500th Anniversary of the Fall of Tenochtitlan

Mexico City marks fall of Aztec capital 500 years ago

By MARIA VERZA

TODAY

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Workers build a replica of the Aztec Templo Mayor, with an image of the Pre-columbian god Quetzalcoatl adorning the surrounding buildings, at Mexico City´s main square the Zocalo, Monday, Aug. 9, 2021. Mexico City is preparing for the 500 anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, today´s Mexico City, on Aug. 13, 2021. 

(AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Walking for hours through the gritty streets in the center of Mexico City, you can hear the daily urban soundtrack: Car engines, the call of the man who buys scrap metal and the handbells that announce the passing of a garbage truck.

It’s hard to imagine that some of these streets trace the outline of what was, five centuries ago, Tenochtitlan, a sophisticated city on an island in a bridge-studded lake where a great civilization flourished.

The Aztec emperors who ruled much of the land that became Mexico were defeated by a Spanish-led force that seized the city on August 13, 1521.

Despite all that was lost in the epic event 500 years ago — an empire and countless Indigenous lives — much remains of that civilization on the anniversary of its collapse. Vestiges lie beneath the streets, in the minds of the people, and on their plates.

Then, as now, the city’s center was dedicated to commerce, with vendors laying out wares on blankets or in improvised stalls, much as they would have done in 1521.

Artists, intellectuals and the government are trying to show what it was all like and what remains, in novel forms: they plan to paint a line on the streets of the city of 9 million to show where the boundaries of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan ended. The drying up of lakes that once surrounded the city long ago erased that line.

Officials have also built a near life-size replica of the Aztecs’ twin temples in the capital’s vast main plaza.

Triquis Indigenous people, originally of Oaxaca state but who live in Mexico City, protest under an image pf the Pre-Columbian moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, to be allowed to sell their wares near Mexico City´s main square the Zocalo, Monday, Aug. 9, 2021. Mexico City is preparing for the 500 anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, today´s Mexico City, on Aug. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

It is part of a project to rescue the memory of the world-changing event, which for too long has been mired in the old and largely inaccurate vision of Indigenous groups conquered by the victorious Spaniards.

“What really was the Conquest? What have we been told about it? Who were the victors, and who were the defeated?” asks Margarita Cossich, a Guatemalan archaeologist who is working with a team from the National Autonomous University. “It is much more complex than simply talking of the good versus the bad, the Spaniards against the Indigenous groups.”

For example, expedition leader Hernán Cortés and his 900 Spaniards made up only about one percent of the army of thousands of allies from Indigenous groups oppressed by the Aztecs.

But the official projects pale in comparison to the real-life surviving elements of Aztec life. The line delimiting the old city boundaries will run near where women sell corn tortillas, whose ingredients have varied not at all since the Aztecs.

Other stands sell amaranth sweets mixed with honey or nuts; in Aztec times, the amaranth seeds were mixed with blood of sacrificed warriors and molded into the shapes of gods. And then eaten, as historian Hugo García Capistrán, explains, but with a sense of ritual.

Not everything ended on Aug. 13, 1521, when the last leader of the Aztec resistance, the Emperor Cuauhtemoc, was taken prisoner by the Spaniards.

There is only a simple plaque marking the spot, in the tough neighborhood of Tepito.

“Tequipeuhcan: ‘The place where slavery began.’ Here the Emperor Cuauhtemotzin was taken prisoner on the afternoon of Aug. 13, 1521,” reads the plaque on a church wall.

A few blocks away, Oswaldo González sells figurines made of obsidian, the dark, glass-like stone prized by the Aztecs.

“Everything the Spaniards couldn’t see and couldn’t destroy, remains alive,” González says.

There also remain traces of Cortés, though they’re neither very public or prominent; Mexicans have learned at school for generations to view him as the enemy. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promoted telling the Indigenous side if the story, and has asked Spain to apologize for the murder, disease and exploitation of the Conquest. Spain hasn’t, and the Spanish ambassador was not invited to the 500th anniversary ceremonies scheduled for Friday.

