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- [00:01]
A
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely all also the Tudors. When many of us picture the so called New World in the Age of Exploration, we tend to think of conquistadors and caravels, gold and silver, or maybe dramatic encounters between Spanish invaders and indigenous emperors. What we don't usually imagine are the women whose lives underpin these empires, grinding maize at dawn, negotiating marriages at court, or standing in colonial courtrooms to defend their children's inheritance. Yet from the very beginning, the societies that emerged in the Americas were profoundly shaped by women, whose names have often slipped out of the historical record if they were ever there in the first place. In the great cities of Mesoamerica, women were central to family life, religion and the economy. With the arrival of the Spanish, everything changed, and yet in other ways much remained stubbornly continuous. Christian marriage, Spanish law and colonial hierarchies sought to confine women, even as some of them learned to use these new rules and institutions to their advantage. The difficulty is that their stories come to us in fragments. A line in a Spanish chronicle, a terse legal petition, a name from a land dispute. Historians have to read between the lines of documents written, of course, mostly by men, often in languages that are foreign to them for purposes that rarely included recording women's lives. That's where historical fiction can play a powerful role, using careful research to imagine voices and experiences that the archives only hint at, and to restore complexity and feeling to women who have stood in the shadows of the Conquest narrative. Joining me today to explore these colonial women of the New World is Sofia Robleda, whose novel the Other Moctezuma Girls recenters indigenous noblewomen in the story of the Spanish Conquest and its aftermath, blending scholarship and storytelling to ask what it meant to survive, adapt and endure in a world remade by empire. I'M Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the tutors from History Hoot. Sophia, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just so mesmerized. I don't even know what to say. You're so good. I'm just like, wow, that's so nice. Thank you for having me.
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A
It's an absolute delight. It's really wonderful to think about this part of the colonial experience, part of the pre colonial experience that is so often obscured. Can you give us an idea of what life was like for ordinary women in Mesoamerica before the conquest? What were the sort of roles they had? What expectations did they have put on their lives?
- [03:53]
B
Yeah, so in many ways it wasn't that dissimilar to, I guess, the, you know, European kind of roles where women, you know, were generally expected to look after the home, do domestic labor, clean, cook, look after the children and pray. There was singing. They were expected very much to be busy, you know, especially the kind of. In the Mexica societies of central Mexico, so the Nahuatl speaking kind of areas, and then the Mayas as well, they were very busy and, you know, kind of being idle was considered a very, very bad thing. So everyone was constantly working. Lower class women were, you know, involved in agriculture. So they would plant seeds during the harvest and work in the fields and, you know, often work in the markets. In the Mexica societies, you know, in Tonochtitlan, they were expected to be kind of very moderate, very in the background, docile, peaceful, chaste. So, you know, it's not like a huge discrepancy between what we kind of maybe saw in Europe versus in Mesoamerica. And yeah, there were lots of, like, weaving, spinning, embroidering. Those are huge, huge aspects of life. And that was the women's domain as well. Yeah.
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A
So, you know, what would a typical day look like? I mean, this is all very general. A typical day for a typical woman. Was there ever such a thing? But, you know, do we have a kind of sense of what that might be?
- [05:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, you would expect the women to be up, you know, super early, doing domestic things, taking care of production of textiles, for example. That was a huge part of the economy. And that was weaving. They were making clothes, they were spinning. They would also be, you know, grinding maze for hours and hours, making tortillas, preparing food, sweeping. So, like, sweeping, for example, in the Mexico societies was of huge importance, and it was even related to war. So, like, if the men went off to war, the women had to sweep almost constantly. And if, like, if the men failed in battle, the women were often blamed for not having swept, you know, diligently enough to kind of bring them home. So it was like a way of keeping order, a way of keeping balance. Some women might have additional roles. For example, if they were part of their family, like healers or midwives. If it was an artisan family and the women were supporting the men, they might be artists. Some women were soothsayers. So they might, you know, be making predictions, be naming babies that were born and making predictions about, you know, who they might be in the future. But, you know, it was very domestic and very, very busy. Yeah.
