Prescott hearts Cortes

First, I always swear that I’m going to hold off from looking at any of your blog posts until I write out my own so that I’m not influenced by what any of you write, but my curiosity got the best of me, and I peaked.   Upon looking at the titles of a number of posts, one stood out to me (Meryn’s) and I chose another at random (Kendra’s).  Meryn’s stood out because her title was exactly what I was thinking: my expectations were pretty low for Prescott’s book as a work of history and for his treatment of Mexicans.  Perhaps candidate Donald Trump has so desensitized me to critical remarks about our neighbors to the south, but I found Prescott’s book to be far more scholarly and fair than I thought at the outset.  Also, he wasn’t shy in discussing the inhumanity of some Spaniards in their treatment of the conquered, like the description of Alvarado’s massacre at Axayacatl (p. 537).  I want to stress, however, like Meryn did, that my knowledge of Mexico and its conquest isn’t all that great.  In fact, I’m in much worse shape: I have only been to Tijuana and I LIKED the Road to El Dorado!  Regardless, by today’s standards I understand that Prescott is not “fair.”  His admiration for Cortes is mighty, and he sees the Mexicans as barbaric.  But I think he gave it an honest try for the time.  Here is a great line that gets to Prescott’s bias and his effort to get past it, and it regards Montezuma at the time of his death: “his pusillanimity sprung from his superstition, and that superstition in the savage is the substitute for religious principle in the civilized man” (p. 583).

Second, I think Kendra really nails it in Prescott’s use of sources: though he seems to have made an honest effort to track down all he could, there was an understandable western bias in what he used, which is a powerful silence for the non-western perspective.  (Those essays on the scholars he relied on were impressive and often interesting.)  I am at a loss for knowing what sources Prescott could have consulted if one side wins and writes the story of that victory.  I do know, however, that someone like Robert Caro, the great biographer of Lyndon Johnson, would not have let that sit undisturbed.  His books are the product of someone who will not stop digging until he gets to the very end of every last rabbit hole he stumbles into.  With Prescott, perhaps he could have sought a wider array of narratives, like stories passed down over generations, to challenge anything that the Spaniards offered as explanation for their success.  I’m a little bit into Bloch’s Feudal Society, and on page 99 he discusses using folk narratives from the 1000s to understand the era.  Also, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel was a fine rebuttal to much of what Prescott offered.  There is evidence that the world spins by forces grander than the strong will of great men.  Granted, Diamond had access to information and scientific work (and, well, science) that wasn’t popular at the time Prescott told his tale.  Beyond that, the narrative of Cortes as hero is perhaps a silence of a perspective of him as a murderous, disloyal, power-hungry abuser of his troops and the people of Mexico.   

See you all Tuesday evening.