How Did The Conquistadors Create A Post-Conquest Central America

In 1498 the Conquistadors first arrived in South America with Columbus (Restall and Lane, 51). With the arrival began a large chain of conquest that spanned the entire Mesoamerican region. In conquering Mesoamerica, the Spaniards worked toward a utopia under the three paradigms of conquest: economic gain, Christian conversion, and social precedence (Stern, 59). The paradigms were frameworks under which the Spaniards hoped to establish a post-conquest utopia within Central America. Their 3 main goals were to benefit economically through looting and forced labor, convert the population to Christianity, and gain social precedence back home in Spain. However, the conquistadors were mostly armed private citizens and in no way resembled an organized

The Conquistadors experienced internal religious and political strife due to competing between different highly motivated factions that supported a specific paradigm of conquest. The Spanish conquest was not a unified action undertaken by a single military. Instead, “self-employed” Conquistadors would break into factions, sometimes based on the 3 paradigms of conquest. After hearing about a letter written to the king, one of the conquistadors wrote, “He wrote this in order to raise up [Hernando] Cortés and knock down those of us who were with him, seeing as we have been taken as surely being the true conquistadors” (Oudijk and Restall, 108). Internal political conflict was very common during the conquest period. The volunteer conquistadors were desperately seeking to reach a certain utopia, and they were not happy with being knocked down in favor of honoring a select few. Given that the conquistadors were highly motivated, they wanted to be acknowledged for their work (Restall and Lane,

Stern argues that the theme of competition between paradigms and factions would prevent the Conquistadors from fully executing their plan to build a utopia in post-conquest South America. While trying to reach utopia under the three paradigms, the Conquistadors experienced resistance from the Amerindian population due to the difficulty converting them and the new layer of policy issues they presented. During an expedition to distant Honuras, the Conquistadors realized that converting the Amerindian population to being subjects of the king presented itself to be quite difficult (Restall and Lane, 55). This disrupted one of the Spaniards’ core tenets of loyalty to the crown. Without loyalty to the crown, the Conquistadors would not be able to sustain an economic utopia within Central America nor convert them to Christianity. As a result, the Amerindians would likely be unmotivated and break off into factions. This started to happen quickly as the Nobles of Xochimilco wrote to the king stating, “We implore Your Majesty to order a royal decree. [that] we not be obliged to give the said service [farm work]” (Restall et. al.,