Mexican Story on the Rotunda January 7, 2021
[As I write this dispatch in Mexico, the United States Capitol is under siege.]
The Mexican Conquest is central to the American Myth. In the Rotunda of the US Capitol, where our greatest fallen heroes meet their grieving mourners, a mural of seminal events encircles the dome, featuring the first navigator Columbus, and ending with the flight of the Wright Brothers. Sandwiched between the momentous journeys of discovery are the confrontations of consequence—a revolution and civil war for the Americans, Cortes and Montezuma for the rest of the Americas.
This is what the US government website says of the painted panel in the Capitol Rotunda:
“The Spaniard Hernando Cortez (sic), conqueror of Mexico, enters the Aztec temple in 1519. He is welcomed by Emperor Montezuma II, who thought Cortez was a god. The calendar stone and idols are based on sketches that artist Constantino Brumidi made in Mexico City. (1520)“
Montezuma thought Cortes was a god? Not likely. A surer bet is that Montezuma found Cortes and his fellow invaders very much to be men—filthy white men, with horses and gunpowder and haughty promises from a distant king, not to mention a malarious odor so terrible that it seemed to make people die. We do not know what exactly transpired during that fateful first meeting, but scholars, like Matthew Restall in When Montezuma Met Cortes, believe that neither surrender nor idol-worship was on the agenda.
The mural scene shows a rather gracious encounter, Montezuma gesturing for his esteemed guest Hernan Cortes to enter, even perhaps to make himself at home, and we know that the Conquistador was showered with gifts, including gold but especially feathers and cacao. Montezuma intended for the Spaniard to return to the King he talked about, perhaps beginning a mutually beneficial trading partnership. As immortalized in the Capitol, it is a wonderfully harmonious memory of something that never happened.
Montezuma was believed to be a willing prisoner of Cortes, or at least the angry Mexica mob thought so, as he was stoned and speared at the first opportunity, when Cortes presented the ninth Aztec Emperor on a rooftop to mollify citizens, still upset that their monarch gave away the keys to the castle. Had he avoided capture, he might have led the subsequent rebellion that killed half of Cortes’s army and chased the Conquistador back to the sea for re-enforcements.
The Emperor died a few days after his attack, leaving the throne of Tenochtitlan to Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma’s 25-year-old cousin, husband to his daughter, and one of the few royal family members not dying of small pox. Following La Noche Triste, Cuauhtemoc awaited the final annihilation, both as the tenth Aztec Emperor and as the native war hero who restored his people’s honor. However, you will not find him in the Capitol Rotunda. Instead, we have the surrendering coward.
To add to the indignities, staring directly across the Rotunda is another painted panel of yet another Mexican conquest—General Winfield Scott and General Santa Ana, in 1847, although only Scott is mentioned by name on the US government website. Like Montezuma, the capitulator in Mexico City waves the conquistadors through the door with bowed head, hat in hand. There is no place on the mural for Los Niños Heroes, the school children who battled to the death against the US Marine Corp on Chapultepec Hill, but the Yanqui General seems pleased enough. If you squint hard enough, you can see Montezuma offering him a fresh glass of Tenochtitlan water. The revenge begins.