This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, neutral.
Prof. Jorge Majfud.
“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
(Still working on this topic)
- What was the founding myth of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City)?
- What was the cosmologic (and cosmogony) difference between the Americas’ Indigenous peoples and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worlds?
- What were the major causes of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerican peoples?
- Europeans transferred 180,000 tons of silver and 2,000 tons of gold from what is now Latin America. Why did Spain desperately need that much gold from the Americas?
Table of contents
The Survival of Indigenous Thought and the Culture of Resistance
In this first chapter «Indigenous Cosmology and Spanish Conquest» from the book The Routledge History of Latin American Culture (Routledge, 2018) we argued that the Spanish conquest and repression did not erase Indigenous ways of thinking but forced them underground, where they survived through language, memory, rituals, myths, and religious syncretism. Indigenous cosmology offered a different understanding of time, nature, authority, and wealth —particularly a cyclical conception of history and a moral suspicion of greed and the exploitation of nature. Over the centuries, these ideas merged with the experiences of resistance to colonial domination, becoming part of the imagination of Indigenous and popular rebellions from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Figures such as Túpac Amaru II could therefore embody not simply political opposition to Spain but deeper Indigenous memories of justice, legitimate authority, and the restoration of a violated order.
This intellectual and cultural continuity did not end with independence. Although colonial elites often continued to suppress or marginalize Indigenous thought, its ideas increasingly converged with anti-imperialist, socialist, and left-wing movements and thinkers in the 20th century. The Indigenous critique of inequality, private accumulation, exploitation, and domination could intersect with modern critiques of capitalism and imperialism. In this sense, we presented Indigenous cosmology not as a dead pre-Columbian inheritance but as a living current that repeatedly merged with later movements of resistance, contributing to Latin America’s continuing search for alternative forms of social organization, justice, and liberation.
Years later, we expanded the analysis of these ideas to North American indigenous peoples in the book Tawiscara: The Hijacking of Democracy (2026).
Tenochtitlan: A City Founded by a Cosmic Vision
From Tonantzin to Huitzilopochtli: The Serpent, the Eagle, and the Birth of Tenochtitlan
In the chapter «Indigenous Cosmology and Spanish Conquest», we saw Mesoamerican mythology as a symbolic transition from an older feminine, terrestrial world toward a newer masculine, celestial and warrior world. The earlier world is represented by Coatlicue/Tonantzin, the “Mother of the Gods,” associated with the earth, fertility, snakes, and the feminine principle. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui also belongs to this serpent/earth world. The emergence of Huitzilopochtli, however, signals a profound transformation: Coatlicue becomes pregnant through a feather, rather than sexual reproduction, and gives birth to a celestial, masculine deity associated with the sun, the hummingbird, feathers, and warfare. Huitzilopochtli kills Coyolxauhqui and casts her followers into the sky, symbolically transforming them into stars. We therefore read the myth as the victory of the “Age of the Bird” over the “Age of the Serpent” —the movement from earth/fertility/femininity toward heaven/abstraction/violent/masculinity.
This symbolism eventually becomes concentrated in the founding myth of Tenochtitlan and survives in the Mexican flag: the eagle perched on a cactus and devouring the serpent. For us, this is not merely a story explaining where the Aztecs founded their city. It represents the final resolution of an older cosmic struggle —the eagle/bird of heaven overcoming the serpent of the earth. Huitzilopochtli himself commands the Mexica to establish Tenochtitlan where they encounter this image, making the foundation of the city the political expression of the new masculine, celestial order. At the same time, Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, occupies an intermediate position: he combines serpent and bird and therefore represents a transitional world between earth and heaven. The symbolism ultimately survives through later Mexican culture, including the Virgin of Guadalupe, where Indigenous and Christian images merge.
According to Mexica tradition, their migration ended when they encountered an eagle perched on a cactus, holding a serpent. The sign fulfilled a prophecy and identified the place where they would establish their capital. The eventual city, built on islands and artificial extensions within Lake Texcoco, became one of the largest urban centers in the world in the early sixteenth century.