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A
And the implicit message from what you've said is that this was rather different from expectations of men.
- [06:35]
B
Oh, absolutely. The men were very much in charge of the political, military, religious endeavors and power. Both men and women were involved in agricultural production, the lower class kind of men and women. But men would be involved in hunting and fishing. And everyone was kind of expected to be well controlled, to be active, to be engaged. But it was a patriarchal world and the men were the rulers, the men were on top.
- [07:00]
A
What about religion? Did women play a role in the sort of pre conquest religions?
- [07:06]
B
There were some minor roles. There is evidence of female priests and women did take part in religious festivals. There would always be a shrine in the home and the women were expected to keep it, to be praying, to be lighting incense, to be making offerings to the gods. Women were of course, often taken into sacrifice, be sacrificed to kind of appease the gods. And, you know, for example, there's lots of innocent notes of the Mayan world. So that's in Yucatan Peninsula where you find these fresh water reserves underwater. Those were kind of the links to the underworld. And women were often thrown in with, you know, gold and jade and so to kind of precious stones to appease the gods. Men were also sacrificed. But, you know, if it was a kind of particularly, like, beautiful woman, you know, she might not fare so well. Females were also, you know, soothsayers, like I said, and they might be involved in that kind of aspect of kind of daily religious predictions, but the big power players were the men.
- [08:05]
A
Is there a distinction, though, to make between Mesoamerican ideas of gender and those of the Spanish? I mean, I mean, actually in Spain at the time, for example, women could inherit. Is that the case in Mesoamerica?
- [08:21]
B
Yeah, I think there are some examples of women inheriting, for example, as Isabel Moctezuma. But it's tricky. Women were Kind of like the inheritors of the lineage. So they would play a role in terms of, you know, if there was a king, they would, you know, want a certain lineage. They might pick a woman and because of her lineage, in terms of like property, I think there are examples of women owning property or women owning businesses or in their names. But in terms of like big power, there, there are women actually in kind of like the year 680 in the Mayan world who have been shown to have been like women warriors and women queens. There were some kind of hieroglyphs and in the ancient Mayan world of these queens who had taken the role of warriors and conquerors. There are examples, you know, over the millennia of women obviously having taken certain roles of power, but it wasn't that common. And yeah, by the time the Spanish came, you know, was very much. Women are, you know, in the level of kind of being given as tribute and as gifts. Which is what happened, you know, when Cortez arrived and he was given women all over the place as part of his tribute, his gifts to welcome him.
- [09:37]
A
So I suppose what you're suggesting is that for certain noble women, for certain women at the top of society, and you've reminded us of course that quite a lot of the time we're looking at a really broad sweep of time when we're thinking about the evidence, but that there is the potential for more power and influence. I mean, you've mentioned Isabel Moctezuma and we'll come back to think about her a bit more. The Aztec Princess, another character who people might be familiar with. They probably know her by this, the Spanish Quarter. Donna Marina Malitzine, as we now call her, the enslaved interpreter of Hernan Cortes. Does that show us kind of women's. Well, in this case, linguistic, cultural knowledge agency. Yes, how they're operating, really.
