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After The Spanish Conquest Analysis

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The Catholic beliefs that the Spanish brought with them to the New World, along with the Aztec religions and prophecies that talked about a returning god named Quetzalcoatl, can be argued to have played the most important part in the downfall of the native empires. On one hand, it is widely believed that the Aztecs came to identify the Spaniards, and in particular Cortés, with this returning deity from their prophecies, and consequently knew that, even if they fought, they would lose the battle against him. Of whether this is completely true or not, we cannot be sure - another possibility is that, after the conquest, the remaining natives took to this explanation to make some sense of their incredible defeat. On the other hand, as Cortés explains this Aztec belief to the Charles V, he might have been twisting some aspects of the story and ideally positioning himself as the returning deity that arrived to conquer and guide a lost people, likening the conquest to the second coming of Christ described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.
All of these rhetoric strategies and techniques ultimately served to help Cortés, who received the royal support he needed while achieving to be recognized as a hero and not a traitor to Spain. In sum, “managed to monumentalize himself and his conquest in the eyes of an even wider audience” (Padrón …show more content…

In this sense, the chronicler is given absolute control over the information he decides to deliver and to graphically expose in his work. He can omit or change any details, and those who had never seen the things he talked about would never know there was a mistake. This has not historically been the case, though, due to the Spaniards’ commitment to observe and record the American region as accurately as possible. Parting from this absolute control over information, we can unmistakably relate this fact to Foucault’s association of knowledge with

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