With Montezuma a vassal and Cortés fending off the Spanish authorities, good fortune seemed to embrace him at every turn.
But within days, Cortés would now have to face his greatest challenge. The bloodbath he sought to avoid at Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City) came to pass when the lieutenant he left in charge, based on rumors of a secret revolt, had massacred large numbers of the Aztec nobility, including innocent citizens and holy men. Angry survivors quickly elected a new emperor, Cuitláhuac, to replace the incompetent Montezuma (who had naively welcomed the Spaniards into the city without rules or restraints). Cuitláhuac ordered his soldiers to besiege the palace housing the Spaniards and Montezuma.
On his return, Cortés asked Montezuma to speak to his people from the palace balcony and persuade them to let the Spanish return to the coast in peace. Montezuma was jeered and stoned, mortally injuring him, and he died a few days later. By these recorded accounts, Cortés had little to do with the misguided opening salvos of the defeat of the Aztec empire.
So this author’s wonderment concerns why Cortés is not considered modern Mexico’s “founding father.” Bipolar Russia still has Lenin’s tomb. And story-high posters of Mao still haunt China.
Instead, it seems, Cortés and his Aztec mistress, the mother of whom many historians consider the first Mexican, their son Martin Cortés (who dressed only in native fashion), both have been relegated to an antiquity Mexicans wish to forget or ignore or simply disavow. Even though, with the defeat of a bloodthirsty Montezuma, in which both played key roles – one as military general and the other as refined diplomat who won over Montezuma’s rivals –a modern Mexico burst dramatically onto the world stage.
And yet in Mexico today there are no streets, sites or monuments to Cortés or to his illustrious mistress. Save for just a handful of representations and references: the mysterious near-life-sized monument of Cortés, Malinche and their son, Martin [found within an area of disuse and buried in falldown]; a small bust of Cortés in Mexico City, a painting of him and Marina by Orozco from the 20th Century; a reference on a sign outside Mexico City that notes Cortés’s Night of Sorrows [his initial defeat before conquering Montezuma]; and a rundown old building called Casa de Cortés, a place of no history in which Cortés never lived. That’s it. Further to the same slight, there’s an imposing, even regal, 500-year-old two-story stone house still standing at Calle Higuera 57 in the Coyoacan district of Mexico City. Doña Marina (sometimes referred to as the Mother of Mexico) once lived there arguably as an Aztec princess, and yet there is no plaque or indicator of any kind to mark the spot as historic. This vacuum of honors is a clear and deliberate effort to deny the man and his mistress any historical cachet or import, except as a not particularly beloved conquistador.
On the other hand, one will still see nationwide parks, streets, bridges, statues, schools, sports stadiums, civic groups, sports teams and even brands of beer bearing the names Montezuma (even Cuitláhuac, Montezuma’s successor). By contrast, the name Cortés could become Mexico’s unutterable “C-word.” As a nation, Mexico has been faced since their independence from Spain with the ironic situation of a historical figure who changed history, being a virtual unknown in a country on which he exerted such a profound influence.
Octavio Paz contended that the Mexicans’ ultimate rejection of Cortés and his mistress as Mexico’s origin story left them in a state of “orphanhood.” “The history of Mexico,” he wrote in analogical terms, “is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins,” and still strangely uncertain where they lay.