According to a recent article in the New York Times entitled “Demoting the Conquest: How the Denver Art Museum Kicked Columbus Out the Door,” a Colorado art museum “obliterated all references to the canceled hero from its collections.”1 Regardless of how one views Columbus, the effort to “cancel” historical figures and events that have resonated for good and ill over the centuries is far from straightforward. In our continuing fascination with the conquest of Mexico, as with Columbus, the actual history can seem to take second place to the many interpretations that have colored our understandings of it.

The conquest of Mexico usually is assumed to have been a singular, transformative episode in which the lands and peoples of what is now modern Mexico were brought definitively under Spanish rule. Scholars who have examined the events leading up to, resulting in, and following the fall of the Aztec (Mexica)...

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