The story of Tenochtitlan provides an entry point into the relationship between myth, political identity, geography, and power in the Native World. Rather than treating mythology as something opposed to history, students can examine how founding narratives create collective identities and legitimize political authority. The Mexica understand their capital as a political center embedded in a sacred geography in a larger conception of cosmic order.
Two Ways of Imagining the Cosmos
European conquest brought together societies whose understandings of the universe were profoundly different. Indigenous civilizations throughout the Americas possessed diverse cosmologies, so there was no single “Native religion.” Nevertheless, many Indigenous traditions understood humans, animals, ancestors, landscapes, celestial bodies, and supernatural forces as interconnected within a living cosmos. Mountains, rivers, caves, forests, and other places could possess profound sacred significance.
Since the Renaissance —and even more radically, since the rise of capitalism— the Western tradition operated within a distinct intellectual and theological framework. Its creation narratives present God as the transcendent creator of the universe and place humanity firmly within a divinely ordered creation. Islam, like Christianity, also affirms God as the singular creator and insists on a clear distinction between the Creator and creation. Their encounter did not merely set rival religions against each other; it brought into confrontation fundamentally different conceptions of creation, humanity, nature, time, death, and the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds.
This difference should not be reduced to a simplistic opposition between a “spiritual Indigenous world” and a “rational European world,” since conquest and religious fanaticism had nothis of rational but the opposite. Indigenous civilizations developed sophisticated mathematics, astronomy, engineering, agriculture, and political institutions, while European societies were also deeply religious. The important question is how different systems of knowledge organized reality and how those differences affected the encounter between the two worlds.
The “Death” of Nature
One of the most consequential intellectual transformations of the Renaissance and early modern Europe was the systematic demystification of nature. In the medieval period, the natural world was construed within a Christian sacred cosmos: nature was created by God, saturated with symbolic meanings, and integrated into a wider spiritual order. The forest has a spirit. Spirits lived there and over there. With the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant revolution, and the consolidation of new forms of rationalism and capitalism, nature increasingly came to be conceptualized as matter —something measurable, divisible, exploitable, and subordinate to human control. Nature did not, of course, literally die; rather, its cultural and epistemic status underwent a profound reconfiguration. What had been apprehended as a mysterious and theologically meaningful creation was progressively recast as an object that could be systematically investigated, extracted, possessed, and transformed.
This transformation had enormous consequences when Europeans encountered the Americas. Indigenous traditions were diverse and should not be reduced to a single worldview, but many Native American societies understood humans as participants within a living and sacred natural world, rather than as owners standing outside it. Land, animals, water, forests, and mountains could possess relationships and sacred significance that could not simply be reduced to commodities. European colonialism in the Americas (Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French) increasingly imposed another logic: land could be claimed as private property, forests could become timber, minerals could become wealth, animals could become resources, and human beings themselves —including enslaved Africans and Indigenous laborers— could be treated as property and instruments of production. The conquest was therefore not only a struggle over territory and political power; it also brought into conflict fundamentally different ways of understanding what nature —and even human beings— were.
The Americas Genocide
European arrival in 1492 led to 56 million deaths by 1600.
The study «Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492» (Koch et al., 2019) confronts us with a staggering reality: by painstakingly reconstructing pre-Columbian population across seven regions of the Americas —Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Inca territory, Amazonia, North America, and the rest of the hemisphere— using a «habitat density method» that weaves together archaeological site data and carefully reasoned assumptions about population density in comparable environments, it reveals a world that was teeming with life and complex societies. Drawing on and unifying previously published regional estimates, the study arrives at a combined Indigenous population of about 60 million people in 1492 —more than the entire population of Europe at the time, a comparison that lays bare the immense human presence that existed in the Americas before the catastrophe of colonization.
The researchers then model the demographic collapse triggered by European arrival, attributing roughly 56 million deaths by 1600 (90 per cent), driven mainly by introduced disease along with violence, famine, and social disruption. They argue this population crash was severe enough to cause a measurable environmental effect: with so many farmed and cleared areas abandoned, roughly 55.8 million hectares of land reforested, pulling enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to contribute to a documented drop in global CO2 levels and a slight cooling of global temperatures in the late 1500s and early 1600s — a phenomenon sometimes called the «Great Dying.»
