Why the Mexica Story Matters

by Salomón Quintero September 08, 2026

Part 3: Why the Mexica Story Matters

 

From Silicon Valley Latino

This closes Volume 2 of Raíces. Historical memory shapes more than our understanding of the past. It influences identity, belonging, and what individuals and communities believe themselves capable of achieving.

In the final installment of this three-part series, Salomón Quintero explains why he chose the Mexica as the subject of Flight of the Hummingbird, how their civilization has often been narrowly portrayed, and why recovering a fuller understanding of Indigenous history matters to Latino communities today.

Missed the rest of the series? Read Part 1, From Activism to Ancestral Memory, and Part 2, Entering the Mexica World, at svlatino.com/blogs/raices.

Author's Note

Our history and culture shape self-esteem, belonging, and a sense of possibility. The images and narratives we encounter through education, entertainment, and the media influence how we understand who we are, where we came from, and what we might become.

When the history of a people is ignored, distorted, or reduced to its most disturbing elements, something important is lost. Reclaiming a fuller understanding of the past allows us to recover some of what has been omitted, and to take greater pride in the depth and complexity of our cultural inheritance.

Why the Mexica?

Why, then, did I choose to write about the Mexica rather than the Maya, Inca, Zapotec, or one of the many other peoples who created extraordinary civilizations in the Americas?

It was not because the Mexica were more worthy of attention. Each civilization developed its own political, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual traditions.

The Maya world, for example, extended across a vast region and a long span of history, encompassing numerous city-states whose fortunes rose and fell over centuries. Its achievements in writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and art were extraordinary.

The Mexica offered a different kind of narrative.

Their rise from migrants entering the Valley of Mexico to the dominant power of a far-reaching tributary empire occurred within a comparatively compressed period. Their capital, Tenochtitlán, became one of the great cities of its time. Their world brought together military ambition, commerce, education, poetry, philosophy, monumental art, religious obligation, and political power, and then confronted a sudden upheaval that transformed it forever.

A civilization seen through its destruction

For many people, the story of the Mexica begins with human sacrifice and ends with Hernán Cortés.

The civilization that existed beyond those subjects receives far less attention. Its people become figures in the story of the Spanish conquest rather than protagonists in their own history.

The Mexica built an intricate social and political world. Tenochtitlán rose on islands in Lake Texcoco, linked to the mainland by causeways and threaded with canals that carried people and goods through the capital. Roads across the empire enabled merchants, messengers, tribute bearers, and armies to travel between distant communities. At the great marketplace of Tlatelolco, tens of thousands of buyers and sellers traded goods arranged by type while officials maintained order and resolved disputes. The Mexica cultivated chinampas, educated their children, trained artists and scribes, maintained diplomatic and tributary relationships, and developed traditions of poetry and philosophical reflection.

The Mexica were also an imperial and warlike society. They conquered other peoples, demanded tribute, and practiced human sacrifice. In Flight of the Hummingbird, I detail two specific sacrifices to enable the reader to understand the beliefs and feelings of the people about these events.

An Indigenous inheritance

Not every Latino or Chicano person is a direct descendant of the Mexica. Before Europeans arrived, the Americas were home to a vast number of distinct peoples, languages, histories, and cultures, many of which remain alive today. Those differences should be recognized rather than collapsed into a single identity. Yet the Mexica story belongs to a larger Indigenous history of the Americas, one through which we can explore our relationship to this hemisphere and its past.

Restoring human dimension

Historical fiction cannot reproduce the past with certainty. The interior lives of people who died five centuries ago cannot be fully recovered, but fiction can use research and informed imagination to explore the human possibilities within the historical record.

Archaeology can tell us what objects people made, what foods they ate, how they constructed their city, and how they treated their dead. Codices and historical accounts can preserve names, dates, events, rituals, and beliefs. Fiction can bring these forms of evidence together and ask a different set of questions: What might it have felt like to inhabit that world? How did people understand their duties to family, community, ruler, and gods? What did they fear, desire, regret, and hope to become?

