La Malinche, essentially, betrayed her people and went against male dominance and authority, which thus threatened her culture as a whole. She did it for the love of Cortes who was her owner and her lover as well as the father of her son. The threat solidified her as a symbol of female sexuality that is at once disparaged and kept under control in the Mexican culture (Michan 2003: 34).

The dual aspect of La Malinche's legendary history shows that a woman's dependence on men for her importance and security leads to forced passivity, loss of identity, violation and abandonment. Despite the continuing scape-goating of what La Malinche stands for in the culture today, her press to develop herself and her independence, as well as her bridging function, has a still perceivable lineage, albeit in nascent form, in the individual Mexican psyche (Michan 2003: 34).

The story of Malinche and Cortes is….

Soon after, an Aztec general murders several Spaniards from Cortez's band and prove that Cortez and his companions are frauds. Cortez takes Montezuma prisoner and compels him in surrendering the entire empire. The Aztec people choose to disobey their master and than kill Montezuma after he attempts to calm the spirits of the rebellion.
Hearing the news of Cortez's success in Mexico, Velasquez sends an army to arrest the deserter, but most of the men sent to capture Cortez join him after a clash between Cortez's forces and Velasquez's men.

Following several days of skirmish, Cortez enters the capital of the Aztecs once again, with the cost of thousands of lives of native people. After two years of attacks from the Spaniards and their allies, on the 13th of August, 1521, the Aztec king of Guatemoc surrenders his country before Hernan Cortez.

For the following seven years, Cortez remained in Mexico and….

Broken Spears: he Aztec Account of the Conquest of America, edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla (Beacon Press, 1992).
Broken Spears tells the Aztec peoples' account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

hroughout history, the conquest has been told from the viewpoint of the conquistadors -- the Spanish victors. Broken Spears was the first book to tell the story of the conquest from the Aztecs' perspective.

It was originally published in Spanish (in 1959), and was only published in English in the year 1962.

he book begins a few years before the conquest by telling of the Aztecs' perceived omens of the conquest, and the remainder of the book gives a chronological account of the conquest.

he primary impetus of the book is not historical data gathering but, rather, is of the storytelling and human emotion behind the Spanish conquest.

Background

Hernando Cortes' army arrived in Mexico in the early 16th century and defeated the Mexicans in relatively….

The nature of cross-cultural exchanges in the early modern period The phenomenon of cross-cultural experiences and exchanges started from the early years and was always the starting point of discovery of the other cultures. On the initial contacts, there were outstanding differences and concerns that the people involved had, with each of the groups of people thinking that the culture of the other was strange and inferior.
Hypothesis
The evidence shows that cross-cultural exchanges in the early modern period were stereotypical and condescending. The people of a given nation always saw the other cultures as strange and hence inferior to their own. They tended to consider the cultures they came across as a possible undue interference with their noble and familiar culture. This corruption of their cultures was often discouraged by all means by either taking measures to discourage their own people from accepting the other culture, or trying as hard as they….

Treatment of omen in Mexican Culture
The choices for women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than the choices of men. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: The pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual - the virgin or the whore.

Mexican culture is certainly not exempt from this tendency to place women on one side of this dichotomy or the other, but in the case of Mexican images of women this division of the female half of the population into the chaste, good woman and the terrible promiscuous one becomes complicated by issues of race (and racial purity), by the historical condition of colonization and post-colonization, by the partial displacement, partial incorporation of native belief systems by Catholicism.

These many complications and elaborations of this essential and essentializing dichotomy….

Collision of Two Worlds
Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortes and Bernal Diaz all wrote very positive and glowing reports about the New World, which seem to have been in conflict with some of the harsh realities that they certainly encountered when they came to the New World. However, the fact that their glowing reports omitted some of the harsher aspects of their "discoveries" does not imply that any of these men were being dishonest. On the contrary, what it does do is highlight the role that these men played in their respective positions. They were not explorers, though they have come to be known as explorers to modern people. Instead, these men were each tasked to complete very specific tasks for the governments for whom they worked. Columbus was given the task of finding an overseas trade route with the East. Cortes went to discover the wealth of the Aztec empire. Diaz….

Aztecs and Incas
In the 15th century various kinds of communities were hosted in the western part of the world. These communities had various activities such as hunting people as well as gathering, agricultural village societies along with chiefdoms and two major state-based agrarian evolutions. Around this time a better fraction of America's population was intense in some two societies known as Aztec as well as Inca. Being that any of the two societies had a far-reaching bookish folklore, those who seek to get acquainted to their past as well as way of life relayed mostly on the 16th Century records along with observations of the Spanish as they are the ones who conquered them. This then brought up a bigger question on how an individual from a conqueror community and with a totally dissimilar way of life be in a position to perfectly illustrate the life style of the people….