- [10:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, obviously women needed to make their lives work. I mean we're always at the background in some way, you know, running things. Maybe they weren't kind of given credit, but Malinche Malincin, she, Dona Marina, all the, all the various things that she, that she had, you know, she was a 17 or 18 year old girl who was sold as a slave from the kind of nao tongue speaking world. She then learned Maya because she was, I think she was given as a slave to the Maya. And when Hernan Cortes arrived, she was one of the prizes given to him. And so she used, obviously she used her skills and language, her facility and language to place herself in a position of more power, even Though she was enslaved, there was like this triangle of translation that was going on where Hernan Cortez had a shipwrecked Spaniard who had been shipwrecked in Yucatan. So he'd learned Yucatec Maya. And then, so Hernan Cortes would speak to him in Castilian, he would speak to Malinche in Yucatec Maya. She would speak in Nahuatlan until she herself learned Castilian. And then she made that man, Ronimo y Aguilar. She made him redundant, basically. And she also understood the power dynamics of what was going on at the time in the Mexica Empire, which was that, you know, many, many people under the Moctezuma emperor, Moctezuma, were unhappy. They didn't want to be part of the empire. There were deep resentments. And so she explained this to Cortez, and he, you know, to the point where Cortez said that Malinche was second only to God in importance of the Spanish conquest, of being successful in the Spanish conquest. That's how much he needed her. And she used these skills that she had to, at the end, become a free noblewoman. And then she was, you know, raised to the status of the Spanish nobility when the Spanish were successful. And so, you know, this was not a united, you know, world where everyone liked each other. This was like going into France and you've got the kind of English that were in Calais. Was it Calais, and someone coming into Calais and saying, well, some people in Calais don't want to be part of England, they want to be part of France. And so you use those deep resentments to kind of play people off each other. And that's what Malinche was able to do. And she spoke. She spoke the highest level of Nahuatl as well. There was kind of like a high level of Nahuatl for the nobility and a low level of Nahuatl. So. So she was, you know, she just was amazing in what she did. But obviously, people have called her in Mexico that she's been blamed for the Spanish conquest since then, and her name, you know, even to call someone a Malinchista in Mexico is to call them a traitor of your country. But that was no country. So, you know, I guess the Spanish arrived to this place where many of the systems, the stratification of society, was very similar to Europe. There was obviously huge cultural differences and language differences and religious differences, but, you know, there was stratification. There was an upper class, a lower class, a slave class. There was women in the background. So, you know, they were unfortunately, able to fit in quite well and place themselves at the top. But some people made the best of it, and that's all they could do is make the best of a bad situation.
- [13:27]
A
Don't you love that? Blame the enslaved woman for the Spanish conquest.
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B
Blame the enslaved teenager.
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A
Teenager even.
- [13:34]
B
Yeah, yeah. The poor girl, she had no say. She had no. Absolutely no say. So she had to make some difficult choices.
- [13:41]
A
We've talked quite confidently about the sort of situation for women so far, but perhaps we ought to address the elephant in the room, the obstacles that exist for historians when they're trying to reconstruct these women's experiences. What are the source problems when we're trying to get at this information?
- [14:00]
B
Well, I mean, obviously most scribes and most people who were leaving documents were men. You know, they not very interested in women. They're just kind of like, okay, well, they're there. So we're not really going to leave much about. About them in our. In our documents. I mean, the good thing is that many Mesoamerican societies did keep good records. You know, the Maya kept, like, hieroglyphs. They were prolific in writing their histories and myths and in a Mata paper and Stella, you know, and even though many, many thousands of books were destroyed by the Spanish, there's not that many codices left because of the destruction that they endured after the Spanish conquest quest. There are lots of. Still lots of records. The Aztecs also wrote lots of goddesses with pictographs and deer skin in bark. They kept, you know, track of tribute flowing into the empire. They kept track of natural disasters, of political changes, of conquests, but obviously not much on the role of women. Later on. It was a Spanish friar, Sahagun, and he. He got together with lots of Nahua elders and wrote the Florentine Codex. But obviously this is also a bend, like with a Spanish angle. We don't know how much they were holding back or everything's being interpreted through a Christian lens. And then later on kind of academic research and archeology and history, it's been traditionally kept in the spheres of men, with a focus on the roles of men and with a focus on European sources or archeology. And it wasn't kind of until very recently that even researchers started to think of actually, maybe it might benefit us to learn Nahuatl so that we can look at these Nahuatl sources because they wrote. They actually, when they learned the Latin Alphabet, many of them started writing in Latin script in Nahuatl, kind of looking back and putting down their kind of oral stories. So there are loads and loads of sources. It's just about taking the time and the care to learn the language to see these sources as helpful potentially and start to dig into those with a gendered focus, I suppose, with like, actually look for the women in these documents.
