Screenings

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-78
Author(s):  
Paul Julian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Limited Series ◽  
Domestic Lives ◽  
Female Director ◽  
Aztec Empire ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith discusses the Mexican limited series, Malinche, which tracks the Spanish conquest of Mexico and destruction of the Mexica (Aztec) Empire from the perspective of the conquistador Hernán Cortés's interpreter, the indigenous woman Malinche. He explains how the series differs from other televisual accounts of the conquest of Mexico in both its emphasis on the domestic lives of women and its use of multiple indigenous languages. He concludes by comparing the series to a recent film about the colonial experience by another Latin American female director—Zama by Lucrecia Martel.

Fray Juan De Zumárraga–His Social Contributions

1949 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-274
Author(s):  
James A. Magner
Keyword(s):  
Human Factors ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
Forward Movement ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Social Contributions ◽  
Aztec Empire ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

To Understand the conquest of Mexico, one must recognize the various human factors and the variety of motives that entered into the titanic struggle for mastery of the land. In the letters of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V, the whole gamut of ambitions—personal, national, grossly material and highly spiritual—are revealed. There can be no doubt that Cortés and the Spaniards with him were moved in the first place by a spirit of personal adventure and a desire to better their fortunes. As the panorama of the Aztec Empire opened itself before his eyes, the dream of expanding the Spanish domains came to Cortés as a justifying cause for his forward movement, so that escape or retreat appeared as treachery to his King. At the same time, as a product of the Spanish crusading era, he beheld himself in the rôle of a spiritual hero bringing the doctrine of Christian Redemption to heathen tribes sunk in idolatry and human sacrifice.

scholarly journals Revising the Narrative of the Conquest of Mexico: Bernardino de Sahagún’s 1585 Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amber Brian
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Bernardino De Sahagun ◽  
Aztec Empire ◽  
Florentine Codex ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

2021 represents the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. This essay addresses the rendering of the events that culminated in the Spanish domination of that region in two texts associated with the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590). The first is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex, a bilingual manuscript written collaboratively with Indigenous intellectuals in Nahuatl with a Spanish translation and accompanied by nearly two thousand illustrations that represent a third text. Completed in 1579, under increasing scrutiny by religious authorities, the manuscript was confiscated and sent to Europe, eventually coming to reside in the Medici Library in Florence. In 1585, Sahagún, authored Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España, which sought to revise the narrative of the conquest found in Book Twelve. Sahagún’s revision reveals how the narrative of the conquest changed in the hands of the Franciscan friar as the sixteenth century drew to a close.

Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s Mexico City in 1554: A Dramaturgy of Conversion

2021 ◽  
pp. 62-86
Author(s):  
José-Juan López-Portillo
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Private Spaces ◽  
Exclusive Or ◽  
Aztec Empire

The interplay between cities, theatricality and conversion becomes manifest in exclusive or semi-private spaces, such as classrooms and private studies. As this chapter illustrates, the rhetorical textbooks of Fernández Salazar sought to train students in the art of Rhetoric by performing didactic dialogues that took place against the background of colonial Mexico. In so doing, the textbooks linked Renaissance humanism to the transformation of urban, social, and religious spaces that followed the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire.

Broken Spears or Broken Bones: Evolution of the Most Famous Line in Nahuatl

2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (02) ◽  
pp. 241-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Schwaller ◽  
Miguel Leon-Pórtilla
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
Undergraduate Student ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Broken Bones ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
The City ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

Arguably the line “Broken Spears” is the most famous in Nahuatl. Any undergraduate student who has taken a course in Latin American history, literature, or anthropology has in all likelihood come across the line. It, of course, comes from the title of Miguel Leon-Portilla's book of the same name. The line appears in a description of Tlatelolco following the destruction of the city by the Spanish in the conquest of Mexico: Broken spears lie in the roads We have torn our hair in our grief The houses are roofless now, and their walls Are red with blood. This evocative image has dominated much of the imagination of two generations of college students.

scholarly journals Military logistics and national currency in international tourism in historical and geographical perspective: the Latin American experience

2015 ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
I. Smyrnov
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
National Currency ◽  
Capital City ◽  
International Tourism ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Military Logistics ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Hernan Cortes ◽  
The Relationship

Revealed the relationship of military logistics and national currency in the international tourism in historical and geographical perspectives on the Concista example, that is the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, including the Aztec and Inca empires in the XV-XVI centuries. Special attention is devoted to seizure by Spanish conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico) and geologistical aspects of the operation.

