cover image They Are Coming: The Conquest of Mexico

They Are Coming: The Conquest of Mexico

Jose Lopez Portillo Pacheco, Jose L. Portillo Y. Pacheco. University of North Texas Press, $34.5 (375pp) ISBN 978-0-929398-35-8

For the Mexican Indians, the Spanish Conquest of 1522 was a cosmic tragedy in which conquistador Hernando Cortes and his small, ill-equipped band of men were mistaken for descendants of the light-skinned, exiled Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. For the West, the Conquest was a great adventure, a fulfillment of the expansionist imperative thought to inhere in Christian salvation. The violent collision between two worlds is plausibly recreated in a vivid narrative that uses invented dialogues and interior monologues combined with exhaustive ransacking of primary sources. Lopez Portillo, a novelist, political scientist and former president of Mexico, adds human interest to a bloody saga by highlighting Cortes's love of Malinalli, a dignified Indian woman torn between two cultures, who converted to Christianity and was baptized as Marina. The cadenced, majestic prose is punctuated by 103 kinetic drawings by the author that have the feel of on-site 16th-century sketches. (Apr.)