Why Did the Spanish Conquer Mesoamerica?
The Spanish conquest resists explanation by a single cause, despite how often it is reduced to one. Military technology played a role, but treating it as the decisive factor oversimplifies a far more tangled process. The Spanish arrived in societies already marked by political competition, shifting alliances, rivalries, tributary relationships, and ongoing resistance —dynamics that did not suddenly begin with European intervention. The Mexica Empire, for instance, had powerful enemies, and Spanish conquistadores did not so much engineer these divisions as insert themselves into preexisting conflicts by allying with Indigenous groups that opposed Mexica domination. A comparable pattern can be observed in the Inca Empire, though the specific circumstances were neither identical nor as straightforward as conventional narratives suggest.
Disease was another decisive factor. Indigenous populations had been isolated from the pathogens that circulated for centuries across Afro-Eurasia. Epidemics therefore produced catastrophic demographic consequences. Smallpox, among other diseases, spread through Indigenous communities and weakened societies at precisely the moment when they were confronting military invasion and political upheaval.
Religion, wealth, personal ambition, and imperial expansion also intersected. Spanish conquistadors sought status, land, wealth, and political power. The Spanish Crown sought to expand its territory and authority, while Catholic institutions sought to convert Indigenous populations. The conquest therefore emerged from the interaction of European imperial ambitions with Indigenous political realities, rather than from European military superiority alone.
Te Golden Century and the Century of Gold
Spain desperately needed gold and silver because, by the 16th and 17th centuries, it was trying to finance one of the largest empires in the world while fighting almost continuously across Europe, the Mediterranean, and overseas. The Spanish Crown spent enormous sums maintaining armies and navies, defending territories, subsidizing allies, and paying its creditors, while its tax revenues were insufficient to cover these costs. American silver —especially from mines such as Potosí and Zacatecas— and gold became essential sources of revenue and credit, but the wealth did not make Spain financially stable: the Crown repeatedly defaulted on its debts —four major times in the 16th century (1557, 1560, 1575, and 1596) and again in the 17th century. Thus, the enormous extraction of American wealth was closely connected to the costs of empire, warfare, and mounting royal debt.
Gold, Silver, and the European World
The enormous quantities of precious metals extracted from the Americas need to be understood within the larger economic transformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spain emerged from centuries of warfare on the Iberian Peninsula and quickly became involved in expensive European conflicts. Maintaining armies, fleets, fortifications, diplomacy, and an expanding empire required enormous financial resources.
American silver became particularly important. Mines such as Potosí in present-day Bolivia and Zacatecas in Mexico generated extraordinary quantities of silver that connected the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Much of this wealth did not simply remain in Spain. It circulated through European financial networks and helped finance wars, purchase Asian goods, repay debts, and participate in an increasingly interconnected global economy.
The question, therefore, is not simply “How much gold and silver did Spain take?” but “What happened to the wealth once it was extracted?” Precious metals transformed economies on several continents while also producing enormous human costs through Indigenous and African forced labor. The history of American silver is consequently also a history of global capitalism, empire, war, debt, and exploitation.
The Conquest Was Not Simply Spaniards Against Indians
One of the most persistent simplifications of the conquest is the image of a small group of Spaniards defeating millions of Indigenous people by themselves. The historical reality was considerably more complicated. Indigenous peoples were political actors with their own interests, rivalries, strategies, and calculations. Thousands of Indigenous allies participated in campaigns against the Mexica. Some saw the Spanish as potential partners against Mexica power; others sought to advance their own political position. The Spanish therefore entered an already complex political landscape and transformed existing conflicts into a new colonial order.
This does not diminish Spanish responsibility for conquest and colonization. It makes the history more understandable. The fall of Tenochtitlan resulted from the interaction of Spanish military intervention, Indigenous alliances, political divisions, epidemic disease, logistical factors, and the extraordinary instability produced by the encounter.