- [16:13]
A
And I suppose it's also, as ever, when searching for women, a case of reading against the grain, using, you know, indirect evidence to fill in some of those gaps and kind of infer women's roles.
- [16:24]
B
Exactly. So, okay, these men were gone. Who's there? Who. They're going off to war. Who's managing. Who's managing the situation here? Well, you know, it's the women, aren't they? So, you know, now we kind of in the last few decades, like, we've got researchers like in Mexico, like Marian Lopez Hernandez. She's. She's really focused on the role of pre Hispanic Mexica women. And you know, there's like Camilla Townsend, she wrote a book called Fifth Son, and she kind of wrote down the history of the Aztecs written by the Aztecs. And that's a wonderful book. So, you know, it's just kind of like changing the focus that we've always had and looking at these sources with a fresh lens and with it maybe kind of looking like you say, for the gaps and like inferring, well, who's doing all of this stuff if the men are not there or. Yeah.
- [17:11]
A
How did the Spanish treat indigenous women when they arrived in the 16th century?
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B
Very poorly. I mean, there's a point after the Spanish conquest, for example, where Hernando Cortes was back in Spain. And so this conquistador called Muno de Guzman was kind of at the top of power. That was before the viceroy was appointed by Emperor Charles V. So obviously after the Spanish conquest, there was a huge time of upheaval. But there was at one point where now Cortez left to go back to Spain and Ninho de Guzman was at the top of the pyramid there. And, you know, there were men that kept dozens multiple women just kind of as sex toys. There's like evidence where people right now is like, why would you have one woman when you can have three? And why would you have three women when you can have nine? So, you know, these were kind of just coming in and like, let's, let's ravage. Let's, you know, it's a boon. It's a boon. These were, you know, fortune seekers and they were seeking any kind of fortune that they could get, including women. So unfortunately, women, you Know, they suffered a lot. They suffered a lot under the Spanish. And there were a few Spanish women that came with the conquistadors from Spain. And later on, obviously, more women came, and there was kind of like the second conquest of where women were kind of trying to bring in some sort of very, very racially tinged civilization, you know, and I do quote unquote with my fingers because we're talking about societies that were extremely, extremely well organized. They were incredibly well developed. Like, when the Spanish came and they saw Tenochtitlan, they couldn't believe their eyes. It was a planned city. It was beautiful. They had, you know, it was a city on the lake. It was like the hanging gardens of Babylon, but the floating gardens of Babylon, you know, so we're not talking about some random village where maybe there isn't any order. This is extremely orderly civilizations that had been there for millennia. So they don't. They didn't need to be civilized. But, you know, people were coming in to just get everything that they could get. And so that was what, I guess, women had to endure.
- [19:38]
A
I know that the Spanish were there in large part to impose Christianity on the indigenous population. Was there a sense that they were trying to enforce for women religious, cultural and social norms? And what were they?