Archaeologist Esteban Mirón notes that there isn’t a single statue to Moctezuma — the emperor who welcomed Cortés — in the city.

Nor are there any statues of Cortés. As Mirón traces the route that the Spaniard took into the city in 1519 — welcomed at first, the Conquistadores were later expelled — there is a stone plaque commemorating the first meeting between Cortés and the Aztec emperor.

Inside a nearby church, another plaque marks the niche where Cortés’ bones are believed to lie.

It was said he wanted to be buried here, near the site of his greatest victory, made possible by feats like constructing a fleet of wooden warships to assault the lake-ringed island city.

Tenochtitlan was completely surrounded by a shallow lake crossed by narrow causeways, so the Spaniards built attack ships known as bergantines — something akin to floating battle platforms — to fight the Aztecs in their canoes

A street nearby marks the place where Cortés docked those ships, but again, there is no monument.

Tenochtitlan also marked some terrible defeats for the Spaniards. They had entered the city in 1519, but had been chased out with great losses a few months later, leaving most of their plundered gold behind.

On June 30, 1520, the so-called “Sad Night,” now re-dubbed “The Victorious Night,” Cortés was forced to flee, leaving many dead Spaniards behind. “The historical record say that they left walking through the lake, which was not very deep, on top of the bodies of their own comrades,” Mirón notes.

In 1981, a public works project in the area unearthed a bar of melted Aztec gold — a small part of the loot that the Spanish soldiers dropped in their retreat.

But it’s not just artifacts; the spirit of ancient Mexico remains very much alive.

Mary Gloria, 41, works making embroidery in a squatter’s settlement near where the edge of the old city.

Gloria just finished embroidering a figure of “Mictlantecuhtli,” the Aztec god of death, to mark the city’s huge toll in the coronavirus pandemic.

Similar plagues — smallpox, measles and later cholera — nearly wiped out the city’s Indigenous population after the conquest. Survival, above all, was the main Indigenous victory from 1521.

Now, Gloria wants to redeem Malinche, the indigenous woman who helped the Spaniards as a translator. Long considered a traitor, Malinche ensured the survival of her line.

“It is up to us rewrite the script,” Gloria says.

Crayfish, grasshoppers, and other local delicacies are displayed for sale at an eatery in the market of Xochimilco, Mexico City, Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021, as Mexico City prepares for the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. The canals and floating gardens of Xochimilco are the last remnants of a vast water transport system built by the Aztecs to serve their capital of Tenochtitlán. (AP Photo /Marco Ugarte)

500 years later, Mexico recalls but doesn't celebrate Spanish conquest

Patrick J. McDonnell
Fri, August 13, 2021

An ancient Aztec temple, foreground, and a Spanish colonial church, top center, stand amid modern buildings in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City. The plaza honors Indigenous Mexico, Spanish colonialism and the "modern" mixed-race Mexico that resulted from Spain's conquest 500 years ago. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)More

In a country that takes great pride in its museums and monuments, the final resting place of one of Mexico's signature historical figures is easy to miss.

A simple red plaque — just a name and the years he lived — marks the spot where his tomb is embedded in a wall to the side of the altar in a dilapidated downtown church. Few worshipers take notice.

The name alone, however, recalls centuries of conflict and a never-ending debate about the essential identity of Mexico:

HERNAN CORTES 1485-1547.

The legendary Spanish military commander may be hidden away in death, but a few blocks away, authorities are readying a remembrance of his momentous triumph — the conquest of the Aztec Empire.

Friday marks the 500th anniversary of the fall in 1521 of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, now the site of Mexico City. The bloody siege culminating in its surrender launched three centuries of Spanish dominion in Mexico.

A plaque bearing the name of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés inside the Jesus of Nazareth Church in Mexico City. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

The conquest still stirs profound disquiet in the national psyche.

Politicians and activists have put their own spin on history, casting Cortés as the coldblooded archetype of European imperialism. But regardless of the denunciations, his military campaign is what led to Mexico’s modern identity as a mixed-race nation.

“We were all born from the conquest, no longer Aztecs, no longer Spanish, but Indian-Hispanic-Americans, mestizos,” wrote Carlos Fuentes, the late Mexican author. “We are what we are because Hernán Cortés, for good or for bad, did what he did.”

