(David) Mexico City combines aspects of Spanish and indigenous or Aztec cultures.

These go back more than 500 years, and many indigenous people claim that it was they who established the victory over the Aztecs and not the Spaniards.

(Announcer) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

Additional funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Laura and Arch Brown and by the Guilford Fund.

(David) The discoveries from Christopher Columbus█ voyage in 1492 unleashed a flurry of Spanish adventurers eager to become rich and powerful.

One of them was Hernán Cortez.

He spent a decade in Cuba at the side of the Spanish appointed governor enriching himself and helping enslave and exterminate native Cubans.

In 1519, only 27 years after Columbus, he financed a flotilla of 11 ships that sailed first to Yucatan and along the coast of what is now Mexico until he found a harbor large and safe enough to establish a colony.

This is the port of Veracruz, Mexico's most important shipping point.

It was also here that Cortez found along the Gulf of Mexico coast, a place where he could escape the storms and reach the shore with his boats.

From the harbor in Veracruz, where he first landed, he moved north and built his first home, now a ruin in the village of Antigua, Veracruz.

From there, he could make out the lofty peak called Citlaltepetl, now called Orizaba.

On his way to greater glory, he stopped at Cempoala, Xalapa, Coatepec, and Xico.

On the Plateau and its lava flows, he arrived at Tlaxcala, Cholula, and finally Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

The Sócolo in Mexico City is the seat of the power of the Mexican government.

700 years ago, it was the beginning location for the power of a government at that time, the most powerful in North America, the Aztecs or the Mexica.

In 1519, a horde of people, including a Spanish army, arrived in Mexico City, and the ensuing two years would change the fate of the Americas forever.

So this is actually a house that Cortez lived in?

(Ana) Yes, this was his house in Coyoacán.

The conquest was inevitable because the European nations were looking for a route to the east at any price.

They were ready to invade, to take, to destroy and to conquest any state that interfered with that goal- of reaching the Indies and being able to bring spices back to Europe from Asia.

If it had not been the Spanish, it would have been the English, French, Dutch.

So it was Spain, and with Spain came a whole system of thought.

The language, their religion, illnesses.

They brought good things, and bad things.

But of course they imposed the culture over peoples and places they didn't know anything about.

They destroyed the native rich gods and religious traditions.

The Spaniards imposed their culture at any cost.

The Aztec tribes came a long, long time ago from the north, and they established themselves in the valley of Mexico founding Mexico City, Tenochtitlán.

When they founded the city, they evolved and created a much more elaborated culture, acquiring the name of Mexicas and making Nahuatl their culture.

Diego Rivera was a nationalist artist interested in revealing Mexico's true history.

That is why he represented so often in his murals different episodes of Mexican history.

A very complete version that showed all the atrocities committed during the conquest.

In 1946, Hernan Cortez's grave was discovered.

He had died of Syphillus.

Diego Rivera wanted to poke fun at this, which is why he always represents Hernan Cortez deformed in his murals with the physical issues caused by syphilis.

(David) I'm standing in the plaza of the little town of La Antigua Veracruz.

The old Veracruz.

It█s located oh, 15 or 20 kilometers to the northwest of the city of Veracruz, which is now enormous.

Cortez first located himself and his troops here.

It was very accessible.

There was a river a water course.

They could get into their small boats and make their way up, get away from the coast and avoid some of the huge storms that came in from the north.

This mural shows the conquistadores and on the right hand side, we see an image of Dona Marina.

She was Cortez's mistress.

Dona Marina or Malinche has an ambiguous role in Mexican history and Mexican ideology.

She is widely viewed as a traitor because she helped the Spaniards destroy the entire Mexican infrastructure and people and led to genocide.

But she also enabled the Spaniards to introduce Catholicism and Spanish way of life.

So depending on your viewpoint, you can view her as a hero or as a villain.

I feel like I'm outside or inside of a prison looking in or out and looking down the barrel of a cannon from the 16th century.

Cortez had this house built, although he wasn't here very long, which indicated that he had quite grandiose plans for his arrival here on the coast of Veracruz.

He wanted to become governor of a new area in new Spain, which had been recently discovered or, as we say, found for Europeans by Christopher Columbus less than 30 years earlier.

Whoever the foreigners were, they brought with them powerful weapons of war, steel, steel armor, steel weapons of battle, rifles, gunpowder and most importantly, germs.

The smallpox epidemics that the Spaniards introduced decimated the population of all the Americas.

Most scholars agree now that within a few years, within a decade, 90% of indigenous people had disappeared.

Most of them due to disease, many of them by conquest.

The earlier expeditions of the Spaniards to the Caribbean after Christopher Columbus were slave raiding expeditions.

Columbus himself was a slave gatherer and trader.

This church was built in 1520, supposedly the first Catholic Church built in the Americas.

The conquistadors, or conquerors, as that means.

Had three things in mind when they came to the Americas, and they are called as a friend of mine says God, glory and gold.

