Out of the shade
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Camilla Townsend, reviewed by Gavin O'Toole, 7 March 2023
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Camilla Townsend, 2021, Oxford UP
Of all the peoples most misrepresented in a global historical corpus dominated by Anglo-European narratives, the Aztecs arguably have the most to be resentful about.
The lives of the people who ruled what is now central Mexico have been so distorted by external observers since the Spanish Conquest it is surprising that more historians have not thrown up their hands in exasperation and said, to hell with this, let’s start again.
Fortunately for us all, and in particular the 1.5 million people who still speak the Aztec language Nahuatl and the many millions more who self-identify with this heritage, that is what Camilla Townsend has done.
Fifth Sun is by far the most honest history published to date of a civilization that has endured countless indignities of erasure and, as a result, for anyone interested in this theme, must be an essential point of departure.
Most importantly, the very human picture painted by the author so eloquently is a result of listening to Nahuatl voices themselves, using as its basis the annals or xiuhpohualli written by indigenous chroniclers in an era of turmoil and in the aftermath of this unique culture.
By highlighting these voices and unpicking from them a very different history to that we are used to, Townsend reminds us insistently that this is a persistent heritage and the “Aztecs”, or Mexica as they are more accurately called, were not erased at all.
Fifth Sun, therefore, is as much historiography as history, exposing and contextualising one of the great injustices in western letters: the misrepresentation of an entire inheritance.
Not only does it explore the history of the Conquest and early colonial era per se, it explores how the Aztecs have been studied since the catastrophe that befell them and the wider approach taken by Nahuatl writers and scholars themselves to record collective memory.
The author argues that the Aztecs simply would not recognise themselves in the bloodcurdling picture that has been painted of them. She writes: “We moderns look at them and then invent the accompanying scene—the spoken words, the music, and the context. We envision orgies of violence, like the one depicted in the film Apocalypto. Textbooks present these same images and teach young people that the nobler native peoples were waiting to be released from a regime of such cruelty.”
The real story, as ever, was very different and far more complex, and the author paints a picture of a mature people with all the vices and virtues of humans everywhere who “sing, laugh, and yell” like the rest of us.
On that basis, Fifth Sun offers important revelations: contrary to western mythology, Aztec political life did not revolve around a rigid religious bloodlust for sacrifice, but the power relations familiar to any society.
She argues that the historical division of subjects into good and evil categories, gentle farmers versus brutal warriors, is nonsensically simplistic, and that it was not fatalistic superstition that enabled the Aztecs’ rapid defeat but Spanish technological superiority.
Survivors of the cataclysm did not then wallow in self-pity, but got on with the job of assimilating in order to guarantee their future—and, finally, when all memory might have appeared lost forever in the fog of time, used powerful tools such as the Roman alphabet to write down and eventually rebuild their historical record.
Told this way, this story continues the remarkable odyssey of the hardy Mexica themselves over centuries from the north down to the Valley of Mexico where they built their imperium and thence into an unforgiving modernity.
Ultimately it is a story of endurance, not of utter defeat—offering lessons in survival for indigenous people everywhere.