Seeds of Change: Spanish Colonization
The capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan.
Our group spent this week’s class talking about Spanish colonization in North America in the century after Columbus’ invasion. This video, from Khan Academy was the focus of our discussion- we watched it together and the kids answered poll questions as we watched:
If you’re watching with sensitive viewers you might want to skip over a line at the 4 min 44 second mark, when the instructor mentions that the Spanish had gigantic war dogs “which they used to rip apart their enemies.”
We wanted to talk about the Spanish colonization of the Americas with our kids because so much of America’s origin myth is wrapped up in the British colonies on the east coast. As James Loewen writes in his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, “the Spanish are seen as intruders, while the British are seen as settlers.” We know from our study of the Indigenous settlers who have been on this land for at least 24,000 years that they were both intruders! When college students are asked when the country we now know as the United States was first settled, the consensus answer is 1620, with the Mayflower. The Mayflower story and myths of the first Thanksgiving are really drilled into kids throughout their elementary social studies lessons. This focus on the British skips over one hundred years of Spanish colonization, which shaped the future of this land as much as British colonization did. Loewen writes that “The first non-Native settlers in the country we now know as the United States were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt.” But as we learned from the video, there were many many other conquistadores who traveled all over North America. They colonized one third of what is now the US- vast regions from California to Arkansas and over in Florida too. Loewen writes:
“The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on. Horses that escaped from the Spanish and propagated triggered the rapid flowering of a new culture among the Plains Indians. “How refreshing it would be,” wrote James Axtell, “to find a textbook that began on the West Coast before treating the traditional eastern colonies.””
Anyway, that’s why we learned about the Spanish colonizers this week. Because it’s weird that our history curriculums overlook them. The focus of the video above was mostly on Cortes’ march through Mexico to Tenochtitlan, so I wanted so share a source for additional learning about this. I learned about it from Decolonial Atlas (highly recommend following them on Instagram). They shared this series of artistic renderings of Mexico City, which was built on top of Tenochtitlan after they conquered it in 1521, which itself was built on top of Lake Texcoco:
You can read more about it here, but the story essentially is that the Aztec people had built a system of canals around the lake and a dike that separated the salt water from the fresh water, with the fresh water being closest to the city. When the Spanish invaded, they destroyed the dike, which made the salt water mix back in with the fresh water. Seeing no value in a lake of salt water, the Spanish worked to drain it, as you can see in the pictures above. This has had huge consequences for central Mexico- precipitation grew scarce without evaporation from the lake, the city had to overdrain its aquifers which has caused the city to sink 10 meters in elevation over the last century(!), and it has pushed the axlotl, one of the most genuinely magical little creatures, to the brink of extinction.
Anyway, that was our topic for this week. We have decided that we won’t try to force ourselves to find a current event/action item every week, unless one clearly jumps to mind. Learning this history is an action item! But that being said, we saw lots of parallels between Cortes’ invasion of 1519-21 and 2020- a brutal pandemic, white supremacy, and uprising. If you have thoughts about current day connections to this week’s lesson, we’d love to hear them!
