History: With Lime and Salt

Enjoy our new contributor, Luis Mario Gonzalez Suarez, an award winning creative writer in the Festival Literario de Nayarit Ali Chumacero. Luis will share stories of our area’s history. Take some time to read his informative columns.

Luis Mario Gonzalez Suarez – Traduccion e interpretacion – Derecho Internacional y Comparado – Mediacion cultural

The pinch of salt: what do we really know about history?

If you have a basic command of Spanish, you may have noticed that Bahía de Banderas stands for Bay of Flags. But what flags? The flag of Spain, of Mexico? Curiously enough, none of them. To know the answer, we need to go back to the time of conquistadors. (And, Kelly and Dennis willing, we will… in the next article). First, I’d like to share some thoughts about how history is recorded that arose from the research I conducted to tell you that story.

It is interesting to point out that while the conquest of Western Mexico was particularly cruel later on, the first Spanish voyage into this land was rather uneventful… or so we are told. While the Spaniards had already settled in the Central Valleys of Mexico by the time, learning the linguae francae of the region (Nahuatl and P’urhépecha) and reaching an agreement of sorts with the old Native ruling class, the languages spoken in this region -mostly a local dialect of Nahuatl and Wixárika (Huichol)- , and, most importantly, the lack of a contemporary and impartial record, blur our vision.

Researching for this article, I found that there is only one direct source, and it was written almost 100 years after the facts! It is Fr. Antonio Tello’s chronicle, a traveling friar in a convent in Guadalajara, who frequently visited the Franciscan missions in Nayarit. So there’s that for accuracy. How much of what we are told actually happened and did not pass through the lenses of time?

There is another source worth mentioning, the 1531 transcript of Hernán Cortés’ suit against Nuño de Guzmán (that cruel conqueror we talked about above)… which, of course, is tarnished by the sort of statements you’d expect between two parties in a bitter trial.

But then again, back to our story: it was 1524, and only seven years had passed since the first Spaniards descended on the territory we now call Mexico when an expedition, under Francisco Cortés de San Buenaventura (related to that Cortés: he was his nephew) left the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec capital, where Mexico City was already being built with the stones of old pyramids, with a simple yet difficult task: to explore beyond the P’urhépecha kingdom, the ancient enemy of the Aztecs. After the first steps of the foray, in which Cortés found the ocean and established several settlements of Spaniards (most notably, Colima), the expedition set course to the north and entered the current state of Nayarit through the southeast…

Stay tuned for the history of the Riviera Nayarit on a weekly basis.