3 ideas
Bernal Díaz wrote that it seemed like the enchantments told in the book of Amadís, and some soldiers asked whether what they saw was a dream. Reyes rebuilds the city from these chronicles, the lost city his evidence of a real civilization that could only be registered as marvel.
Reyes argues that what links modern Mexicans to the ancient inhabitants of Anáhuac is not ancestry but the same effort against the same land and the same response to the same nature. A dry, sharp-lit plateau with clear air and harsh vegetation shapes a common way of feeling across broken histories. National identity is therefore rooted in a physical place worked and looked at together, not in a racial or dynastic line.
Faced with things they had no words for, the chroniclers described Mexico by analogy to what they already knew. Read this way, a first-contact account records the limits of the observer's vocabulary as much as the reality observed, so the distortions themselves become evidence.