Tlatelolcan View of the Siege of Tenochtitlan: May 1521

The local people of the city complex of Tenochtitlan who were not prepared for battle fled north.

"During this time the Aztecs took refuge in the Tlatelolco quarter. They deserted the Tenochtitlan quarters all in one day, weeping and lamenting like women. Husbands searched for their wives, and fathers carried their small children on their shoulders. Tears of grief and despair streamed down their cheeks.

The Tlatelolcas, however refused to give up. They raced into Tenochtitlan to continue the fight and the Spaniards soon learned how brave they were. Pedro de Alvarado launched an attack against the Point of the Alders, in the direction of Nonohualco, but his troops were shattered as if he had sent them against a stone cliff. The battle was fought both on dry land and on the water, where they shot at the Spaniards from their shielded canoes. Alvarado was routed and had to draw back to Tlacopan."

Miguel Leon-Portilla our editor here for these recollections (in Broken Spears), reminds us that the Tlatelolcos had long been active enemies with the recently reigning Aztec clan of Motecuhzoma. But they had also long accepted their  place in their quarter of the gigantic city. He also tells us that the storytellers here were Tlatelolco elders remembering the siege many years later and that they would be the only one's left to recall their own quarter's heroic deeds.

From page ninety-nine, one-hundred in The Broken Spears: the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico, translated, edited with an introduction by Miguel León-Portilla, expanded and with a postscript, Beacon Press, 2006.
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Camilla Townshend paints an almost beguiling sketch of the circumstance of the retelling, if it were not for the terrible events recalled. It was the young Nahuatl men who came and asked the elders about those days of thirty years before. So, they led the old men to a place near the Franciscan church in Tlatelolco where they could talk and write.

"They led their guests through dark, quiet rooms bordering the church courtyard to a place where they could work, and then asked them in polite and respectful Nahuatl to consider themselves welcome, to take care to preserve their good health, to seat themselves. As the old ones spoke of what they remembered, the young ones dipped their feather quills in black ink and tried to write it all down on the large, thick paper they had before them. Their actions made a peculiar scratching noise. In the old days, the elders knew, the writing would have been different, and the scribes would never have used black ink alone, but red and black together, on the same page. These young men remembered little or nothing about those times, however, having spent so many years of their lives with the Spanish friars.

The old men said the first attack on the city had come suddenly. Like lightning in the storm season, they had known it was coming, and when it came they were somehow stunned. The Spanish had been moving in the area for months; they had been seen assembling their boats across the water in Tetzcoco. Then one day they came rapidly across in a body toward the neighborhood of Zoquipan on the island's shore."

from p. 115,  Malintzin's Choices: an Indian Woman In The Conquest of Mexico, Camilla Townshend, University of New Mexico Press, as part of the series Dialogos, 2006