Restall, Matthew & McAnany, Patricia

Restall, Matthew: Edwin Earl Sparks Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology at Penn State University, author of When Montezuma Met Cortés and Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

McAnany, Patricia: professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, chair of the Dumbarton Oaks Senior Fellows in Pre-Columbian Studies, discussant

The session is introduced and moderated by Frauke Sachse, director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (rendered "Fra Kazaka" in the captions). It was recorded on Zoom the day after the November 2020 US presidential election, with audience questions at the end.

When Cortés met Malinche, and Montezuma met Cortés. Alternative Facts and Disturbing Truths

Andrea Cirla · Apr 11, 2026 · partial coverage

• Matthew Restall
• Montezuma
• Hernán Cortés
• Malinche
• conquest of Mexico
• Aztec Empire
• Indigenous slavery
• Quetzalcoatl myth
• colonial historiography
• Dumbarton Oaks

Coverage note: full - automatic transcript of a 40-minute lecture followed by discussion and Q&A.

Core ideas

Restall starts from two "dots": a 1527 letter in which Cortés sends a tame "tiger" to Charles V as "booty to be gifted", and the many images of the gift of Malinche to the Spaniards. He follows them through the reception of the conquest. A portrait of Cortés, probably looted by General Worth during the US invasion of Mexico, hung in the White House under Sarah Polk. Prescott's Conquest of Mexico was carried by American soldiers who called their war "the second conquest". In the Capitol rotunda frieze, Montezuma's surrender to Cortés mirrors Santa Anna's surrender to Scott, beside an allegorical female America. The meeting of 8 November 1519 has thus been remembered as a single symbolic surrender. But the 530-word speech in which Montezuma supposedly recognised the Spaniards as heirs of an ancient lord was written down by Cortés long after the event. In reality the emperor hosted the invaders as honoured guests for six months and kept ruling until the violence began.

Restall argues that this surrender story survived because it covered up the violence of the invasion. Massacres, epidemics and the mass enslavement of Indigenous women and children made the war, in his phrase, "effectively and regionally genocidal". Malinche was about twelve when she was handed over with nineteen other girls; she bore Cortés's child at fourteen, lost the boy to Spain and was married off. Her later recasting as lover, then traitor, adds to that violence, and the sexualised allegory of America makes surrender a gendered metaphor. The lie also lasted through confirmation bias (the Abbé Prévost found it suspect but repeated it), the needs of later empires, the interests of Montezuma's descendants, and the Florentine Codex, whose Quetzalcoatl prophecy was a friars' addition. The Cortés legend, positive or negative, hides a messy war fought among a dozen Spanish captains and as many Nahua leaders. Some 3,000 Spaniards came, two-thirds of them died, and the Aztec empire survived the 1520s around Texcoco under Ixtlilxochitl. Restall's alternative is Montezuma the collector, with palaces, gardens and zoos ordering the world. In his reading the emperor welcomed the Spaniards in ritual Nahuatl to collect them, and they, like his animals, could not be tamed.

In the discussion, Patricia McAnany links the mythic charter to settler colonialism ("conquest and blending" in Mexico, "conquest and replacement" in the US) and raises Audra Simpson's ethnographic refusal. Restall says the "true story" of his subtitle is ironic: the aim is to destabilise, not replace one truth claim with another. He welcomes Indigenous perspectives without treating them as automatically right, prefers "invasion" to "conquest", and calls for breaking down the boundary between history and anthropology. He answers questions on tribute networks extended after 1521 into highland Guatemala, the Cholula massacre as a Tlaxcalan move, and Nahuatl registers of courtesy. He also suggests that European collecting practices may owe something to Montezuma's. Rejecting the charge of a new Black Legend, he says his target is not Spain but war itself, and that there is "no such thing as a good war".

Excerpts