The story of what he wanted and how we accomplished what he did is a very complicated one.

(Ana) When Cortez arrived with his beard, pale skin and green eyes, and with horses and firearms.

The natives, though they were gods.

Moctezuma, had spies all over what we called Mexico today.

So on their path to Tenochtitlan, they had to prove that they were gods.

And they did so with the horses of the guns.

They just brought glass beads that they gave as presents to the natives in exchange for pieces of gold.

[In Spanish] The natives didn't give gold any value, Hernán Cortez was also gathering information about the politicalization, and he was told that they were all part of a great empire.

The Mexican Empire.

Which controlled all 38 provinces.

So the empire was divided into 38 provinces, and by the 16th century, it was calculated that they were 2 million native inhabitants.

Essentially later, 90% of the population had died due to mistreatment, abuse and illnesses.

Definitely the conquest destroyed pre-Hispanic cultures.

(David) Cortez always gave high priority to erection of a cross wherever he went.

Importance of the cross was never lost upon the natives.

They were forced to accept it or sometimes endure punishment or even death.

But they were quick to incorporate it into their own mythology and their own system of beliefs so that in Mexico today you have a delightful combination of pre-Columbian post-columbian, and pagan elements combined all into the Catholicism, which to this day is the overwhelmingly popular religion in Mexico.

When Cortez arrived in 1519 to the coast of Veracruz, the city of Cempoala had 20,000 inhabitants.

It was probably the largest commercial center in all of the great Aztec or Mexica empire.

The Aztecs or Mexica had conquered the Cempoalans who were Totonacan people a few decades earlier and extracted heavy taxes in the form of a tribute they called it.

But Cempoala prevailed, and when Cortez arrived here, he found a thriving place.

And Cortez seems to have made himself friends with the people here.

They brought food for the Spaniards, and they began to tell him stories about how they hated the Mexica, the Aztecs from Tenochtitlan.

That gave Cortez the idea of making an alliance with the Totonacans.

And they were able to recruit thousands of Cempoalans, of Totonacs to accompany them to help overthrow dictatorship of Tenochtitlan.

The coast of Veracruz doesn't have great deposits of limestone that the people here could burn to make mortar.

Instead, they ground up seashells, roasted them, and then made them into a fine paste and used that as their kind of cement to hold the rocks together.

It was ingenious and it worked very well.

This side is at least a thousand years old, and probably parts of it are much older than that.

The rock here is very well rounded, is ancient volcanic rock that has been polished smooth by rolling down a river.

And those make an ideal and material for making the pyramids, which the Cempoalans took advantage of, to make their gorgeous site.

The Spaniards had heard tales of Indian empires inland, but still were convinced that Indians were barbarian savages, who knew very little about technology.

When they saw this place, which was as beautiful as any place they had ever seen in Europe, they realized that the Totonacs here were very sophisticated people.

And when they heard that inland and up in the Highlands were an even greater people, they were intrigued and their greed increased.

The site is full of smaller structures, but it is dominated by a great pyramid and a great temple.

And the Spaniards saw those in their full glory and realized that this was not what they had expected.

This is the town of Coatepec, Veracruz.

Cortez arrived here with a retinue of this 500 or so soldiers, and probably more than a thousand porters who were hired by him and invited by him from the people of Cempoala.

They were Totonacans.

The entire retinue passed through here.

The route to Tenochtitlan got higher and higher, and it was a well trod almost a highway that they were able to follow.

Several weeks after departing from Cempoala, with his enormous entourage, Cortez and his buddies arrived to the mountains, climbing up very steeply out of the coastal plain.

Before long, they entered an area that we know today as Cloud Forest.

One of the great habitats of all of Mexico and on into South America.

It is a very wet area.

It's covered every day with a dense fog.

So that passage was very hard.

But fortunately the Aztecs or Mexica had created a trail through their empire everywhere, and this was a good one.

It wasn't until a couple of hundred years later that Europeans discovered that the area was also ideal for coffee.

(Arturo) This is Arábica.

There are of course other varietals, but they don't produce as well.

You have to have both shade and heat.

This is to pay for basic living expenses.

I sell the cherries or beans at 12 pesos a kilo.

Toasted and ground, it sells for 180 pesos.

I also remove dead leaves, trim branches and clean up the ground covering.

(David) This particular area is very unusual in that the shade for the coffee trees is provided by banana trees.

Not just ordinary ones, but very tall, very robust banana trees.

This waterfall is located near the ancient town of Xico Colmarco.

It is very rough country, as we can see, and it is very wet.

And Cortez and his enormous entourage had to pass through here.

If they had had to do it on their own, they would never have found it.

They made it through, but not without the leadership and the guidance of many, many local people.

And the Aztecs knew what they were doing, could have stopped them at any point.

But let them come on through to the Highlands, which don't have this kind of jungle.

This entire plateau was one extraordinarily, big lava flow.

As it cooled, or as the earth shrunk, it created a crack and the water has gouged out this marvelous, beautiful canyon above.

