studies Institute (NASE) (National Asian Pacific American Relations at the University of Southern California, Santa Cruz, or the Asian American Heritage Project, which is affiliated with it, do), is striving to do by combining and linking with indigenous American communities along the American Southwest.