This week in Mexico City’s central plaza, or zócalo, workers have been erecting a more-than 50-foot-tall replica of the emblematic Templo Mayor, the main sanctuary of the Mexicas, as the Aztecs called themselves. A multi-colored light show will flash images Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and other Aztec motifs.

Workers ready a replica of the Templo Mayor, the Aztecs' main sanctuary, with an image of the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl adorning the surrounding buildings in Mexico City. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

“A society needs to know where it comes from to know where it is going,” Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s City mayor, said at a forum last month detailing plans for the occasion. “How can we resolve some of our great problems if we don’t know where they began?”

By any measure, Spain's arrival in the New World was a global milestone, a meeting of civilizations that had evolved distinctly through the millennia.

“It was a turning point in human history, and we will never go back,” said Matthew Restall, a professor at Penn State University and author of "When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History," chronicling the encounter between the Aztec ruler and the Spanish conquistador. “These were human beings who had been on the planet for tens of thousands of years and never knew about each other.”

Portraying the Spaniards' arrival as a nationalist parable of good versus evil — a glorious native culture devastated by European marauders — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has called for historic “reconciliation.”

“The so-called conquest was accomplished with the sword and the cross,” he declared a few months after taking office. “Thousands of people were murdered during this period. A culture was imposed, one civilization on top of another, to the point where Catholic churches were constructed on top of the temples of pre-Hispanic peoples.”

Both Spain and the Vatican have rebuffed the president’s demands for apologies. Events from five centuries ago cannot be judged by “contemporary considerations,” the Spanish government said. The Catholic Church pointed out that during a 2015 trip to Bolivia, Pope Francis already apologized for colonial-era abuses committed against Indigenous populations in the Americas.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador rings the bell and issues the annual independence shout at the Zocalo in Mexico City on Sept. 15, 2020. (Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press)

“We want him to do it in Mexico too,” López Obrador shot back.

No one disputes the culpability of Cortés and his captains in massacres, torture, forced religious conversion and enslavement in a quest for glory and gold. However, many historians also dismiss López Obrador’s good-versus-evil template as one-dimensional.

“It’s a simple vision of history in which one sees everything as black and white,” said Alfredo Ávila, a historian at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “The historic reality is never that simple.”

Mexican officials have dubbed the remembrance “500 Years of Indigenous Resistance.”

The “resistance” tag overlooks an uncomfortable fact: More than 90% of Cortés’ troops in the siege of Tenochtitlán were Indigenous rivals of the Aztecs, notably warriors from the Tlaxcalan and Totonac cultures. Post-conquest, historians say, other Indigenous peoples bowed to Spanish hegemony, while Cortés rewarded allies in the war against the Aztecs with favored treatment, including exemption from some royal taxes.

“Many Indigenous groups collaborated with the Spanish,” said historian Miguel Pastrana Flores, also at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “It was an alliance that not only fought with the Spanish, but provided the Spanish with food, shelter, helped fabricate their arms and build their boats.”

The Aztecs ruled a vast realm, from present-day Central America to central Mexico. But divisions roiled their domain. Resentment seethed among vassal communities fed up with their overlords’ demands for tribute, including victims for human sacrifice.

Indigenous people take part in events on Aug. 12, 2021, the eve of the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec Empire. (Claudio Cruz / AFP/Getty Images)

Cortés skillfully played on these deep fissures, recruiting personnel to bolster the thin Spanish ranks.

Today, some view the events of 1521 less as a Spanish-versus-Aztec struggle than as a tipping point in an internal Mesoamerican clash among the diverse Indigenous populations of the day. An alliance of convenience with the bearded outsiders brought the benefit of horse-bound cavalry, sophisticated military tactics and technologically advanced weaponry, including cannons, muskets and crossbows.

As historical interpretations have evolved, the Spanish usurpation and how it is construed remain a tinderbox in Mexico.

Sheinbaum, the Mexico City mayor and a protege of the president, recalled her youthful miseducation about Mexico’s origins.

