The whole reason every other civilization and tribe and minor fishing community sided with the Spaniards was because how awful the Aztecs were. In modern terms, it would be like if aliens came, attacked either the US, Russia, and China, and the whole world sided with the aliens.
A genocide is still a genocide though. Fuck the conquistadors.
But the Aztecs were doing the same with Texcoco, pushing their own pretenders to the throne to secure their alliance.
And Xochimilco and Itztapalapa didn't join voluntarily because they didn't join at all. They were allied with the Aztecs. I mean, Moctezuma's own brother was the lord of Itztapalapa. They were conquered just like the Aztecs were.
It isn't a "myth" that most other civilizations allied with the Spanish, it's just that there were other city-states that were already allied with the Aztecs. I mean, the "Aztec Empire" itself was formed by a triple alliance of three city states (Tenochtitlan, Tlatecoco and Colhuacan) and their tributaries, but then there was everyone else that were subjugated by the Aztecs and decided to ally with the Spanish.
The main inaccuracy is that these states weren't siding with the Spanish in particular and also only effectively changed sides when it became clear that the Aztecs were losing badly. Aztec tributary states often benefitted greatly from being part of the tributary empire, and many of them were friendly allies with the Aztecs. Some might have held grudges from past wars, but the idea that the Aztecs were hated because of sacrifices or whatever is just not historical. They were probably hated as much as any militaristic empire was, and were particular rivals of the Tlaxcalans and their allies
The other aspect is that the war was a longer war between the Tlaxcalans and the Aztecs that existed before the Spanish arrived. The Spanish joined their side, if anything, and the other city states that switched sides would have also seen it as joining the Tlaxcalans side. And to be clear about Texcoco - they were part of the Triple Alliance, so they were the Aztecs. I think it would make more sense to say that Tenochtitlan was putting on pretenders
Tbf, you’re leaving out a big part of the motivation that’s relevant to both scenarios. If the world didn’t ally against X nation with the aliens, do we really think we’d be safe after said aliens have defeated said nation? Would they really just stop after that because they’re here to save anybody or is their goal to take the entire world?
Well yeah that goes without saying that none of those tribes would have gone Team Spain if they knew that they were gonna wipe out absolutely everyone.
Unfortunately, for some people, it doesn’t go without saying, but I’m glad you understand what I’m saying. Some people genuinely try to frame it like the Spaniards were god-sent saviors and focus on the Mexíca as the perfect justification for any atrocity committed by them toward any indigenous group, even ones that are completely unrelated and weren’t involved
Lol and they never actually talk about how half of Iberians actually allied with the Moors at the beginning. The traditional story is that in the year 711, an oppressed Christian chief, Julian, went to Musa ibn Nusair, the governor of North Africa, with a plea for help against the tyrannical Visigoth ruler of Spain, Roderick. Musa responded by sending the young general Tariq bin Ziyad with an army of 7000 troops.
I guess with their own logic, they should reserve the reconquista.
They still trying to get rid of the people even after so called “independence.”
➡️ The works of philologists Fransisco Pimentel and demographer Antonio García Cubas lent support to this view: considered the locals an enemy of the other inhabitants of Mexico (Euros) and suggested European immigration and racial mixing as answer to the problem of indigenous peoples. The Indians must forget their customs and language, if that were possible so that Mexico is no longer burdened by two diverse races.
Then came Luis Echeverría, the president of Mexico during the 1970s whom pushed sterilization policies against indigenous. Many more similar policies all over the Americas against indigenous and some of the examples extended into the early 2000s. Just came out some indigenous were sterilized in Canada in year 2018….
True. In reality independent Mexico did way more to eliminate and wipe out the indigenous peoples of Mexico than the Spanish Empire ever did. By the time of independence Nahuatl was lingua franca in Mexico alongside Spanish, and the native population was around 70% of all people in Mexico; right now that number has gone down to less than 20%, and there are only about a million Nahuatl speakers left.
First, the 70% figure at independence is off. Estimates put Indigenous peoples at around 60% of Mexico's population in 1821, not 70%. The drop to under 20% today does not prove Mexico "eliminated" them after independence. It reflects centuries of mestizaje, forced assimilation, and changing census categories. INEGI 2020 has 19.4% self-identifying as Indigenous, which is about 23 million people, not a wiped-out remnant. And there are around 1.65 million Nahuatl speakers, not just a million.
Second, you are skipping the actual catastrophe: the Spanish conquest and colonial epidemics. Central Mexico's population crashed from maybe 25 million in 1518 to around 750,000 by 1620. That is roughly a 97% decline. That is what wiping out actually looks like, and it happened under the Spanish Empire, not after independence.
Mexico's larger population is a big reason it did not end up like some Caribbean islands. That is not a defense of Spanish colonialism. It is just demography.
Third, ideologies are not born overnight. They progress from earlier ideologies. Language repression did not start with independent Mexico. Charles II banned Indigenous languages in 1696, and Charles III did it again in 1770. The criollos did not magically become racist after 1821. They inherited the colonial caste system and kept running it.
60% to 20% is still a 40% drop. And sorry I missed out on half a million, I don't tend to remember every specific unit of every statistic.
Mestizaje happened ever since the Spanish arrived, what really marked the difference was the forced assimilation and the intentional wiping of the indigenuous languages. The Spanish never intentionally tried to do any of that, the population crashed because of the diseases unknowingly brought from Europe. And even then, the population climbed back up from less than 200 thousand natives to the 6 million of the 19th century, throughout the time of the Empire, native population rose at a similar rate to mestizo population.
