The Broken Spears Essay

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While presenting a lecture on the “Danger of a Single Story” in a 2009 Ted Talk in London England, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie remarked that if a people are shown as one thing, over and over again, that is what they become. For centuries the conquest of Mexico and the fall of the Aztec empire has been a single story told through only European accounts. In The Broken Spears Miguel León-Portilla provides an account of the first arrival of European colonizers through a collection of codices authored by indigenous people. Although the validity of these accounts is often debatable, they offer another side to the story and show the similarities and differences between the Aztec and Spanish accounts due to their differences in motivations and interpretations of events.
The collection of codices that make up in The Broken Spears offers the story from the years leading up to the initial contact until their first contact. This is useful in offering, in some ways, a back-story for the Aztec. Although the general facts are generally the same, the Aztec account offers more detail about the massacres and the brutality of the Spaniards. The official accounts of when the Spanish conquest first started are recorded as being between 1519 and 1521, however the codices in The Broken Spears document the appearance of omens
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There were many factors involved in the defeat of the Aztec empire and these accounts offer new interpretations of how factors such as greed, fear, and power played important roles in the ultimate defeat. The book offers a more complex view of the advantages and disadvantages the Aztec and Spaniards had over one another. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie remarked, “power is the ability not just to tell a story about another person but to make it the definitive story.” This book emphasizes the significance of different sides to historical narratives in having a more balanced definitive

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