“They made us see — or at least, that was the history that I learned in school — that the conquest of Mexico had been almost romantic, and that there had simply been an ‘encounter of two worlds,’ “ she said. “And, in reality, history wasn’t like that.”

Cortés, an ambitious and ruthless adventurer with a penchant for defying his superiors, arrived on Mexico’s Gulf coast in 1519 and set his sights on the treasures of the Aztec Empire, based hundreds of miles away in a high-altitude valley flanked by volcanoes. He and his 500 or so initial troops proceeded north, convincing legions of Indigenous adversaries of the Aztecs to join them as warriors, porters and laborers.

Accompanying Cortés was his interpreter and trusted consort, Malintzin, an Indigenous woman now known as La Malinche, who remains an incendiary figure in Mexico — denounced in popular culture as a traitor, but celebrated by some as an extraordinary woman who overcame slavery, prejudice and misogyny.

A plaque reads in Spanish, "Tequipeuhcan: The place where slavery began. Here the Emperor Cuauhtemoc was taken prisoner on the afternoon of Aug. 13, 1521," at La Concepcion Tequipeuhcan Church in Mexico City. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

The Spaniards were awed at first sight of the wondrous island-city of Tenochtitlán, with its broad causeways across a series of lakes.

“These great towns … and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision,” Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a member of the expedition, wrote in "The Conquest of New Spain." “Indeed, some of our soldiers asked if it was not all a dream.”

Montezuma, both wary and curious, had sent emissaries in a bid to dissuade the strangers from venturing to his capital. When Cortés insisted, the emperor extended a welcome to the newcomers, providing luxurious lodgings and a “sumptuous dinner” after thousands of Aztecs lined up to gawk at the foreigners' motley ranks, wrote Díaz del Castillo.

The Spaniards, fearing a gilded trap, hatched an audacious plot: They grabbed Montezuma at his palace and forced him back to their quarters and held him hostage. The great monarch whose many underlords could not even look him in the eyes would never be a free man again.

The Aztecs revolted in 1520 after a Spanish massacre of their noblemen at the Templo Mayor. The conquistadors and their allies suffered heavy casualties as they fled the city. Killed during the tumult was the captive Montezuma. The Spaniards pinned his death on a native mob, but many historians believe that the enraged conquistadors executed Montezuma.

Mexican schoolchildren have long learned about the Noche Triste — The Night of Sadness — as the Spaniards' nocturnal retreat from the Aztec uprising is known.

This year, in another revisionist touch, Mexico City renamed the plaza where a grief-stricken Cortés supposedly mourned his losses as Noche Victoriosa, or Night of Victory.

A book published in 1524 includes a map of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, and the Gulf of Mexico to the left. (Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)

"It's time to give a voice to the original peoples of our land," Sheinbaum tweeted last month, heralding the rebranding of the plaza. "It's time to revise the past in order to transform the present."

One problem: Historians say casualties among the Indigenous rank and file aiding Cortés far outnumbered Spaniards who perished in the chaotic withdrawal. Scholars also dispute the mayor's comments that contemporary racism in Mexico can be traced to the Spanish.

"This government makes political use of history and thinks that changing the name of a plaza changes history," said Alejandro Rosas, an independent historian. "The typical idea is that [Mexico] was practically an earthly paradise until the Spanish brought all the bad. That's also false."

Cortés soon regrouped and, with reinforcements from Spain and additional Indigenous recruits, launched his siege of Tenochtitlán.

By then, a smallpox outbreak — the native people of the Americas had no immunity to the virus — had ravaged the Aztec capital. Nonetheless, its warriors mounted a spirited defense, using hundreds of canoes to transport forces between the city and the lake shore and to thwart enemy advances on the causeways. Cortés deployed newly built brigantines with sails, oarsmen and cannon while blockading supplies of food and fresh water to the city.

In what is surely one of the epic battles in the history of the Americas, tens of thousands were killed in months of cavalry and infantry charges, door-to-door urban warfare and naval engagements. In his firsthand account, Díaz del Castillo describes onslaughts of arrows, darts and stones and the doleful sight of Spanish prisoners being placed on sacrificial altars as captors cut open their chests and “drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them.”