Hispanic community in the United States. Hispanic-American's have influenced many aspects of today's American culture such as art, religion, and education since the early 1600's. It will outline the influx of the Spanish explorers and the defense of the border between the United States and Mexico. The paper will also examine the influence of the food, colorful clothing, art, and the educational reform that has come about to meet the needs of the Hispanic children in the school system. This culture has made such a lasting impact in America that is deserves to be studied and researched more in-depth to gain more appreciation and insight to its lasting contribution.
Hispanic-American Cultural Diversity

Hispanic-American's have influenced many aspects of today's American culture such as art, religion, and education since the early 1600's. The borders of Mexico have long been the subject of territorial disputes and have many people have died to defend….

Rivera's work is divided into three panels. The right-hand mural was inspired by pre-Hispanic Mexico, and depicts the story of the Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl. It is interesting to note here that by putting the god's story into images, Rivers attempts to forge a Mexican national identity centered on its pre-Hispanic heroes. The middle panel is the largest in the Palace and depicts the horrors of the Conquest and the Mexican battle for Independence. The left-hand panel illustrates the artist's contemporary realities seen through the communist eyes of Rivera who depicts a sort of Marxist utopia. The significance of the building erected by the Spanish between 1521 and 1530 is very interesting. On the one hand, the Palace represents the conquering Spanish culture, but on the other hand, the Palacio Nacional is a very Mexican building, a mixture of Spanish and Aztec civilizations.
orks Cited

DeLange Audrey; DeLange George. "Travel and Tour….

orks Cited

Boehm, Deborah A. "Our Lady of Resistance: the Virgin of Guadalupe and contested constructions of community in Santa Fe, New Mexico." Journal of the Southwest. March 22, 2002. Retrieved November 27, 2006 from HighBeam Research Library.

Bowen, Jennifer A. "Our Lady of Guadalupe: New devotional site dedicated to Mary at Our Lady of Snows." Belleville News-Democrat. September 4, 2005. Retrieved November 27, 2006 from HighBeam Research Library.

Coleman, Patty. "Guadalupe caught in clerical struggle." National Catholic Reporter.

June 14, 1996. Retrieved November 27, 2006 from HighBeam Research Library.

Edwards, Bob. "Commentary: Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico."

Morning Edition: National Public Radio. January 4, 2002. Retrieved November 27, 2006 from HighBeam Research Library.

The gift of Guadalupe." U.S. Catholic. December 1, 1999. Retrieved November 27

2006 from HighBeam Research Library.

Lyden, Jacki. "Profile: Torch run to celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe comes to New

York from Mexico." eekend Edition - Sunday: National Public Radio. December 14,….

AZTECS
The ancient Mexican region not only stands out as a mythological haven, but also as a culturally vibrant and technologically advanced civilization. Among the Mesoamerican civilizations, the Aztecs standout for their significant contributions in the fields of astronomy, medicine, and also for their bizarre ritualistic practices.

The Aztecs represent an important group of the Mesoamerican civilizations. They arrived from the north to the 'valley of Mexiaco' or what is currently the city of Mexico, during 1200 AD. Known as the 'Tenochca' or the 'Toltec' tribe, the Aztecs dominated the Mexican valley between the 14th and 15th centuries. Initially, confronted by the Culhuacans the Tenochcas had to flee the mainland and move towards the island. Under the command of Itzacoatl, the Tenochcas gained freedom and undertook the construction of the grand city of Tenochtitlan. As new regions in the valley of Mexico came under the Aztecs they also absorbed the local gods….

Hernando Cortez
The story of Hernando Cortez, who conquered the extraordinary Aztec peoples, is a story of many facets. Cortez is called the "Conqueror of Mexico." In some sense his story is indeed the story of a remarkable soldier and commander, one who conquered a new world against all odds. In another sense, his story is the story of Europe and its very mixed feelings about the Americas.

The Europeans struggled with their ambivalence about the new world of the Americas. Fantasies about Mesoamerican peoples were often invented -- they were viewed as heathen tribes, and history has told the story of the Aztec peoples with great bias at times, unwilling to embrace them as a complex society. "It was not easy or comfortable for Europeans to fit the incredible news of entirely unknown lands, peoples, empires, souls, gold, into their intellectual horizon. America became, for centuries, a 'strange new world' with….