The Demographic Catastrophe
Perhaps the most devastating consequence of European arrival was not the military conquest itself but the enormous demographic collapse that followed. Epidemic diseases, warfare, famine, forced labor, displacement, and the disruption of agricultural systems contributed to extraordinary population losses across the Americas.
Disease deserves particular attention because it challenges conventional definitions of conquest. Armies did not need to kill every opponent directly to destroy a society’s political and economic foundations. Epidemics could eliminate enormous portions of a population, including rulers, soldiers, farmers, religious specialists, and entire communities.
The demographic catastrophe also transformed the balance of power. As Indigenous populations declined, colonial institutions gained greater control over land and labor. The consequences therefore extended far beyond the immediate destruction of cities: they reshaped who possessed land, who worked it, who exercised political authority, and whose culture would dominate public life.
The arrival of Columbus in 1492 unleashed one of the most staggering demographic catastrophes in all of human history. Though estimates of the Indigenous population of the Americas before European invasion vary, a major modern synthesis suggests there were roughly 70 million people in 1492. Within barely a century, about 90 per cent of them were dead, leaving a shattered remnant of only around 6 million by 1600. The driving force behind this devastation was the onslaught of Old World infectious diseases —smallpox, influenza, measles, and other ruthless pathogens— introduced into societies with little or no previous exposure or immunity. These epidemics did not strike just once; they tore through communities in relentless waves, each outbreak often killing 30 per cent or more of the population and leaving survivors traumatized and grieving. Warfare, famine, forced labor, slavery, and the deliberate destruction and disruption of Indigenous agricultural and social systems deepened the collapse and compounded the suffering. In countless places, entire peoples were dying in unimaginable numbers before they had even laid eyes on a single white person.
The catastrophe was particularly dramatic in regions like central Mexico. Estimates suggest a population of more than 1.5 million in 1519 that fell to fewer than 200,000 by 1610— nearly a 90 percent decline, with most of the loss occurring during the first fifty years of Spanish occupation. The demographic collapse transformed the entire colonial landscape: millions of abandoned fields and settlements were gradually reclaimed by forests and other vegetation, while the surviving Indigenous populations faced a radically altered political, economic, and cultural world.
Conversion, Resistance, and Cultural Transformation
The conquest was also a struggle over ideas. Spanish missionaries attempted to replace Indigenous religious systems with Christianity, destroying some sacred objects and temples while converting Indigenous populations. But conversion was rarely a simple replacement of one culture by another. Indigenous communities adapted Christianity to existing traditions, incorporated Indigenous symbols and practices into new religious forms, preserved languages and oral traditions, and continued practices that colonial authorities attempted to suppress. In many places, the result was neither complete cultural destruction nor complete cultural continuity, but cultural transformation.
Consider, for instance, how the transformation of Tonantzin —a Mexica mother-goddess of earth and fertility— into the Virgin of Guadalupe exposes the transulturization of colonial Christianity. Indigenous beliefs were not simply erased; they were cannibalized, repackaged, and made to serve a new religious regime, usually on the same indigenous sacred places, like hills or sophisticated temples like in Mexico and Cuzco, Pereu. Colonial accounts insist that an apparition of the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in 1531, a site long sacred to Tonantzin, yet this story itself has functioned as a tool to overwrite an Indigenous sacred landscape with a Christian one. The new Christian figure did not merely resonate with Indigenous understandings of a sacred maternal presence; she captured and redirected that devotion under the authority of the Catholic Church, which eagerly folded this powerful icon into its religious order. Over time, the Virgin of Guadalupe became something far more unsettling than a simple Spanish Catholic import or a seamless survival of Tonantzin: she emerged as a mestizo religious and cultural symbol that both reveals and conceals the profound fusion —and brutally unequal struggle— between Indigenous and European worlds.
Resistance did not simply fade after the fall of the major Indigenous empires —it burned on. It erupted in armed uprisings, strategic flight, refusal to labor for colonizers, stubborn preservation of language, underground religious practices, radical community organization, and fierce defense of land. The conquest was not some neat, finished event in 1521 or 1533; it marked the start of centuries of unequal negotiation, relentless resistance, forced adaptation, and violent conflict.