500 years later, Mexico still struggles with 'uneasy truths' about the Spanish conquest

Arturo Conde
Fri, August 13, 202

As Mexico looks back on the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, an award-winning filmmaker wants his fellow Mexicans and others to confront their national identity — and re-examine how the legacy of colonial history still affects people today.

“Nationalism tells you where you come from so it can tell you where you’re going,” Rodrigo Reyes told NBC News. “I think it’s important to feel proud of where you’re coming from. I’m super proud of being from Mexico. But I do believe that some of these narratives are so simplistic, so black and white, that they damage our understanding of who we are and how we’re interconnected.”

On Aug. 13, 1521, the army under Spanish "conquistador" Hernán Cortés took the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán after a brutal siege with warships and cannons that lasted at least 75 days. The popular idea of a small Spanish army defeating a much larger Mesoamerican empire is factually incorrect, Reyes said.

“We have this mainstream Mexican identity as the heirs of the Aztecs, which is completely false,” Reyes said. “There were also thousands of Indigenous allies who were instrumental in helping Cortés win. They collaborated and worked together and participated in the exploitation of other [Indigenous] groups.”

The filmmaker described his movie “499,” which won best cinematography as a documentary at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, as an “anti-epic” that “hacks the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest” to expose the far-reaching footprint of colonialism that still lingers over Mexico today.

“We spoke with an amazing group of scholars who are local chroniclers, and they point out that the conquest didn’t end on Aug. 13, 1521,” Reyes said. “It continues to this day because Mexico sadly has a huge problem with racism and classism that forces Indigenous communities to assimilate.”

The movie, premiering in New York on Aug. 20, is a hybrid of a documentary and a fiction film. It follows a 16th-century chrome-armored conquistador (played by Eduardo San Juan) who travels through time to modern-day Mexico and goes on the path Cortés’ army took from the coast of Veracruz to Mexico City.

Eduardo San Juan stars as a conquistador in the film

The conquistador narrates moments from the Spanish invasion in 1521 as he is also compelled to listen to the testimonies of contemporary Mexicans — who are grappling with their own issues around violence and politics a half-millennium after Cortés' army's victory.

The movie, Reyes said, reveals a mirror in the shape of the conquistador so viewers can see how contemporary Mexicans could carry a small part of him inside them. History, Reyes said, is not something remote or alien but very much alive in different parts of society.

“Sometimes we don’t want to recognize ourselves in these characters for who they are,” Reyes said about the conquistador and other antiheroes in national stories. “We want to simplify history so that it can comfort us and bring us together. But this can also blind us by being overly simplistic.”
Mexico, U.S. struggle with 'uneasy truths about the past'

Mexico has sometimes gravitated toward this simplistic view of history, which distorts both its past and its present, he said.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote a letter to Felipe VI, king of Spain, denouncing the inhumane violence of the Spanish Empire on the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Cortés’ army in 2019. Obrador’s government has also renamed the five-century anniversary of the conquest as 500 years of Indigenous resistance. But hundreds have denounced this rebranding as a token gesture and marched to the National Palace on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (Aug. 9) to demand greater inclusivity for 23 million Indigenous peoples in Mexico.

When comparing the Mexican government's perspective of history with the United States', the filmmaker said both countries struggle with uneasy truths from the past.

“In the U.S., we’re still wrestling with the fact that George Washington was a slave-owner and the founding father of our country,” he said. “The stories of victims are pretty often being erased. And this is true for every country that is grappling with a history that remains unattended.”

Reyes said this is the case for many Latinos and other diverse groups in the United States who are struggling with the unattended history of their own communities and demanding greater inclusivity in mainstream society.

In the U.S., pressure to remove monuments that commemorate the country’s colonial and Confederate pasts, like the 36-foot equestrian statue of Juan de Oñate in El Paso, Texas, have divided communities over exalting or decrying European conquistadors and settlers. But engaging with history, the filmmaker said, can help people work through centuries of cultural and social traumas.
The 'atrocious' reality of conquest

“For the defeated, the days immediately after the fall of Tenochtitlán were atrocious,” historian Hugh Thomas wrote in his book “Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico.”

