No Settlement, No Conquest by Richard Flint

Author:Richard Flint [Flint, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, North America
ISBN: 9780826343642
Google: yfSHAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNM Press
Published: 2013-11-01T03:38:18+00:00

ASSESSMENT BY INDIAN ALLIES

Almost all the written records created as a result of the Coronado expedition expressed or were founded upon European aspirations, ideals, and points of view. Yet two-thirds to three-fourths of those who participated in the expedition were not Europeans or even natives of the Old World. They were the American natives who traveled north, in large measure willingly, as adjuncts of the Spanish-led entrada. When they left their homes in the south, they, too, had expectations of what Tierra Nueva would be and how it would affect their lives. Are those expectations and their realization or frustration preserved today?

Direct evidence does not exist; no accounts of Tierra Nueva set down by or on behalf of indigenous members of the expedition have yet been located. But that does not leave historians without recourse. A few documents survive from the Coronado entrada and contemporaneous events involving natives of central and western Mexico that were composed by indigenous participants in the events themselves. They permit one to make judicious deductions and inferences about the indigenous Coronado expeditionaries.

There is, for instance, a nearly contemporaneous record of the departure from and return to the Ciudad de México of a group of Tenochca—the native people of Tenochtitlan—of unknown size that made up a portion of the Coronado expedition's corps of indios amigos.16 Part of the significance of this pictorial manuscript, a summary history of the Tenochca known today as the Codex Aubin, is that it demonstrates the prominence that participation in the expedition held in Tenochca memory. The expedition was a major occurrence, on a par with the death of the Tenochca's principal leader.

Whether they considered participation in the entrada as service to be proud of, as a dismal disappointment, or as something else altogether is not immediately apparent from the entries in the codex devoted to the entrada. But the expedition to Tierra Nueva is linked in the codex with another event involving Tenochca warriors just a year and a half later, which strongly suggests that both events were seen as meritorious, as sources of pride, and as opportunities for royal reward. The entry for 1539 includes a prominent reference to the departure of a party of Tenochca with the Coronado expedition. The only event recorded for 1541 is the participation of Tenochca as allies of Viceroy Mendoza in the Mixtón War: “At this time [the Tenochca] conquered the people of Xochipillan.”17 The subsequent entry in the codex, for 1542, records the return to the Ciudad de México of both parties of Tenochca, together. Pride in the two instances of service to the Spanish viceroy, and expectation of reward and preferment as a result, surely dominated the reasons for their inclusion in the historical codex.

The Tenochca leaders and their people, then, participated in the expedition in large measure to solidify or advance the leaders’ and the community's status and position in the evolving Spanish colonial order. That is precisely how the principal leader of a native contingent expressed the result of his having led his people into battle after battle during the Mixtón War.

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