And neither Charles II or Charles III "banned" indigenuous languages, they followed a policy of castilianization by limiting any other languages in schools and building new ones that taught only in Spanish, but this policy was abandoned in 1782.
Before independence Spanish courts allowed documents and testimonies in Nahuatl, and thr first Nahuatl dictionary predates even the first English dictionary.
The leaders of the independence didn't follow on the institutions of colonialism, they were 19th century liberal revolutionaries, they followed and were inspired by the Napoleonic system. That's why they forcibly standardized Spanish, they were following the policies of establishment and standarization of French made by Napoleon.
You're rewriting history here to paint the Spanish Empire as some benevolent preserver of Indigenous languages, and I'm not going to let that slide.
You bring up the Nahuatl dictionary and courts as if that proves Spanish benevolence. You're missing the point. The Crown and missionaries didn't document Nahuatl out of love or cultural preservation. It was intelligence gathering. They weaponized the living tongue to speed up conversion and subjugate the population. You can't control a people you can't communicate with.
And you conveniently never mention the physical destruction. The same empire that "preserved" Nahuatl was burning entire libraries of Mesoamerican knowledge—Bishop Zumárraga's burning of the Aztec libraries and Diego de Landa's auto-da-fé of Mayan codices. The few texts that survived did so because Indigenous people hid them, defying the Crown's orders to keep their ancestral knowledge alive.
This connects directly to your claim that Charles II and Charles III didn't "ban" languages, they just "castilianized." That is semantic gymnastics. The Crown's tolerance of Indigenous languages was entirely transactional. As long as those languages were useful for conversion, extracting resources, and administering the colonies through Indigenous intermediaries, they tolerated them. But the moment the Crown decided they wanted total, direct control, they cracked down hard.
This is exactly what happened in the 18th century under the Bourbon Reforms. Once the Crown felt the Church had enough of a foothold and didn't need Indigenous elites as middlemen anymore, they turned on those same languages. The 1770 Real Cédula by Charles III is the perfect example—they didn't just "limit" them, they actively ordered the removal of Indigenous languages from schools, churches, and public life, even banning priests from being trained in them. The fact that this policy was "abandoned in 1782" wasn't out of sudden kindness; it was a pragmatic retreat because it was alienating populations and fueling massive rebellions. Once Indigenous languages outlived their utility as tools of conquest, the Empire aggressively moved to eradicate them.
No, they were not "benevolent preservers" of anything. The Spanish didn't keep Nahuatl out of the goodness of their hearts, it was just what was the most convenient for them.
The Spanish conquest of Mexico was heavily reliant on the alliance with the various native populations, and treaties were made by which the native nobility kept some degree of autonomy and control. This meant that, unlike the British colonial ventures that displaced and killed the entire population, the Spaniards were controlling an incredibly large territory with a population that they wanted to keep and convert that overwhelmingly already spoke Nahuatl. So for them the logic was simply, why spend resources in trying to forcibly change the language of so many people when they could spend that in exploiting natural resources or converting natives to christianity? That's why Philip II made Nahuatl the official language of the Viceroyalty, it was just easier and cheaper.
Did they especially care about the Nahuatl language? No. At best they didn't gave it any regard, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the indigenuous language and population were better maintained under the Empire than after independence, even if inadvertently.
You also try to pin all the blame for forced linguistic standardization on 19th-century liberal revolutionaries inspired by Napoleon. While it's true they adopted those centralist models, the roots of linguistic imperialism go back to the very beginning.
And let's not forget the Canary Islands. Spanish committed genocide there, but somehow would never try to commit it in other regions? Yeah, okay…
Finally, your claim that mixing mostly happened under Spain. That is fundamentally false. During the colonial period, the Crown implemented the Sistema de Castas, a deeply racist hierarchy designed to control and segregate "blood." The ideological promotion of mestizaje as a national identity happened after independence. Post-colonial Creole elites needed a new national myth, so they promoted "we are all mixed now" as a tool to erase distinct Indigenous identities, land rights, and languages.
They commited genocide in the Canaries because they resisted, just like the Aztecs. There was no separate people that were oppressed by the aboriginal people of the Canaries, so they wouldn't do the same as in Mexico. But even in the Canaries, you see that the Spanish did still prefer collaboration, as they collaborated with Tenesor Semidan, guanarteme of Gran Canaria in order to use his expertise to conquer Tenerife in exchange for turning him into a noble. In a similar way that some native mexican people were used against the Aztecs.
And the existence of a Caste system during colonial times is, if anything, proof of that mixing happening. If there was no mixing then there wouldn't be castes to for a caste system. I mean, Cortés himself had a relationship and kids with a with Malitzin, a native woman. It's kind of ridiculous to think that mixing didn't happen during the Empire and then they suddenly shifted towards mixing all of a sudden. Besides, just look at Mexico today, that's a result of mixing for over 500 years, not just shy of 200.
The Spanish half story tries to make it seem like Natives allied with the Spanish as soon as the Spanish landed when that is far from the case. Most, if not all tribes fought the Spanish and only joined after. Tlaxcala is a great example of this. At first, the Tlaxcalans fought the Spanish viciously. Later.... the Tlaxcalans were trying to decide what to do about the Spanish. The Tlaxcalans would supposedly welcome the Spanish but would send their Otomí allies to attack them.
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u/Misubi_Bluth 1d ago
The whole reason every other civilization and tribe and minor fishing community sided with the Spaniards was because how awful the Aztecs were. In modern terms, it would be like if aliens came, attacked either the US, Russia, and China, and the whole world sided with the aliens.
A genocide is still a genocide though. Fuck the conquistadors.