From Activism to Ancestral Memory: Why I Wrote Flight of the Hummingbird

by Salomón Quinteros August 24, 2026

Part 1: Why I Wrote Flight of the Hummingbird

From Silicon Valley Latino

A new volume of Raíces begins today. Volume 1 gave our history a place, Mexican Heritage Plaza in San José. Volume 2 gives it a voice. “The questions that drew me into activism as a young man never entirely left me. Decades later, they led me to write a novel.” Salomón Quintero was a Chicano student activist at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, walking picket lines with César Chávez and helping found the university's Ethnic Studies Department. Forty-five years later, retired from a career as a trial attorney, he returned to the questions that first pulled him out of the classroom, and answered them with Flight of the Hummingbird: An Aztec Tale of Fire and Rain and the End of the Fifth Sun.

This is Part 1 of a three-part Raíces series with Salomón Quintero.

Author's Note

When I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965, I thought I might major in English as I was drawn to literature, poetry and language. My first-quarter classes included English, German, and Spanish. But I had chosen Berkeley because I was inspired by the protest movement taking root there.

Before long, I found myself torn between my aesthetic interests and political activism. I loved studying Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. But when our reading turned to Jane Austen's character Elizabeth, whose life ambition was to marry rich, I came to feel lost and disconnected from the excitement my professor was displaying over the material.

Outside the classroom, the energy was different. Vietnam War and Civil Rights, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and Dylan and Baez were dominating the ethos. Sproul Plaza featured Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael, and Richie Havens and Phil Ochs.

My attention turned to César Chávez and the grape boycott. While I was walking a picket line at a Safeway store, a Teamster drove his semi-trailer truck straight at us. I had to leap out of the way to save my life.

At that time, there were only about thirty Chicano students at Berkeley. We formed the Mexican American Student Confederation, MASC. In 1968, while the nationwide grape boycott was underway, we were outraged to see grapes overflowing at all university cafeterias. After asking the administration to stop selling table grapes, we staged a sit-in at the office of University President Charles Hitch to demand the University stop grape purchases. I spent the following week fasting in the Santa Rita Jail. In the end, the University agreed to our demands.

Later, I led a MASC delegation to Delano where I addressed the United Farm Workers (UFWOC) convention. César Chávez then invited our group to his very humble home where we sat on his rickety back steps and discussed the Chicano movement. His children were playing and his wife, Helen, brought us slices of bread to share.

It was an intimate moment with a man who had become a national figure, and it has remained with me throughout my life.

In 1969, we joined with Black, Asian and Native American students to form the Third World Liberation Front to successfully move the University to establish an Ethnic Studies Department. At the time, I had no idea what Ethnic Studies would eventually become or how the questions behind that movement would return to shape my life decades later.

I continued on to UC Berkeley law school and then spent forty-five years practicing law in Redwood City. There, I built a three-lawyer firm. My civil practice included negligence suits, real estate and fraud actions, and family law. I was among the first attorneys in the state certified as a Family Law Specialist. Among other honors, I was listed among Northern California Super Lawyers for ten consecutive years.

While the law became my career, the fight for social justice and the welfare of our people continues.

After retiring in 2016, I returned to the study of history and identity. I immersed myself in Mesoamerican civilizations and, in particular, the world of the Mexica, the people commonly called the Aztecs. I studied their codices, their history, art, poetry, philosophy, society, religion and warfare.

As I read, I became increasingly aware of how narrowly this civilization is often presented. The Mexica are frequently reduced to conquest and human sacrifice, while their art, engineering, poetry, discipline, family life, and complex understanding of humanity receive far less attention. I wanted to look beyond the familiar stereotypes and imagine their world as they themselves might have experienced it.

The immediate inspiration for my novel grew out of a conversation with a renowned archaeologist about social mobility among the Aztecs. He argued that Aztec social structure was static, that people's social position was determined by their birthdate and their parent's role in society.

I could not accept that as the whole story. In my view, the desire to excel, to achieve, to have success, recognition, wealth, influence, or a higher position, is part of who we are as humans. No social structure can entirely suppress it. As I continued my research, I found exceptions to every rule. Mexica society was hierarchical as are all human societies, but they also had avenues for disciplined, talented, and ambitious individuals to advance.

That question became my impetus for writing Flight of the Hummingbird.

The novel follows four generations of one Mexica family as its members rise from the chinampas of Tenochtitlán into the worlds of art, commerce, education, warfare, diplomacy, and imperial power. Its narrator, Huitzilin, “the Hummingbird,” tells how his father rose from a farm boy on the chinampas, first by a chance encounter with a respected jeweler who taught him the craft of jewelry making. And another chance encounter with the head of the imperial school who led him on a journey from artisan craftsman to renowned philosopher artist.

Huitzilin's brother becomes a wealthy merchant, his sister a famed feather artist. Huitzilin himself rises to serve as chief adviser to Emperor Moctezuma II.

Their achievements unfold beneath a gathering shadow. Omens appear. Rumors arrive of strangers approaching from the eastern sea. At the height of the family's success, the world they know moves toward its prophesied end.

I wrote the novel to present the Mexica not as distant figures in an archaeological account, but as human beings: parents and children, artists and merchants, teachers and warriors; people moved by love and fear, by heartache and sorrow, ambition and duty, loyalty and jealousy. We don't just see the horror of human sacrifice; we reach an understanding of the beliefs and feelings surrounding these events.

My hope is that readers will enter their world with curiosity and emerge with a fuller understanding of a civilization too often defined by its destruction. For Latino readers especially, I hope the story contributes to a deeper conversation about ancestry, cultural memory, and the histories that shape our sense of who we are.

The questions that drew me into activism as a young man never entirely left me. Decades later, they led me to write a novel.

Get the Book

Flight of the Hummingbird: An Aztec Tale of Fire and Rain and the End of the Fifth Sun by Salomón Quintero is a multigenerational historical novel set in the Mexica world before, during and after the arrival of the Spanish. Enriched with color images from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century codices, it portrays a civilization alive with art, philosophy, discipline, ambition, and fate.

Purchase on IngramSpark: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=QuxJVgZm2sMlCbVloOELHwIcn3HpNXX0ZjhAwUW1YbD

 

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