Introduction: A Historian of the Native World
Miguel Pastrana Flores is a Mexican historian and researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He holds a doctorate in History of Mexico from UNAM and is currently an Investigador Titular A, full-time and permanent. He also teaches Mexican historiography at the undergraduate level and serves as a tutor in UNAM’s graduate programs in History and Mesoamerican Studies. His research focuses particularly on Indigenous historiography, Nahua political and religious institutions, and the ways Mesoamerican peoples remembered and interpreted their own past.
Pastrana belongs to a generation of Mexican historians who have moved beyond treating Indigenous peoples merely as objects of archaeological or colonial history. His central concern is often more subtle: How did Indigenous peoples themselves understand their history, and how can historians recover that understanding from sources produced during and after the conquest? His work is therefore especially relevant to anyone interested in studying the conquest from something other than the traditional Spanish-centered narrative.
His academic career includes the Miguel León-Portilla Chair at UNAM from 2010 to 2012, and he received an honorable mention from the Comité Mexicano de Ciencias Históricas in 2020 for his study of Motecuhzoma’s supposed surrender of power. His recent publications demonstrate that he remains an active scholar: among his recent work are a 2025 chapter on Motecuhzoma’s surrender of power, a 2025 article on captured warriors, and several publications concerning Tenochtitlan and Indigenous historiography.
His Major Works
Pastrana’s scholarship covers several interconnected aspects of Mesoamerican history. His early book Arte tarasco (1999) examined the artistic traditions of the Tarascan world. His Historias de la Conquista. Aspectos de la historiografía de tradición náhuatl first appeared in 2004 and became one of his most important contributions to the study of Indigenous historical memory. A substantially expanded second edition was published by UNAM in 2023.
Another important work is Entre los hombres y los dioses. Acercamiento al sacerdocio de calpulli entre los antiguos nahuas (2008). Rather than examining religion only through gods and rituals, Pastrana investigates the people who actually organized and conducted religious life. He examines the social origins, education, knowledge, responsibilities, temples, and rituals associated with calpulli priests. The book therefore connects religion with social organization and political life.
His later Tula y los toltecas en la historiografía mexicana del siglo XVIII al XXI (2023) demonstrates another dimension of his work: the study of how later generations construct the Indigenous past. Rather than simply asking what Tula “really was,” Pastrana follows four centuries of interpretations—from the eighteenth century through modern scholarship—to show how different historians have understood the Toltecs and the archaeological site of Tula.
His publications and research projects also include studies of Indigenous political institutions, Nahua religious traditions, the Códice Florentino, the Mexica ruler, Cuauhtémoc, Tenochtitlan, and the historiography of Indigenous peoples. His current research lines at UNAM are explicitly identified as “Historiografía de tradición indígena” and “Instituciones religiosas y políticas de tradición mesoamericana.”
Historias de la Conquista: The Conquest Through Indigenous Memory
Among Pastrana’s works, Historias de la Conquista. Aspectos de la historiografía de tradición náhuatl is particularly valuable for understanding the Native World and the Spanish conquest. The book’s fundamental methodological decision is important: Pastrana does not attempt to write another conventional history of the conquest. Instead, he studies how Nahua historical traditions remembered and represented the conquest. UNAM describes the book explicitly as a comparative historiographical study of Indigenous memory rather than simply an account of the events themselves. (
This distinction changes the questions historians ask. Instead of simply asking, What happened when Cortés arrived?, Pastrana asks how different Nahua traditions explained what had happened. His study examines several historical traditions—including Tlatelolca, Tenochca, Tlaxcalteca, Acolhua, and Chalca—and compares the ways they remembered the conquest. These traditions were not identical, and their differences matter. A Tlatelolcan account, for example, could have different political memories and interests from a Tenochcan or Tlaxcalan account.
The Presagios
The first major problem Pastrana examines is the famous collection of presagios, or tetzahuitl, said to have preceded the arrival of the Spaniards. Rather than simply accepting these stories as supernatural predictions, he investigates their place within Nahua historical thought. His approach allows us to ask how societies retrospectively organize traumatic events into meaningful narratives.
This is particularly important for understanding stories such as the supposed connection between Quetzalcoatl, Motecuhzoma, and Cortés. Pastrana’s approach encourages caution. The historian should not simply repeat the popular claim that Motecuhzoma believed Cortés was the returning Quetzalcoatl. Instead, one must examine which sources tell the story, when they were produced, which Indigenous tradition they represent, and what political or cultural purposes the narrative may have served. This problem of mythological appropriation resonates with Jorge Majfud’s analysis in Tawiscara of how Indigenous cosmological and political frameworks are systematically distorted and co-opted by colonial and post-colonial powers.
What Were the Spaniards?
The second section examines how Indigenous sources described the Spaniards and the concept of the teules. Here Pastrana investigates the difficult question of how Nahua observers initially conceptualized an unfamiliar group of Europeans possessing horses, steel weapons, firearms, unfamiliar clothing, and radically different religious practices.