Animating History at a Cellular Level

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-79
Author(s):  
Manuel Betancourt
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Cellular Level ◽  
First Century ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Child's Play ◽  
Family Friendly ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Growing Network

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt, whose mother ran an animation studio in Colombia, reflects upon the diversity of contemporary Latin American animated production. Unlike in America, where animation has long been misunderstood as child’s play, an ever-growing network of Latin American creators refuse to see animation as beholden to family-friendly fare. Noting the didactic potential of this malleable medium, which is being used to educate children about everything from the Spanish conquest to modern-day environmental issues, Betancourt also calls attention to a growing animated canon bringing Indigenous traditions into the twenty-first century.

Mexico’s Early Cookbooks

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maite Gomez-Rejón
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico ◽  
Food Writing

During the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519–1521), gastronomic literature was already prevalent in Europe, yet not so in Mexico. The use of the printing press in Mexico was limited to print and disseminate ecclesiastical and legal documents; it was not used for subjects as seemingly superfluous as recipes and food. This is not to say that food was not a source of fascination, or a means of social control. Kitchen manuscripts written before Mexico became independent of Spain (between 1810 and 1821) show that there was an abundance of food writing before Independence, especially by nuns in colonial convent kitchens. However, the earliest printed cookbooks did not make their debut in Mexico until 1831, a decade after Independence. Mexican cuisine can be examined beginning from the diaries of conquistadors and missionaries to colonial kitchen manuscripts to the cookbooks published after Independence through the Porfiriato (1876–1910) and Revolution (1910–1920). Reading between the lines of the recipes in these sources, one sees the shifting attitudes toward food, as it ceases to be a status marker and a divider of classes and becomes a tool for unifying the country.

The Plum'd Serpent: Antonio Borgese and Roger Sessions's ‘Montezuma”

Tempo ◽  
1985 ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Andrea Olmstead
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Early History ◽  
Smith College ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Home Town ◽  
American Subject ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

The Spanish Conquest of Mexico provides stirring drama for an epic opera on an American subject It has been set by some 30 composers; the earliest is Graun's Montezuma (1755), and the best-known Spontini's Fernand Cortez, ou la Conquête de Mexique (1809). Antonio Borgese, a Sicilian who ‘fell in love with the English language’, retold the epic story to music by Roger Sessions.How did such an unlikely alliance—a Sicilian poet, an American composer, and Mexican history—come about? Sessions first met Antonio Borgese in 1934 in his home town of Hadley, Massachusetts, when Borgese was teaching at Smith College. In 1935 Borgese made a trip to Mexico, where he was overwhelmed by the early history of that country; on his return, he proposed collaborating on an opera on the subject, although he had never written a libretto. Sessions knew nothing of Mexico's history, but did possess a first edition of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico given to his grandfather, possibly by Prescott himself. Sessions read the Prescott and Bernal Diaz's account, and he too became enthralled. Borgese wisely advised against Sessions's proposed title, Tenochtitlan, arguing, ‘The opera is written for titans; we don't need a title for titans, too’. Instead, he suggested the title Montezuma.

Narration and the experience of history

Semiotica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (219) ◽  
pp. 511-528
Author(s):  
Roberto Flores
Keyword(s):  
Time History ◽  
Vicarious Experience ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Textual Basis ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

AbstractFor a long time, history has been conceived as a textual fact, whether as positive knowledge of the past, reported in chronicles and original sources, or through acknowledgment of its textual basis, assumed as historiography, as narrative history. In either case, the text appears as the source and goal of knowledge, and has assumed the nature of an immutable monument, an invariable object of reference and information. These texts are limited to constituting a regulatory storehouse of knowledge, a mere object of appropriation. In contrast, we can consider history not just as knowledge enclosed in textual containers, but as experience inscribed in peoples´ memory. This is what Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman suggests with his proposal to consider history as readers formulating their own versions of the past. Through these proposals, semiotics is in a position to describe the role of texts in the production of a vicarious experience of history through the act of reading. This paper provides examples taken from accounts of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and proposes a semiotic interpretation of the experience of history.

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