Compare And Contrast The Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes

The foundations of the discourse of the other were formulated alongside two independent Spanish expeditions of the New World. In 1492, Christopher Columbus not only sailed the ocean blue, but he also went about initiating the embryonic stages of the discourse of the other through his encounters with the Taino Indians. A little under thirty years later, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes would be responsible for the downfall of the Aztec civilization and with it, Cortes would add new dimensions to the otherness of the indigenes of the New World. Both expeditions created a new mode of contextualizing the encounters between the New World and the Old World. This new mode of contextualization is the discourse of the other and was born through a

There is a scene that depicts the Spanish encountering a burning indigenes village which they promptly raid for resources such as food. At one point during the raid, the Spanish stumble upon the remains of a conquistador and find his skull in a nearby pot, to which they quickly assume that the Indians who had inhabited this village were cannibals. The Spanish then fled the village upon sight of this skull. The Spanish did not hesitate in employing the trope of cannibalism upon seeing the dead conquistador, which is an obvious nod to the same theory of indigenes cannibalism that Columbus employed to the extent that it became a term not only associated with the indigenes but rather a defining term of the indigenes. Similar again to Columbus’ experience, the notion of natives of this village being cannibals is quite unlikely considering the one resource the village had that the Spanish coveted, that of stockpiles of food. Thus, in an expedition that consists of the competing and often interchangeable narratives of Gold of God, there is the apocryphal rhetoric of the indigene’s cannibalism that seems to be as pivotal as gold in holding together the discourse of the