Pasiones bélicas: violencia y afectos en crónicas de la conquista de México

AÑÓN, VALERIA

Colonial Latin American Review

Routledge

Año: 2022 vol. 31 p. 191 - 216

1060-9164

The conquest of Mexico and, in that context, the specific scenes that account the fall of Tenochtitlan, constitute a topos that organizes a great part of the 16th-century chronicles. The rhetoric of emotions provides a central contribution to the representation of the devastated city and its inhabitants, the very scheme through which the event is narrated, and the experience is seized. Said corpus adds the special feature of a crossing of discursive traditions (occidental and native) that travel, in different ways, through the rhetoric and the topic of emotions. This intersection is what constitutes the distinctive feature of the corpus and prepares the entry of the American novelty in the narration of the conquest and failure. In this research I propose a comparative reading of some scenes present in texts by Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Brother Bernardino de Sahagún and Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, particularly focusing on the fall of Tenochtitlan, a space in which pathos appears in a fundamental way.