When I sat down to write this episode, I kept thinking about how high-ranking Mexica officials were told about the arrival of Hernán Cortés to the Yucatan peninsula in 1519. I did not want to write something from the perspective of the Colonizers. We have their accounts and they can be easily accessed. Instead, I wanted to take the perspective of the person who, for the first time, had no choice but to tell Moctezuma II about a previously unknown presence that just arrived along the shoreline. How does this person describe armor, horses, or the foreignness of their language? What words do you use? Did their voice hesitate? Did they stutter?
I am also taking this perspective because so much of our collective understanding of indigenous populations is incorrect. What has been presented to us is largely a fabrication—a presentation of a monolith population, somehow idyllic, unchanging, primitive, without culture. That understanding is wrong. This is an attempt, a modest attempt, to help de-center those narratives.
This story is called Invisible Pueblos.