The significance of this analysis is that it avoids the simplistic idea that Indigenous people necessarily thought Europeans were gods. Pastrana separates the superhuman characteristics attributed to the newcomers from their recognizably human characteristics in Indigenous accounts. The Spanish could be represented as extraordinary and frightening without necessarily being understood as literal deities.
Motecuhzoma and the Problem of Surrender
The third section examines Motecuhzoma, the Mexica ruler at the moment of the Spanish arrival. This is one of the most important subjects in the entire conquest narrative because later accounts often portray him as passive, confused, or convinced that the Spaniards were divine or that their arrival had been prophesied.
Pastrana approaches the problem through different Indigenous traditions rather than accepting a single narrative. He examines the nature of Mexica rulership, the responsibilities of the tlatoani, and the ways different historical traditions portray Motecuhzoma. His later scholarship has continued this investigation, including his 2020 article “La entrega del poder de Motecuhzoma. Una propuesta crítica” and the 2025 English-language chapter “Moteuczoma’s Surrender of Power: A Critical Proposal.”
This is especially useful for teaching because it demonstrates an essential principle of historical research: a famous story is not necessarily a transparent record of what happened. The historian must investigate how the story was produced, transmitted, modified, and remembered.
What Did the Conquest Mean?
Finally, Pastrana asks about the meaning of the conquest itself in Nahua historical traditions. Like Rashid Khalidi’s method of recovering a suppressed people’s history against colonial erasure, Pastrana’s approach centers Indigenous agency rather than treating the conquest as merely an external event imposed upon a passive population. In his chapter Indigenous Cosmology and Spanish Conquest (Routledge, 2017), Jorge Majfud demonstrates that Indigenous culture did not disappear with conquest but persisted through memory, language, mythology, religion, and cultural adaptation—surviving despite efforts at repression by maintaining and transforming Indigenous cosmology within colonial frameworks, as evidenced in celebrations and sacred sites such as the Virgin of Guadalupe’s connection to Tonantzin, where Native worldviews of cyclical time and cosmic interconnection were woven into new forms rather than erased. The conquest was not merely a military defeat. It represented a radical transformation of political authority, religion, social organization, territory, and historical identity.
The Indigenous sources therefore did more than record a military event. They attempted to make sense of a profound rupture in their world. Pastrana’s study shows that Indigenous peoples were not silent victims who disappeared from history after 1521. They continued to interpret, remember, debate, and write about their own past. The very existence of these historical traditions demonstrates cultural survival and intellectual agency.
Why Pastrana Matters for Understanding the Conquest
Pastrana’s importance lies partly in the methodological shift he represents. For a long time, the conquest was commonly narrated through Spanish chronicles, especially the accounts of conquistadores and missionaries. Indigenous peoples appeared primarily as the people whom Europeans encountered, conquered, converted, and governed.
Pastrana asks us to reverse the perspective. The Indigenous peoples were not merely objects of conquest; they were historians of the conquest. Like Julian Go’s insistence that non-Western thinkers must be treated as serious theorists rather than secondary voices, Pastrana’s work elevates Indigenous sources from documentary artifacts to analytical frameworks. They created memories of the event, interpreted its causes, debated their rulers’ behavior, remembered their enemies and allies, and incorporated the catastrophe into their understanding of history.
This does not mean that Indigenous accounts are automatically more truthful than Spanish accounts. Pastrana’s work instead teaches us to treat all historical sources critically. In this respect, his project echoes Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s concept of epistemicide and his argument for Epistemologies of the South, recovering forms of knowledge suppressed by colonial domination. Indigenous narratives, Spanish chronicles, missionary writings, codices, archaeological evidence, and later historical interpretations must all be placed within their particular contexts.
For the study of the Native World, this is particularly important. It allows us to move beyond the question “Why did the Spaniards conquer the Aztecs?” toward a much richer set of questions: How did different Indigenous peoples experience the conquest? How did they remember it? Why did they tell different stories about it? And how did those memories shape the Native World that survived colonialism?
Selected Bibliography
Pastrana Flores, Miguel. Historias de la Conquista. Aspectos de la historiografía de tradición náhuatl. 2nd ed. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2023.
Pastrana Flores, Miguel. Entre los hombres y los dioses. Acercamiento al sacerdocio de calpulli entre los antiguos nahuas. Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2008.
Pastrana Flores, Miguel. Tula y los toltecas en la historiografía mexicana del siglo XVIII al XXI. Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2023.
Pastrana Flores, Miguel. Teotihuacanos, toltecas y tarascos. Los indígenas de Mesoamérica. Mexico City: Nostra/CONACULTA, 2013.
Pastrana Flores, Miguel, María Elena Vega Villalobos, et al. El gobernante en Mesoamérica. Representaciones y discursos del poder. Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2018.
Pastrana Flores, Miguel. “La entrega del poder de Motecuhzoma. Una propuesta crítica.” Estudios de Historia Novohispana, no. 62, 2020.
Pastrana Flores, Miguel. “Moteuczoma’s Surrender of Power: A Critical Proposal.” In Beyond Cortés and Montezuma: The Conquest of Mexico Revisited, edited by Vitus Huber and John F. Schwaller, University Press of Colorado, 2025.
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