Some say history is written by the victors, but researchers with City College’s History department seek to understand how the conquered recollected the fight to preserve their culture, specifically within the Spanish conquest after the 1500s.
In order to understand how people thought in their day-to-day lives, many historians look to travel writings. Some famous travel writers include Herodotus from ancient Greece, the Maghrebi Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo from 13th century Italy.
“Something that we want to focus on is the transculturation that happened, where people wouldn’t just write about their travels and describe other cultures, but other cultures would respond back to the accounts of these travelers and want to add their commentary onto it,” said Dimil Hernandez, a student working on research with Professor Barbara Naddeo to develop an undergraduate class to understand cross-cultural encounters through the readings of travel writing with an eye towards transculturation. The focus of Hernandez’s study were the travel writings of the Spanish Empire.
The Spanish conquest was notoriously brutal, with entire populations nearly wiped out, and those remaining were forced to pay resources to Spain, convert to Christianity and engage in forced labor against their will.
“Even in relationships that are unequal like that, the native people would still write back and would still recollect their own history,” Hernandez said.
Two examples of discrepancies are Hernan Cortes’ “Letter from Mexico” and Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s “The True History of the Conquest of Mexico.” In the writings, Moctezuma II, the last emperor of the Aztec empire, was described as brilliant and cunning. The Spanish Conquistadors had an incentive to portray Moctezuma II as highly skilled to bolster the impressiveness of their conquest. However, it was later revealed that the natives actually saw Moctezuma II as a bumbling fool who did not know how to deal with the Spanish threat.
Another example of a well-known text with some embellishment is Volume 12 of the Florentine Codex, “The Conquest of Mexico”, written by the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún but sourced from indigenous leaders after the conquest. Even with some discrepancies, the Florentine Codex is one of the best insights into indigenous culture in what the Spanish called New Spain, currently Mexico.
“The friars coming in and transcribing their words was crucial. They didn’t just write down their accounts in Latin, but transcribed the Nahuatl language using the Latin alphabet, allowing Nahuatl and Nahua writing and stories to survive, even if it is represented through Latin letters. ” Hernandez said.
“The friar coming in and writing the words in Latin was crucial for saving many of these primary sources that might have disappeared or changed.”
One might wonder why the Spanish wanted to document so much of the culture and thoughts of the natives, especially if they were essentially trying to eliminate it.
“Even where there is an asymmetrical relationship of domination and power over another, you still need to understand what perspectives you’re working with. The priests were gauging whether the natives had a history of complex religious worship that could be replaced with Christianity,” Hernandez said. This is Hernandez’s first research experience. “I’ve always been interested in history since middle school … As you know, many times what you read in history courses is only snippets, but they don’t really give you a view of how things actually were, so I’ve enjoyed this tremendously,” he said. “I was able to read the perspectives of native americans, and documents from the Spanish inquisition where they’re trying Muslim or Jewish converts who they believe are not loyal to their conversion and just seeing how these people responded to the accusations and how the legal system of Spain worked in the 1500s.”
Even though Hernandez is of Latino descent, he approaches the texts with scholarly distance. He said the perseverance displayed by the Native Americans in the face of adversity and the conviction to write back with their own views and telling of history is a universal experience. “History isn’t just fragmented, it’s mirrored throughout the entire world,” he said. This experience of domination and writing back was reflected even within Spanish Iberia with Muslim and Jewish converts to Catholicism, called Moriscos and Conversos.
The research has been a positive and enriching experience for Hernandez and has made him recognize that just because you politically conquer a land, it doesn’t mean that the people will just automatically accept the culture forced onto them.
“They still want to share their points of view and their voices … Culture isn’t a solid, it’s more of a liquid where it takes and mixes with others,” he said.
Currently working toward a Master’s and eventually a PhD in history focusing on the Spanish empire, Hernandez said the experience has really ignited even more interest in historical texts that might shine new light on the writings of the victors.