- [19:53]
B
I think, you know, that the Spanish took a very moderate approach in some ways to imposing religion. You know, they had kind of had the Spanish Inquisition in Spain for quite a while. But when, for example, Cristobal Colon, Christopher Columbus, arrived and they finally found out that it was a New World quote, unquote, Isabella of Castile said, you know, these are my subjects. I want them to be treated as my subjects. And there was a whole kind of dialogue going on about human rights, how they needed to kind of treat the indigenous people. And in Spain, obviously, the application of all of these conversations, the Council of the Indies, this is what it eventually started being called, the Council of Indies, that were debating what laws to apply so that the people of the New World could be respected and not enslaved unnecessarily. So they took that approach with religion as well. They kind of said, okay, well, we know that these people have been, you know, practicing these kinds of religious beliefs for thousands of years. And it's not like the Moors or the Jews who have been in Spain for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they know what Christianity is. They know where it comes from. These people have no idea. So we're going to kind of try and do it in a way that is maybe a little bit not too violent. And, like, I Say that the actual practical applications of this dialogue was a bit different, but the monks would kind of try to understand what religious beliefs there were and how we can kind of meld them together. So I would say, for example, there was the Virgin of Guadalupe. She's the patron saint of Mexico. She's, you know, huge. We're hugely devoted to her in Mexico. And she kind of appeared in, like, 1531 and to this indigenous man called Juan Diego and this place called the hill of Tepeyac, where traditionally, the goddess Guatluque and other Aztec goddesses had been venerated for millennia. So there was kind of a. How do we kind of mix a little bit of the religious beliefs that already exist? And, you know, it's interesting that the patron saint of Mexico became a woman and, like, the Virgin Mary. And so it was kind of like, let's kind of keep this idol, I suppose, alive in this place where they were already practicing praying to this female God. So it was more kind of like, in a way, kind of like what the Romans did. They kind of looked at what the pagans were already doing, and then, you know, then the Christians did the same with the pagan beliefs. And then it just kind of like becomes this mixture of things. In terms of women, there were a lot of kind of like, the noble women were then also used the marriage to wed them to kind of conquistadors, and they're kind of like, support the plight of the Spanish in kind of the lords of the land. So it was more like, okay, let's marry into the nobility. Let's bring the women into these religious roles, into these marriage roles, and then they can be used as kind of the example for everyone else to follow. So that was kind of what happened with some of the women that they were then kind of used as, look, here's Malinche. Here is Isabel Moctezuma. They're hispanicized, but they're indigenous. And this is what everyone else is need to kind of be doing.
- [23:08]
A
Well, let's talk about Isabela Moctezuma then. Who was she, and why did you feel compelled to write a novel about her and her daughter?
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B
So Isabel Moctezuma, she was born to Kwiczpoch. She was the most important daughter of emperor Moctezuma Shakoyotsin. So he was the emperor, the weightlatuany of the Mexica of the Aztecs when Enantes arrived in, like, 1518.
- [23:34]
A
So Tekuc Podzin is her birth name, Is that what you're saying?
- [23:38]
B
Yeah.
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A
I don't know if I pronounced that correctly.
- [23:40]
B
Yes. Tekwicz Poc is her birth name. Tekwicz Pocin. It's like the diminutive. When you had seen at the end of a name, it's like, denoting care and affection for someone. So a lot of the times you will see kind of two types of names in Nahuatl, and the sin is just like a way of showing respect, showing care.
- [24:00]
A
How lovely it is.
- [24:01]
B
Beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. And so the Guidicpoch, she. Yeah, that was her. That was her birth name, her Naruto name. That's what she was known as. And she was baptized when she was given as a prize. She was given a prize to Hernan Cortez in a very young age. She was, I think, like 12 or 11. And she was then baptized as Isabel Moctezuma in honor of Isabelle the Catholic. Yes. So, yes, this woman, you know, she. To be honest, I hadn't heard about her until I had started writing my first novel. And as I was researching that book, I came across just like, a little paragraph on her, you know, the fact that she had left behind a will at the time of her death where she had freed all her slaves. And I was like, what do you mean? This is Montezuma's daughter. Obviously, every Mexican knows who Moctezuma is. And I was like. Then I found out she was married to Cuautemak, who was the last Aztec emperor, and he defended Tenochtitlan against Hernan Cortez in the siege. Once the Spanish came back to kind of lay siege to Tenochtitlan. And I was just astounded that I didn't know about her, that I didn't know that she had been married to Cuauhtemoc and then had been married another five times to other Mexica men and Spanish conquistadores. And she had a child with Cortez. And I was just flabbergasted like, that. I did not know that I'd never been taught about her, that she'd never been mentioned in any of the history that I'd kind of read or been taught as a child growing up. And she just kind of stayed with me for a really, really long time as I was kind of writing my first novel and then getting that published. And then I just couldn't get it out of my mind. So I started doing a bit more research on her.
- [25:44]
A
And.
