4 ideas
After losing the Texcocan succession to his brother Cacama, whom Moctezuma backed, the prince Ixtlilxóchitl allied with Cortés, was baptized as Hernando, and brought Texcoco's forces to the Spanish side. The book uses this case to argue that a dynastic dispute inside the Aztec Triple Alliance, not Spanish arms alone, brought down Tenochtitlan.
Alva Ixtlilxóchitl argues that a few hundred Spaniards could not have taken Tenochtitlan without Indigenous allies. The conquest succeeded because local rulers used the invaders to settle their own grievances against the Mexica hegemon. On this view, credit for the victory belongs largely to the native allies, which shifts who can claim it.
The chronicle is built like a petition of merits. It documents specific services an ancestor gave the Crown, such as troops, labor, loyalty and conversion, and treats them as a debt the sovereign owes the lineage in lands, titles and privileges. History writing here works as legal evidence: whoever narrates the past controls who is owed in the present.
The book presents Nezahualcóyotl as a philosopher-king, lawgiver and poet who worshipped a single invisible 'Lord of the Near and Close' and built a temple without idols. By making his ancestors appear already reasonable, just and nearly monotheistic, the mestizo author makes the Indigenous nobility worthy of honor under colonial Catholic values. The same lens applies wherever a subordinated group translates its heritage into the dominant culture's moral vocabulary to win status.