"The Vision of the Vanquished": Knowledge Europe Destroyed—and that the U.S. Power Structure Still Fears, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

'The Vision of the Vanquished': Knowledge Europe Destroyed—and that the U.S. Power Structure Still Fears

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 24, 2025

There is a great deal to ponder when we sit with the historical record not from the conqueror’s pen, but from the voices of those who survived conquest.

One learns of some of these communities through Miguel León-Portilla’s landmark work, The Broken Spears (Visión de los vencidos). Drawn from original Nahuatl sources written in the 1500s and published in 1959, the book offers the closest account we have of the invasion of Tenochtitlan—today’s Mexico City—from the perspective of the invaded. 

León-Portilla’s contribution was not to interpret these voices into comfort, but to preserve them as testimony, gathered and preserved across numerous archives by the children of survivors, allowing the vanquished to speak in their own words (León-Portilla, 1959/2006).

This fullest surviving account reveals not only the great cultural and linguistic diversity within and around Tenochtitlan, but also its extraordinary sophistication. At the time of the Spanish invasion, Tenochtitlan was a meticulously planned metropolis with engineered causeways, freshwater aqueducts, regulated markets, and sanitation systems that surpassed those of most European cities. 

It practiced chinampa agriculture—one of the most productive and sustainable farming systems ever developed—and maintained universal education through formal schools for both elites and commoners (León-Portilla, 1959/2006; Mann, 2005). While much of Europe struggled with overcrowding, open sewers, and periodic famine, Tenochtitlan functioned as a clean, ordered, ecologically attuned urban center.

See 3-D digital reconstruction of Tenochtitlan by Thomas Kole (2017)

Perhaps the most revealing evidence of Tenochtitlan’s advancement comes from Spanish eyewitnesses themselves. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador who participated in the invasion, wrote in astonishment:

“We were amazed… at the great cities and towns built on the water… it all seemed like an enchantment from a book of chivalry” (Díaz del Castillo, 1632/2012, Book II, chap. 88)

Díaz del Castillo compared Tenochtitlan to Venice, widely regarded as Europe’s most advanced city at the time—a comparison that carries extraordinary weight precisely because it comes from a hostile witness (Díaz del Castillo, 1967). This was not a primitive settlement encountered by Europeans bringing “civilization.” It was a civilization Europe encountered and chose to destroy.

The devastation was led by Hernán Cortés, whose actions would today be unambiguously described as war crimes. The violence was so severe that even Spain eventually distanced itself from him. Yet colonial narratives have long recast this annihilation of an advanced society as discovery or progress.

One of the most haunting statements preserved in The Broken Spears comes from an Indigenous eyewitness, paraphrased but searing in its clarity: they came, they conquered, and they never once asked what our cosmovision was (León-Portilla, 1959/2006). This sentence names colonial violence at its deepest level—not only the theft of land and life, but the refusal to recognize another way of knowing the world.

León-Portilla does not attempt to resolve this wound. Aside from his methodological introduction, the book remains an anthology of voices. That restraint matters. It resists the colonial impulse to narrate devastation into closure or to translate loss into lessons that absolve the conqueror.

The destruction of Tenochtitlan was not the result of cultural inferiority, but of a refusal to recognize another civilization as worthy of study, much less of existing. That refusal did not end in the sixteenth century. Today, it reappears in more bureaucratic and sanitized form—in the backlash against Ethnic Studies, in the dismantling of DEI initiatives, and in policies that treat minoritized knowledge as dangerous, divisive, or expendable.

Once again, majorities move through institutions without asking the descendants of this same history what they know—or what might be redemptive about their ways of knowing, doing, and being in the world. Ethnic Studies does precisely what conquest refused to do: it asks whose cosmovisions were silenced, what knowledge survived anyway, and how those knowledge systems might offer more humane, truthful, and sustainable ways forward. That is precisely why it is being targeted.

The attack on Ethnic Studies and DEI is not about rigor, neutrality, or free inquiry. It is about control—about preserving institutions that still cannot bear to ask what minoritized communities know, remember, and imagine beyond the colonial frame. Visión de los vencidos reminds us that dismantling does not always arrive with swords or cannons; sometimes it comes as legislation, budget cuts, appeals to “neutrality,” and so-called program “consolidations” that quietly strip resources, power, and voice—once again refusing to listen.

Until we recognize these attacks for what they are—today’s version of institutional dismantling or "conquest"—we will continue to mistake erasure for "balance" and domination for "progress."

None of this has to be feared. Asking what was never asked—listening to the descendants of conquest and recognizing the redemptive possibilities of their ways of knowing, doing, and being—does not weaken institutions; it humanizes them. What threatens democratic life is not Ethnic Studies or DEI, but the continued refusal to listen and know.

References

Díaz del Castillo, B. (1967). The true history of the conquest of New Spain (Vol. 3). Lulu. com.

Kole, T. (2017). Tenochtitlan: 3-D digital reconstruction of the Aztec capital [Digital reconstruction]. Independent project. https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/

León-Portilla, M. (1959/2006). The broken spears: The Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico. Beacon Press.