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B
And unfortunately, there isn't much. There isn't, like, a biography on her. There's not, you know, there's maybe a couple of chapters here and there in different books or just a few research articles, but nothing much is known about her except, you know, that she was married six times and that she survived the Spanish conquest. She survived the smallpox epidemic that, you know, decimated 90% of the indigenous population. But her last will and testament was to kind of free thousands of people. And that, to me, was such so powerful. She also sued the Spanish Crown and gained back a lot of her lands. And so, you know, this was a woman that did everything. The most horrible things that you could possibly imagine happened to her, and she survived them and then kind of continued going and continued fighting and, you know, resisted. And her last kind of act was to free people. So I thought that was such a powerful thing. And I just had to write a book about her because it was just too. I just want everyone to know about her, really. She's just too incredible to me to not be known.
- [26:46]
A
And we call her Isabel, as you said, because she converted to Christianity. So how common was that and how much choice do you think that she had?
- [26:55]
B
I don't think she had any choice. She probably didn't even know what was going on when she was baptized. And, you know, she didn't.
- [27:01]
A
She.
- [27:01]
B
It was very unlikely that she even spoke Castilia. And she was probably just standing there being kind of sprinkled with holy water. And, you know, it's possible that there was some translation. This is what I imagine someone would have translated that someone possibly was Malinche. She would have said, your new name is this. And then slowly, she would have learned a bit of Castilian and been taught a bit about, you know, this. This new God that she now had to kind of at least look like she believed in. But I don't think that people really understood what was going on. And I don't think she had any choice or say. She just had to really kind of do her best to keep going. And if it meant pretending to pray and crossing. Crossing herself and just kind of looking around and seeing what else anyone was doing and just copying that, I imagine she would have done it because it was that or, you know, she was. She was the most important woman of her generation. So she had to at least look like she knew what she was doing.
- [27:58]
A
So she didn't have much agency in that. But do you think you can detect agency in. Elsewhere in her life?
- [28:05]
B
I think so, because, I mean, her last two husbands were very proactive in supporting her right to her lands or her ancestral lands. I don't think there Would obviously, there would have been selfish reasons for them to do it. You know, if they had children with her, they would have inherited their mother's lands. But the land was in her name. It was her right to own these lands. So I think there is definitely part of her that would have encouraged her husbands to go and speak on her behalf. She wouldn't. I don't think in the Spanish system of law, I might be wrong, but I don't think that she was able to go by herself to kind of speak for herself alone. But, you know, she would have encouraged her husbands to go and fight for her, which they did. They spent decades and decades in accord. And the other thing that I find quite interesting about what she did was she left a lot of money for her children, especially her two daughters, so that they could join a convent. So her two youngest daughters and did end up in a convent. And that was interesting to me that this is the choice that she would have put forward for them. I mean, it would have been, I think, mostly her decision. And I think it speaks volumes that she didn't want her two daughters to enter into marriage when she herself had experienced six marriages. And I think there is some evidence that she said, no, I don't want my daughters to be married. I want them to be left alone. And so I think she did wield influence within some of the men that she married and through them, exerted some of her will. And it just. I think it does speak volumes that she. That she did free all of these people because those were her slaves and she emancipated them, you know, and that was like part of her executor's. That was her say. So I think it says a lot that she didn't want people to kind of continue to be enslaved and that she didn't want her daughters essentially to be property.
- [30:00]
A
I mean, I'm going to have to play the devil's advocate here and say she does this on her deathbed. So she's benefited from the labor of
- [30:07]
B
these enslaved people a hundred percent. Yeah. One hundred percent. So, you know.
- [30:11]
A
Yeah.
- [30:12]
B
Why didn't she do it earlier? Yeah. Why. Why did she keep them all the way to the end? That is a question that I kind of consider in the book that I ask, you know, and I kind of explore where she might have kind of come. Come forth to this conclusion. But, yeah, she did. Absolutely. She did benefit from their labor. It was a very cultural thing, though. Like, it was something that she would have experienced her whole life. She would have had Slaves her entire life. So I do think that there is a.
