The Catch-22 of a Conquering People: Death to Drive Us All (A Conquest Rant)

I was born out of Conquest.  And I'm here now, trying to rationalize the borderline between understanding the wrong of the Conquistador's actions, and humanizing them, if only for selfish reasons...otherwise, would I be able to say that the possibility of my birth, centuries after, would have still been made possible?

The problem with violence is...it has to grow from somewhere, from someplace.  In the case of the violence between Aztec and Conquistador...it never needed to grow...it had already seeded itself on both sides.  I hope I don't offend anyone when I say the Aztecs were not blameless in the War for Gold.  What is striking to me even now, after so many years of study, is how no one saw the brutal carnage coming!  If you sacrifice your children to God, chances are, you'll be sacrificing peace at all costs, to make sure you don't defy your God.  In this way, Aztecs were already mounting their own way of life against the backdrop of blood, of the very fabric which would tear them to shreds as soon as Cortes stepped through the jungles and told them only Gold could cure their hearts' disease.  I should mention that just now I almost mistyped  Gold as God, and ironic isn't it, that I'm not entirely sure it was an honest mistake...God and Gold, after all, went so hand in hand for Cortes.

All I'm trying to say is, calm can't grow out of chaos, and surely, Cortes and his Spaniards did not mean to go gently into that good night.  No matter how much we emasculate Montezuma and the Aztecs (which Diaz absolutely does just by sheer description of what they wore, how they lived, etc.) they too worked under the very same violence the Conquistadors did.  In fact, I'd say more so, because they SEXUALIZED their violence in a way Cortes and his men didn't...you guessed it, until they arrived in the New World.  Something quite curious happened, I believe, the moment Aztec and Spaniard came together, giving birth (well...not birth, but at the very least create a new chapter in its evolution) to an entirely new form of violence, one which, to this day, gives many of us pause...

The violence of desire and the body.

Hear me out now.  I think it was the audacity in which the Aztecs threw themselves at the glory of their bodies, of the sacrificial quality of Body, that proposed, almost instinctually, the Spaniards' own equally Violent response.  It isn't enough that the heart is ripped out, but that it is shown to the Glory of God, raised high above the death, and in truth, signifying the life that has just been taken, taken in a most ritualized, and most eroticized manner.  How else could Cortes have responded in kind?  Montezuma took them in, suspicious and full of the fear that'd eventually cause his empire's crumble, but it's not as if Cortes had been unaware of what the Aztecs did to appease their God.  It was the very thing the Conquistador did for his Gold.  When two forces collide, two forces so similar in means and so similar in ways, there isn't any end or beginning, there is only an expansion of the Violence, a growth of tensions between the winning side and the side that has to inevitably lose.

Take a box with infinite squares inside, all of them boxes too, and take a people that grow to believe Violence and Ritual to be nearly co-dependent, to be normalized, and understood as traditional and expected...take all of this and put it in the box, then add a Conquistador, another people with the exact mindset but for opposite ends (i.e. the abolition of the former occupants in this hypothetical box)...what will you get?  Violence...infinite amounts of it, because no matter how evolved and how much each box grows within each box, within each box, within each box...the violence IS the norm, and for two cultures unwilling to try Change and unwilling to bend and break to the wills of Nature and the cultural landscapes on which both Aztec and Conquistador traversed...there is nothing doing except the vicious cycle on which they based their own mutual destruction (and creation).  Make sense?

Despite all of this, and though The Aztec is now essentially lost forever, a part of that Symbol lives inside the Spaniard, for that is the greatest piece of the story that many people seem to forget: Cortes and his men may have slaughtered thousands, may have pillaged and raped in the name of the Lord, may have called Mexico their home when they had no right whatsoever to do so...but if they really wanted, if they really understood that to erase the past one cannot leave any traces behind, there would be no Diaz, there would be no Conquest of New Spain.  There would only be silence.

I was born out of Conquest, out of the impossible catch when two warring people crash into one another.  Cortes was King, but Montezuma was King first, and it is from those two stories that I can form my own.  Violence begets violence, it's true, but sometimes it deigns to spring new life...

Here is a particularly adequate link, concerning Freud's Death Drive and one that I think holds true ESPECIALLY for the context in which the Aztecs and Conquistadors existed in.  It's super long, so obviously, watch at your own risk, but I do advise that a little skimming might be very helpful, and even illuminating in a way you may not have known before.  Enjoy!

To Die Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure