Os inimigos e as guerras mexicas nas crônicas de Diego Durán e Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a comparison of the narratives of Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc's Crónica Mexicana and Diego Durán's Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y islas de Tierra Firme, focusing on the representation of the Mexican wars and conquests after the establishment of the Triple Alliance. Using the structural similarity of the two histories as a guiding thread, we developed a reading of the representation of each of the main Mexica enemies and the wars and conflicts with them in the chronicles. Through the differences and similarities contained in the documents, we sought to scrutinize the contradictions between the stories of the Mexica tradition in the explanations and narrative resources used to legitimize and magnify their past. Tezozómoc, a mestizo, focuses on the warlike dimension and makes it clear that the conquest of the Tlaxcala region was an objective, albeit a frustrated one. While the religious Diego Durán, in justifying the Mexica defeats contained in the Mexica tradition to his Tlaxcaltec rivals, resorts to perspectives that minimize the power of the adversary while seeming to value the dimension of the war captive and anthropophagy as the primary objective of the war. In this sense, we propose a problematization of the perspectives proposed by Durán on intentional non-conquest and the dynamics of the wars between the Mexicas and the Tlaxcaltecs as objective explanations of those historical realities.