Thomas wrote that when looking back at the destruction of the Aztec Empire and the conquest of other Indigenous peoples in the Americas, European colonizers have tried to justify the violence by denouncing Indigenous communities' brutal acts of human sacrifice and murder.

In the case of the Aztecs, the Spanish condemned how priests tore out the hearts of prisoners and slaves and wore the skins of their victims inside out. Both British and American colonists similarly seized upon the action of scalping by some Native Americans to defend violent reprisals.

Eduardo San Juan, center, stars as a conquistador in the hybrid documentary film

Yet historians say the magnitude of violence the Spanish conquest had on Mexico — as well as the destruction perpetrated by other European conquests in the Americas — is undeniable.

Thomas referred to a letter from Pedro de Maluenda, a commissary working with Cortés, which said making the trip back from Tenochtitlán to Veracruz was like traveling from hell to heaven.

The historian described a devastated city in the wake of the Spanish conquest, with defeated Aztecs leaving their homes in smoke and ruins and the streets of their capital full of unburied bodies.

To put the size of the destruction into perspective, Thomas described Sevilla, Spain’s biggest city at the time, as “probably a mere quarter of the size of Tenochtitlán.” The Aztec capital was bigger than any other city the Spanish soldiers had seen.

“If the lake dwellers [the Aztecs] were fascinated [by the Spanish], Cortés and his men also felt awe,” the historian wrote. “For in front of them lay a city as large as any that anyone in his party had seen — though Naples and Constantinople, with over 200,000 people each, ran Tenochtitlán close.”

For Reyes, the footprint of colonialism still looms over the Americas, in large part because different groups don't heed the lessons of history through the eyes of others' experiences.

“We are in a moment of conflict. And there are huge sectors of society, huge sectors of power, who do not want to listen to the voices of people who are being impacted by the lingering actions of colonial domination,” he said. “If we can listen to the voices of our history, then we can actually reinvent the future.”

Reyes is currently taking his film on a pilgrimage of sorts through Mexico, screening “499” for people living on the historic warpath that Cortés took from Veracruz to Tenochtitlán. On Aug. 13 he will arrive in Mexico City — which is built on the ruins of the Aztec capital.

“We’re constantly trying to make sense of history, trying to use it to understand our moment right now,” Reyes said. “And ‘499’ promotes the idea that we need to be more active writers about our own histories.”

But the battered, starving Aztecs finally surrendered on Aug. 13, 1521, their last emperor, Cuauhtémoc, captured and tortured. Cortés ordered Cuauhtémoc executed four years later for alleged treason.

In Mexico City, a woman takes part in a ceremony Friday marking the 500th anniversary of the fall in 1521 of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. (Associated Press)

“We could not walk without treading on the bodies and heads of dead Indians,” wrote Díaz del Castillo. “The stench was so bad that no one could endure it.”

Cortés eventually returned to Spain to deal with various legal and financial entanglements. He died there in 1547. He was 62.

Convinced that his achievements had been underappreciated in Spain, he had wanted his body returned to Mexico. It took almost two decades, but in 1566 his remains were shipped across the Atlantic.

As anti-Spanish independence fervor gripped Mexico in the early 19th century, some feared that independistas would desecrate the remains. So in the 1820s, one of Cortés' sympathizers reportedly collected the remains for safekeeping, hiding them in a hospital. Years later, he secretly hollowed out a space at the Jesus of Nazareth Church, deposited a lead, wood and glass container holding the bones — including a skull wrapped in lace — and then repaired the wall, according to various accounts in the Spanish and Mexican press.

The church is said to be around the corner from the spot where Cortés and Montezuma first met, though contemporary, traffic-clogged Mexico City is unrecognizable from the island Aztec capital.

The whereabouts of Cortés' remains were a mystery until 1946, when the discovery of a document revealed the secret and Mexican officials authorized a team to extract them. The bones were returned to the church wall the following year with the simple red plaque.

Amid Friday's memorial events, none are planned for Cortés.

Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.