The conquest of Mexico: a pending commemoration

Rachel Marin

A few years ago, in less turbulent times, I envisioned the possibility of a binational commemoration of the V centenary of the conquest of Mexico.

He saw it as a great opportunity for historians, not only Mexican and Spanish but American, British and European, to reclaim our trade applied to the study of that encounter that changed the world.

He was not thinking of purely academic events but of mass broadcast programs on radio, television and internet channels in which the participants would present their narration of the events.

It would have been a democratic exercise that would have transcended providentialist and nationalist views, a civilized debate between different views with adherence to the humanist tradition and factual truth.

It was not done, but the possibility remains open.

The public deserves it.

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• The other conquests of 1521 narrated from Mexico

In New Spain the providential narrative prevailed for three centuries, understood as the work of God guiding the steps of Hernán Cortés.

It was the natural vision in a global empire allied to a universal church.

Starting in the 17th century, every August 13 (the day of the fall of Tenochtitlan), a caravan would leave the Cabildo Houses of Mexico City carrying the banner of the City Council to the hermitage of San Hipólito or “de los Mártires”. where the Spanish defeat had occurred in the so-called Noche Triste. The

Paseo del Pendón

was the great celebration of Mexico City in viceregal times, especially notable in 1621.

The custom continued in force throughout the 18th century, but in the face of the fading enthusiasm that it provoked (parallel to the awakening of a national consciousness in the Creoles) in 1794 the peninsular authorities decided to glorify the memory of Hernán Cortés with a cenotaph that would keep his remains in the Church of the Hospital de Jesús, which he had founded in 1524. The greatest gala of this monument, a golden bust of Cortés, was the work of the Valencian sculptor Manuel Tolsá, with a fond memory and a deep mark on Mexican architecture.

In Mexico the nationalist narrative, built on a symbolic reversal of the conquest, prevailed. It was the natural vision in a war of independence aimed at creating a new nation. In 1813, within the framework of the first Constituent Congress, in front of the major leader of the insurgency, the Creole chronicler Carlos María de Bustamante invoked in a prophetic tone the defeated leaders of Mesoamerica: “Genios of Moctezuma, Cacahma, Quautímozin, Xicotencal and Calzontcin, celebrate [...] the glorious moment when your illustrious sons have come together to avenge your outrages and outrages ”.

In 1821, the year of the consummation of independence, there was a fleeting moment of reconciliation, reflected in the initial words of the Plan of Iguala: “Three hundred years ago North America had been under the tutelage of the most Catholic and pious, heroic and magnanimous […] the branch is equal to the trunk, the public opinion and the general […] is the absolute independence of Spain ”. But the harmony did not last long. In 1823, incitements were heard to violate the tomb of Cortés, burn his bones and throw his ashes to the wind. An important personage of the time, Lucas Alamán, ordered the cenotaph to be undone one night, safeguarding the bones of the conqueror and sending the bronze bust to the descendants of Cortés in Palermo.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Mexicans did not fight with Spain but with the Spain that lived in their entrails. The conservatives maintained that Mexico was born in 1521, the liberals maintained that the date was 1810: both were right, the former in cultural terms, the latter in political terms. But instead of debating the ideas, they took up arms. The liberals triumphed, passions softened, generations followed one another, and in September 1910 Mexico got ready to commemorate the first centenary of the war of independence, closing the wounds of the conquest.

On the advice of historian Justo Sierra, Minister of Public Instruction and a man of calm judgment, the Government of Porfirio Díaz wanted to make these festivities a ceremony of reconciliation. Both governments did their part. The Mexican organized historical representations in the open air: the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma, the presence of Malinche (and the no less conspicuous absence of Cuauhtémoc), the parade of the missionary fathers who evangelized the country and even the

Paseo del Pendón

, which it had not been staged for a century.

For his part, the Marquis of Polavieja, Spain's plenipotentiary ambassador to the festivities, returned to Mexico the garments and banners of the heroes of Independence.

In that act, according to the chronicles, General Porfirio Díaz could not contain his emotion: “And the silent room heard this cry: 'Gentlemen: Long live Spain!

Long live our Great Mother! ”.

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) did not actually reopen the old wounds.

Mexico's complaint was no longer with Spain or its legacy, but with the internal social order and with the United States.

For this reason, in 1921, on the IV centenary of the conquest, another Minister of Education, the philosopher José Vasconcelos, proposed for the third time the reconciliation of Mexicans with their past through the cultures that had formed them: the Spanish, the indigenous , the classic, the oriental.

Mexico as a melting pot.

His ecumenical message did not convince the great Mexican muralists, particularly Diego Rivera, who perpetrated a deformed and syphilitic Cortés in the National Palace itself.

With greater moral sensitivity and a tragic sense, José Clemente Orozco captured on the walls of the old Colegio de San Ildefonso (since 1867 Escuela Nacional Preparatoria) the founding couple of Mexico: the powerful and hieratic figures of Cortés and La Malinche, with their hands linked. and at his feet the body of a dead Indian.

Octavio Paz saw in that disturbing mural the expression of original sin: the mestizo family was not born from a union but from a dark complicity.

But at the same time he preached the urgent need for Mexico to finally reconcile itself with its past.

The way of reconciliation is knowledge. Against the anachronistic providentialist and nationalist visions, against the ideological distortions of Hispanists and indigenists, from the 1940s onwards, a professional historiography was built in Mexico that took up the best humanist tradition of previous centuries, that of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún to Miguel León-Portilla, from Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to Silvio Zavala, from Francisco Javier Clavijero to Edmundo O'Gorman. That unbroken chain of historians did not harbor theological or ideological hatred, but intellectual love; it did not politicize history to serve power (the Crown, the Church, the caudillos, or the nation state) but it served exclusively knowledge.

The historians of various nationalities who today study those dramatic and portentous events are the heirs of this noble tradition.

They seek to preserve memory, understand and explain the facts before judging them.

Today the winds are not conducive to the knowledge of History, but to its use and abuse for purposes of legitimation and political manipulation.

But the winds will pass.

Governments will arrive that apply themselves to improving the present and building the future without taking shelter in the supposed guilt of the past.

Then we can carry out the pending commemoration.

Enrique Krauze

is a historian and essayist, author, among other books, of

El pueblo soy yo

(Debate).