I wanted readers to meet Mexica parents and children, artists and merchants, teachers and students, priests and warriors, people moved by ambition, loyalty, tenderness, grief, duty, fear, and love.

I also wanted to portray a world in which art, philosophy, religion, and daily life were closely connected. A crafted object could carry spiritual meaning. A flower could become a metaphor for beauty and impermanence. A dream or omen could influence a political decision. Poetry could ask whether anything on earth truly lasts.

These dimensions do not erase conquest or sacrifice. They restore the humanity that disappears when a civilization is reduced to those subjects alone.

History through Huitzilin's eyes

I have always believed that history should be told, whenever possible, through the experiences of the people who lived it. Wars, disasters, famines, migrations, and the ambitions of rulers are often presented as a sequence of dates and decisions. Yet history is also what happened to ordinary people whose lives were changed by those events.

Historical fiction allows me to approach the past from that perspective. It cannot recover with certainty the private thoughts of people who lived five centuries ago. It can, however, draw upon research and informed imagination to ask what historical events might have looked and felt like to the people who lived it.

Huitzilin is the witness through whom readers experience the Mexica world. He does not observe its history from a distance; he is drawn into its schools, friendships, wars, councils, and moments of crisis.

The war with Tlatelolco is therefore not presented merely as a military conflict between neighboring cities. Readers experience it through Huitzilin's eyes and thoughts as he enters combat for the first time, confronts fear and violence, and captures his first prisoner. The public event becomes a personal threshold that changes his understanding of warfare, honor, and himself.

After gaining admission to the royal Calmecac school, Huitzilin befriends future rulers Axayacatl and Ahuítzotl. He knows them first as fellow students, not as names in a royal succession. Through their friendships, rivalries, and education, readers encounter the formative experiences behind the rulers they will become.

As an elder, Huitzilin serves among the Teuctlatoque, the council of senior advisors, when reports arrive of Hernán Cortés and strangers approaching from the eastern sea. Through him, readers witness the debate over whether the strangers are gods or powerful humans, and watch Moctezuma's anguish and indecision as he struggles to interpret incomplete reports, weigh competing advice, and confront a danger for which neither precedent nor prophecy provides certainty.

The rulers and wars are historical. Huitzilin is imagined. But, through his eyes, I seek to tell history as lived experience: how the ambitions of rulers reach into households, how public events alter private lives, and how a person attempts to find meaning while the world around him is changing.

That is the task I gave myself as a novelist: not to write a history textbook, but to enter the Mexica world through one life and allow readers to walk in the shoes of someone living it.

Why cultural memory matters

The questions that drew me into the Chicano movement as a young man continue to shape my thinking: Whose histories are taught? Whose accomplishments are remembered? Who is given the opportunity to recognize themselves in the story of the past?

For Latino readers, learning about the civilizations of the Americas can open a broader understanding of identity. It can remind us that the history of this hemisphere did not begin with European arrival and that the people who lived here created cities, governments, philosophies, works of art, and systems of knowledge long before the conquest.

That knowledge does not dictate who we are. It gives us more with which to understand ourselves.

To reclaim the Mexica story is not to seek refuge in an idealized past. It is to encounter that past honestly and completely, to acknowledge achievement alongside violence, beauty alongside suffering, and humanity amid contradiction. Historical memory shapes living identity. When we see ancestral worlds in their fullness, we expand the possibilities through which we understand both the past and ourselves. That is why the Mexica story matters.

 

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. Narrated by Huitzilin, “the Hummingbird,” the novel follows one family's rise from the chinampas of Tenochtitlán into the worlds of art, commerce, education, warfare, diplomacy, and imperial power as omens darken the sky and strangers approach from the eastern sea.

The novel is enriched with fifty color images from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century codices.

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

 

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