ABSTRACT
The meaning of Moteuccoma’s speech to Hernan Cortes was immediately controversial and the source of several of the most distorted legends of the Conquest. Cortes politically spun the speech as a capitulation, although recent scholarship has shown that such exaggerated and obsequious speeches were pro forma when people of importance arrived. Since then, generations of university professors and schoolteachers have claimed that the speech proved that the Nahuas were cowed because they believed the Spaniards were returning gods. Although the Nahuas’ narrative is authentically indigenous, it is also the product of a cultural conversation between the Nahuas and the Spaniards when they came into contact during the mid- to late 1500s. When Sahagun translated the Nahuatl into Spanish, he made annotations, most likely after asking follow-up questions of the Nahua storytellers. As a result, the Spanish version sometimes has different or conflicting information about the same events.
