Camilla Townsend
Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
Women in [the] Conquest: The evidence from the xiuhpohualli
Abstract:
In this presentation I will make two preliminary arguments: 1) that we should place women’s involvement in the Spaniards’ War of Conquest in the context of women’s involvement in all previous wars of conquest; and 2) that despite some limited evidence for women’s occasional participation on the battlefield, their real and regular importance came from the fact that it was they who were key to the establishment of warring lineages of rival half-brothers. To that end, I will first explain what the annals teach us about the political effect of polygyny in the central basin in general— that it was this, as much as or more than interethnic strife, that caused the era’s perennial warfare. Then, I will show that Cuauhtemoc’s strange (and even brutal) behavior during the period of war with the Spaniards can be explained by this phenomenon: he was attempting to use a current crisis to eliminate power contenders from a rival lineage, despite what seems to us a common ancestry. His Tlatelolcan mother and grandmother were of paramount importance in his assessment of the situation. (The mysterious loyalty of the Tlatelolcans suddenly makes a great deal of sense.) Sadly, it was Moctezuma’s daughter, Tecuichpotzin (and other women like her) who bore the brunt of the changes in motion.
Camilla Townsend is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, New Jersey. A recipient of fellowships from such entities as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, she is the author of numerous prize-winning books. Her most recent titles are Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Oxford), published in 2016, and Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford), published in 2019.