Miguel Leon Portilla’s The Broken Spears serves as the counter to The Conquest of the New Spain. While this text was published a little more than 400 years after la conquista, Leon Portilla gathered up a variety of eyewitness accounts, stories transmitted orally down the generations and writings from the colonial period – all from Indigenous sources. Given the Spanish efforts to quash the voices of the conquered through the destruction of codices, Leon Portilla’s book represents a meaningful attempt to re-encounter voices lost to history.