A Short List of Factors That Explain the Conquest
Horses. Horses gave the Spanish a major psychological and tactical advantage. Indigenous peoples had no horses before European arrival, and the sight of mounted warriors could be terrifying and confusing. Horses allowed Spaniards to move rapidly, attack from a distance, pursue fleeing forces, and strike with greater mobility. However, horses alone did not conquer the Americas; Spanish cavalry became especially effective when combined with Indigenous allies and European weapons.
Diseases. Epidemic disease was arguably the most devastating factor in the conquest. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and other Old World diseases spread through populations that had no previous exposure to them. Smallpox reached central Mexico around 1520, killing enormous numbers of people, including the Mexica ruler Cuitláhuac. Epidemics weakened armies, destroyed communities, created political instability, and killed people who were essential to agriculture and government. Disease therefore often accomplished what weapons could not.
Swords and Steel. Steel swords, armor, helmets, and other metal weapons gave Spanish soldiers important advantages in close combat. Indigenous peoples possessed sophisticated weapons—including the Mexica macuahuitl, which could inflict devastating wounds—but European steel weapons and armor offered greater durability and protection. The technological difference was real, although it should not be exaggerated: Spaniards were heavily outnumbered and depended greatly on Indigenous allies.
Guns and Cannons. Firearms were technologically significant but not the primary reason for Spanish victory. Early sixteenth-century guns were slow, inaccurate, and difficult to reload. Cannons could produce tremendous psychological effects and were useful against fortified positions, while firearms gave Spaniards additional tactical advantages. Their importance came from their combination with horses, steel weapons, tactics, and alliances rather than from overwhelming firepower by itself.
Religious Zeal and Imperial Ambition. Spanish conquest was also driven by a powerful combination of religious conviction, imperial expansion, personal ambition, and the search for wealth. Many conquistadors understood themselves as soldiers of Christianity fighting against what they considered pagan religions, while the Crown sought new territories and subjects for the Spanish Empire. Conquest, conversion, extraction of wealth, and the expansion of Spanish political power became deeply intertwined.
Indigenous Political Divisions and Alliances. Perhaps the most important factor often overlooked in the traditional story is that the Spaniards did not conquer the Americas alone. Cortés and his relatively small Spanish force depended heavily on Indigenous allies who opposed Mexica domination, while other Indigenous peoples made their own political calculations. Similar dynamics occurred in the Andes. The Spanish exploited existing rivalries and conflicts, turning Indigenous political divisions into a major advantage.
Myths and the Stories of Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha. Stories about Quetzalcoatl in Mexico and Viracocha in the Andes have sometimes been used to explain the conquest through the idea that Indigenous peoples mistook Europeans for returning gods. This interpretation, however, should be treated cautiously. The famous story that Moctezuma believed Cortés was the returning Quetzalcoatl appears to have been shaped substantially by post-conquest Spanish and Indigenous accounts, and historians debate how much it reflects what Moctezuma actually believed. Similar traditions concerning Viracocha and Atahualpa were later interpreted in ways that could make the conquest appear divinely predicted or destined. Rather than accepting these stories literally, it is more useful to examine how myths and colonial narratives were constructed and later used to explain or legitimize the conquest.
What Survived the Conquest?
We can move beyond the traditional narrative of destruction. Indigenous societies survived, although profoundly transformed. Indigenous languages remain spoken by millions of people. Agricultural knowledge, foods, medical practices, artistic traditions, architectural forms, community structures, and systems of ecological knowledge continue to influence societies throughout the Americas.
Modern Latin America is therefore neither simply Indigenous nor European. It emerged from an unequal encounter that produced new societies through violence, mixture, resistance, adaptation, and cultural exchange. Studying what survived forces us to reconsider the meaning of the word conquest.
The conquest destroyed political states and transformed entire civilizations, but it did not erase the Native World. The Americas after 1492 were not the disappearance of Indigenous civilization; they were the beginning of a radically transformed Indigenous, European, African, and eventually global world.
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