- [Instructor] Imagine that one day
you are standing in your backyard
when all of a sudden you saw an alien ship land
and the alien ship had incredible technology
and you saw aliens walking out of the ship
bearing strange animals,
maybe scary looking weapons
and speaking a very strange language.
What would you do?
Would you try to be kind to the aliens,
hope that maybe you could befriend them?
Would you fear them
and perhaps immediately try to make war against them?
Would you hope that perhaps War of the Worlds style
that they would die of the common cold
or would you fear that maybe they had some kind
of common cold that you might die of?
These are the choices that were faced by Native Americans
when they encountered the Spanish at the end of the 1400s.
Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492
and when he got back in 1493
the secret was out that there were great riches
to be had in the New World,
so much so that as early as 1494
Spain and Portugal were trying to decide
how they would divide the riches
of the Old World and the New between them,
so in the years after Columbus' first voyage
many Spanish conquistadors or conquerors
began exploring throughout the Americas
and it's not necessary for you to memorize
any of these names
but I want you to get a sense
that in the 50 years or so after Columbus,
European explorers began checking out everything
in the Caribbean, North America and South America
and their motivations, like Columbus'
were the three Gs of colonization,
gold, that is to get rich,
glory, that is to bring glory to one's self
for one's nation
and a little bit of God,
that is to bring Catholicism
to native peoples living in the Americas.
Now, as you can see from the many individuals here,
Spanish colonization was a very complex process
taking place in many different regions
but in this video I wanna focus in
on just a few aspects,
the conquest of Mexico by Cortes,
a society that came out of this blend
of Spanish and Native American culture
and a little bit about the resistance
to colonization that we'll see in New Mexico
with the Pueblo Revolt.
Now, like Columbus, Spanish explorers originally
were looking for a passage to Asia through the Americas
but quickly learned that there was quite a lot
of riches to be found in the Americas themselves
and one place that came to the attention
of the conquistadors was Tenochtitlan
which was the capital of the Aztec Empire.
Now, the Aztecs were not well loved in Mexico.
They ruled over a vast territory
with many smaller tribes
they required to give them tribute
and even human captives for sacrifice,
so in 1519, Hernan Cortes,
a Spanish conquistador landed
with a group of about 600 men in Vera Cruz
and with the help of some translators
he worked his way across Mexico
learning of the general dislike of the Aztec Empire
so that when he finally came upon the city
of Tenochtitlan he had about 20,000 Native Americans
who were ready to make war
on this city along with him.
Now, it's hard to imagine what Tenochtitlan
would have looked like to the Spanish.
It's estimated that it had about 200,000
to 300,000 inhabitants
which made it one of the larger cities in the world.
There was nothing quite so large as this city
in all of Europe.
It sat in the middle of a lake with hanging gardens
and an aqueduct and had incredible pyramids
that were many stories tall
and at first, Moctezuma the Second
who was emperor of the Aztec Empire
treated the approaching Spaniards with great kindness
and generosity showering them with gifts.
After all, the Spanish had things
that Moctezuma had never seen before
like horses and gigantic war dogs
which they used to rip apart their enemies
and cannons which even though they only had a few of them
and they didn't work very well
were very frightening
when they were fired,
much like I think a ray gun would be frightening to us now.
Now, it didn't take very long for the relationship
between the Spanish and the Aztecs to crumble
and aided by their many native American allies
and also by the spread of deadly disease like smallpox
which decimated the Native American population,
by 1521 Tenochtitlan had fallen,
in fact, was in ruins.
Moctezuma had died
and the Spanish began building on the ruins of Tenochtitlan,
Mexico City but much to the horror
of the many Native American tribes
that had allied with the Spanish,
the Spanish would turn out
to be much crueler imperial masters
than the Aztecs had been
and the smallpox that had ravaged the Aztecs,
ravaged the rest of the Native American population as well
as they lacked the immunity
to European disease.
Although much of the conquest
of the Spanish Empire in the New World
was done by conquistadors, adventurers,
the Spanish Crown was eager to place some control
over this new territory
and one way that they did was through the Encomiendas System
and the Encomiendas System was a labor system
that in a way was kind of a combination
of feudalism from Europe and slavery.
So, the idea was that the Spanish Crown
would grant land holders called encomenderos
the right to the labor of Native Americans,
perhaps a village or two
and anything that those Native Americans produced
through their slave labor,
so gold if they mined it or agricultural products
if they were working on a plantation
and in theory what the Native Americans would get for this
would be Christianization
which to the Catholic Spanish Crown
was an important goal to convert
all of the world's people to Catholicism
and also the protection
of these Spanish feudal lords or encomenderos.
In practice the Encomiendas System
was really just another way of saying slavery
and between the harsh treatment of the Spanish lords
and disease, the native population of this region
went from about 20 million
when the Spanish arrived to only about two million
by 1600, so that not very long after conquest,
the Spanish began to bring enslaved Africans
to labor in the New World
as the Native American population had shrunk
to a fraction of its former size.
So, for the native people of Mexico
the arrival of the Spanish was about the worst outcome
of an alien invasion that you could imagine.
Now, native people did resist the Spanish in many ways.
Some ways were more subtle
like outwardly adopting Christianity
while maintaining their ancestral beliefs inwardly.
The combination of Native American beliefs
and Christianity together is called syncretism
or the blending of two religious traditions
but sometimes the Spanish pushed native people too far
as in the case of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680
when after a few generations
of being forced to shed all of their religious beliefs
in favor of Christianity
or face severe punishment, the pueblo people rose up
against the Spanish led by a man named Pope,
so that sometimes the Pueblo Revolt is also called
Pope's Rebellion and they killed Spanish priests,
burned churches, replaced them with kivas,
their own place of worship
and drove the Spanish out
so that in the next 50 years
it took the Spanish to reestablish control
of this region, the Spanish took
a much more accommodating approach to pueblo society.
The last aspect of Spanish colonial society
that I wanna point out is the racial caste system
that developed in the New World.
Because the conquistadors were on dangerous adventures,
very few Spanish women came with them in the New World
and so, Spanish men had relationships
with both native women and African women
and Native Americans and Africans had relationships
such that there was really an unprecedented
mixing of peoples and cultures in the New World
and to account for this incredibly diverse society
the Spanish developed a caste system
that very carefully ranked individuals
by how much Spanish blood they had
so that people with pure Spanish blood,
criollos were at the top of the hierarchy,
and people who had both Native American heritage
and European heritage were called mestizo at the time
whereas people with European heritage and African heritage
were called mulatto at the time
and so, as you moved up or down this scale
you had more legal rights
than the groups below you
and this is what is known as a casta painting
which very carefully categorized
where every person fell on this hierarchy of race,
so we see in the Spanish caste system
the beginnings of assigning legal status
to individuals based on their race
but I think it's also important
to note here that the casta system
made a place for many different types of people
in society and that will be important later
when we contrast it with how English settlers
treated Native Americans.
The Spanish sought to Christianize
and incorporate and enslave native people,
whereas the English sought to completely eradicate them
from the landscape.