The combination of lava stretching earth movement and the flow of water made this one of the most visited place in all of the northern part of the state of Veracruz.

This is the Museum of Anthropology in the city, the state capital of the state of Veracruz, Xalapa.

It's one of Mexico's two or three greatest museums.

Its significant because it demonstrates how sophisticated the cultures of the Americas were long before the arrival of any Europeans.

The fact is that 3000 years ago Americans were producing art equal to anything that came out of Europe.

This museum not only is extensive, but it contains just a sampling of the riches of the heritage in the state of Veracruz in the nearby state to the southeast of Tabasco.

It contains the Olmec heads which were constructed from basalt, a very hard rock carved out without steel and transported over many kilometers to the site of San Lorenzo.

They weigh between three and five tons and are exquisite.

Tlaxcala is a very small state in Mexico, but looms very important in the history of the Republic.

(Maria) The Spaniards were used in the battle between Tlaxcalans and Aztecs, and the Tlaxcalans won.

[In Spanish] In these murals, we can see Tlaxcala█s history, how these cultural groups emerge, and corn becomes a mythological element.

The Tlaxcalan█s are considered descendants of corn.

We can also observe in these murals how, after the transition from a hunter gatherer to an agricultural society, we begin to see all these practices of cultural and commercial exchanges from people who came to Tlaxcala with their own linguistic, religious and ritual practices.

This is Ocotelulco█s market.

At the forefront, we have the negotiations taking place among these four states.

We can see the exchange of products with groups coming from other places.

We are in Tlaxcala█s market.

It is very important for all the region dating back to way before the Spanish arrived.

We could see these institutes in murals.

How the market was the place for the authorities to debate political questions.

[In Spanish] (Dave) The ancient markets operated mostly on trade.

If you brought in Turkey and you could trade it for a weight of beans or some corn or maybe a molcajete, a stone grinder.

Of the objects that were readily available.

But what that meant was that almost everybody was on an equal footing.

It was hard to accumulate a huge number of turkeys or a mound of corn more than anybody else could.

So it was a center of equality and everyone benefited by that overall social leveling that that market represented.

(Maria) The Malinche is Marina, Cortez█ wife.

She arrived with him from Veracruz to Tlaxcala.

And thanks to her knowledge of the Spanish and Nahuatl, they could establish the nature of the Spanish presence.

She was very important in designing the strategies and the negotiations that allowed our culture to stand.

Some people use the term Malinchismo to characterize the preference for anything foreign over local.

But that's not how we see it here.

For us, Malinche is a woman who knew how to defend our own.

Thanks to this resistance, based on establishing alliances, the Tlaxcalan culture could retain some privileges.

Those privileges provided protection for our religion and political order.

And allow us to use horses and weapons brought by the Spanish.

We can see here the flower wars started with the goal of capturing the slaves.

During war, the soil was fertilized with blood.

In Tlaxcala, Spaniards took advantage of the very fertile soil to breed the bulls they will use in bullfights.

This is a very Spanish tradition, allowed only in Tlaxcala at the time, and it has survived until today.

After independence in the 19th century, Tlaxcala disappeared as a state because Mexicans wanted to punish Tlaxcalans for being loyal to the Spanish crown.

(David) This is the Great Pyramid of Cholula near Mexico City.

It is, many say, the largest pyramid in the world by volume, although it's not very high and doesn't look like a pyramid.

But it was occupied by a succession of rulers and empires over the last 2000 years, and each one changed it.

Built their own structure on top.

And as we see the Spaniards built their own church on top.

The last one.

The Cholulans were ancient enemies of the Tlaxcalans and friends, allies of the Aztecs.

When Cortez arrived here with a huge army of Tlaxcaltecos, and the Totonacans from the coast, they were warmly received by the people of Cholula and their rulers.

The Tlaxcalans invented a story and sold it to Cortez that the Cholulans were planning an ambush to kill all his men.

Cortez bought the story and blocked off the exit to the plaza.

And it was full of Cholulans.

The Tlaxcaltecos joined them and they massacred thousands of people, thousands of Cholulans, all the nobles, many, many women and children.

And Cholula never recovered from that.

Cholula was neutralized, much to the satisfaction of the Tlaxcalans, and from there, Cortez had a pretty free ride into Tenochtitlan the capital of the Aztecs, the Mexica.

In 1519, Hernan Cortez arrived at Tenochtitlan and the Sócolo where I'm standing.

It took two years for the combined armies to defeat the Aztecs and their empire.

After that, Spain was able to establish itself as the dominant factor in the politics of the Americas.

The waterfall looks to be about 80 feet tall and in another oh million years or so, it will be a slide rather than a waterfall.

This is one of dozens and dozens of similar waterfalls in this mountain country to the west, of Veracruz.

And before we get to the Altiplano, the high part of the plateau where most of the people now live.

(Announcer) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

Additional funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Laura and Arch Brown and by the Guilford Fund.