The Broken Spears
by Miguel León-Portilla
The conquest of Mexico, told by the conquered.
For you if
you know the Hernán Cortés version and want to hear what the Aztecs actually experienced
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$24 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
León-Portilla compiled accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico from Indigenous sources — codices, oral histories, the testimony of survivors. What you get is the other side of one of history's most mythologized events. The omens before Cortés arrived. The massacre at the Great Temple. The fall of Tenochtitlán. History's winners wrote the version you were taught. This is the dispatch the losers left behind.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- Written by a Mexican author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Like Water for Chocolate(1992)
dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
In early-1900s Mexico, Tita is forbidden by family tradition from marrying the man she loves, so she pours her longing into the food she cooks — food that carries her emotions, sometimes literally, into everyone who eats it. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
Pedro Páramo(2024)
dir. Rodrigo Prieto
A ghost town where the dead won't stop talking.
A man travels to his late mother's hometown to find the father he never knew, only to discover Comala is a ghost town in the most literal sense — populated by the dead, still narrating the tyranny of the cacique who once ruled it. Adapted from Juan Rulfo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in blurring the line between the living and the dead until power and guilt outlast the man who held them — Pedro Páramo's tyranny haunts Comala long after his death. Pedagogical in showing how one man's greed can hollow out an entire town's future.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
The most profitable atrocity in history. Documented.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen
A colonist's love letter to the land she took.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Smilla's Sense of Snow
Peter Høeg
A half-Greenlandic woman investigates a child's death in Copenhagen.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
In the Castle of My Skin
George Lamming
A Barbadian childhood, and colonialism arriving without announcement.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
Prayers for the Stolen
Jennifer Clement
Girls raised to disappear before the cartel finds them.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Daughters of Juárez
Teresa Rodríguez
Mothers refusing to let their daughters be statistics.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
My Mexico
Diana Kennedy
Fifty years of Mexican kitchens before they're gone.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Devil's Highway
Luis Alberto Urrea
Twenty-six men. The Arizona desert. Fourteen survived.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST