Aztec Dance Along the Ruta de Cortés: A Search for New Ethnic Identities

During the course of my research on colonial topics during the last three decades, I was repeatedly struck by the eagerness and passion of Mexicans to talk about the conquest and its legacy in Mexico today. I was also struck by Mexico’s rich layering of visual imagery – produced over millennium by multiple ethnic groups and conquests. In 2006, I began exploring a new project based on two working hypotheses: first, that Mexicans of all walks of life can shed light on how the reality and perception of the Spanish conquest informs current traditions, identities, and debates about Mexico’s future; second, that visual imagery from both historical and contemporary sources can add a crucial element to this testimony. Working with a photographer and archival image researcher (Emmy award winner, Rich Remsberg), we began consulting renowned Mexican scholars in the fields of archeology, ethnography, history and political science; interviewing people on the street, in buses, stores, museums, archeological sites, cafés, and festivals; and photographing churches, markets, ancient monuments, street scenes and locating visual archives. The resulting project, In the Shadow of Cortés: From Veracruz to Mexico City, seeks to transform how traditional disciplines in the humanities have approached modern Mexico by combining oral and visual histories with a focus on the presence of the past in Mexico today.¹

From 2006 to 2010, I conducted nearly 100 interviews with Mexicans of all walks of life. Each trip focused on the intersection of place, people, and history in one of three distinct geographical areas along the Ruta de Cortés, the famous route taken by Hernán Cortés and his army on his march from the coast of Veracruz to Tenochtitlan. Each area (Veracruz, Tlaxcala-Cholula, Mexico-Tenochtitlan) has its own set of diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural and historical characteristics. I asked everyone I interviewed the same four basic questions: What do you think about Cortés and the conquest of Mexico? How did you learn about the conquest? Do you think there is any evidence of the conquest in Mexico today? What else do you think I should know about for this project? In my book, I organize interviews following the geographical trajectory of the Ruta de Cortés, but I use it as a trope to access both popular and scholarly discourse about conquest, history, and memory in Mexico, and to explore the legacies of conquest in town and city centers today. The voices of leading statesmen and scholars, along with housewives, children, Nahua and Totonaco Indians, artists, street vendors and many others, bear witness to the profound and continuing impact the events of the conquest and its aftermath have on intimate, complex worlds in which official discourse intermingles with lived experience. One informant advising us on the project put it succinctly, “Neither you, nor I speak for them. Every Mexican must speak his own history” (Pérez).

Many Mexicans view the geographical trajectory of the Ruta de Cortés from Veracruz to Mexico City as a graphic symbol of a moment that changed forever the course of their history. While the Ruta de Cortés is a national symbol of conquest and colonization – and even a tourist route promoted until recently by the Mexican government – the Spanish conquest was not a single historical military trajectory. Cortés himself used at least four distinct routes as he moved between the coast and Mexico-Tenochtitlan over the course of two years. Several of these routes strategically avoided established pre-Hispanic routes while others followed them. After the conquest of Tenochtitlan, many more routes of military and spiritual conquest were established and crisscrossed through central Mesoamerica before moving north and south when Cortés and others mounted expeditions to Michoacán and Honduras. By mid-century the Royal Road (Camino Real) from Veracruz to Mexico City was established and solidified a route that connected the inland city to the coast, but it did not necessarily retrace Cortés’ route, which even today remains uncertain in more desolate areas. When new Viceroys arrived from Spain, they symbolically re...