- [30:38]
A
Yes. We can't blame people for not thinking outside their particular historical era. That's true.
- [30:42]
B
It's hard to say. Obviously, it was someone that lived 500 years ago, but they could have chosen not to. They could have chosen just to keep them for their children and keep that labor for their children, but they didn't. So, anyway, it's hard. It's hard to say because obviously there isn't much. She was known to be illiterate. So, you know, this is part of what we hear from other people.
- [31:02]
A
Yes, and that absolutely is the heart of the problem, isn't it? When we're trying to find women in history, if they were illiterate, then they're obviously not keeping sources that we, centuries later can access to find out about them. How important is it for you to maintain standards of historical accuracy? Or do you feel that the latitude, the prerogative of a historical novelist is that that is not necessary?
- [31:49]
B
I myself feel like it's important to know as much as you can about the period and kind of find a puzzle that. Find the pieces of the puzzle that you can find and then fill in the blanks with the pieces that you can't find with your own imagination and, you know, obviously taking into account that the story needs to be interesting enough for people to read and compelling. But obviously it's hard because there's a time limit. Sometimes you could. And years. And I did spend years and years trying to find as much information as I could. But in my own viewpoint, I do think that you need to try and keep the historical facts as accurate as you can and then kind of, yeah, like, take. Take the fictional liberties in the places where there's a blank. And I think it makes it maybe a bit richer in that way. You know, I think if you're writing a historical fantasy, then by all means, you know, if you've got magic, and to be fair, I've got, you know, magical realism in my book at times, and I've got myths and I've got other things, but these are kind of part like cultural reflections of our culture and our. And how we live our lives in Mexico. But if you're writing maybe a historical fantasy, maybe you can take a bit more of a loose approach. But I think if you're writing historical fiction, then you, you know, you should try. You should try to keep the facts there if you can, because I do think it's. It's. It adds that much more authenticity. And I personally like like, when I read something in a book, I'm like, oh, my God, this actually happened. Sometimes, like, truth is stranger than fiction.
- [33:30]
A
Absolutely. I mean, just you're. You're singing my song right now.
- [33:34]
B
I agree.
- [33:35]
A
What have you worked on since this novel came out? What direction has this taken you? Has it changed your approach to your work?
- [33:45]
B
Well, I mean, at the moment, I think I'm kind of following on this. There's, like I said before, Isabel Muktuzuma, she had a child with her nun, Cortez. And I was really quite shocked that I didn't know that and that there's, like, this direct lineage to this day, because they're still descendants of Isabelle Moktuma living today.
- [34:09]
A
Amazing.
- [34:09]
B
It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. And so I was really captivated by this daughter that she had with Hernan Cortez, legitimate daughter that she had with Hernan Cortez. And I've been kind of looking into her life a bit more. You know, she's quite interesting as well. She married Joannes de Tolosa, who discovered the mines of Zacateca, the silver mines that then basically fed the entire Spanish empire. So she, you know, she was this noble girl that then moved into this, like, frontier town, this, you know, like, wild west type place. And, you know, she just had to make do with this man who was 20 years older than her. And so also, not much is known about her, but I'm very interested in kind of doing a bit more research on her and kind of discovering a bit more about her. My approach at the moment, I do think, like, this is an area of history that isn't really well known. And in fiction, for example, you know, obviously we have lots of books about the Tudors, lots of books about the Medici and the Fascinating. And I want to kind of have a bit of a similar thing going on for Mexico and, you know, because we also have the same. You know, obviously it's not just the tutors like this, like, this beautiful podcast. There's people that I'm sure would be interested in kind of knowing about the noble lives and of people that lived in. In those times in Mexico. So that's kind of where I'm going. I'm taking, like, a Filippo Gregory approach to Mexico and, you know, continuing with discovering more about the women that lived there that were maybe in these, maybe houses of power and just how they managed all the. All the constraints that they had. So that's kind of my approach at the moment.
- [35:49]
A
Well, to end, then, it feels like there's been lots of moments of surprise for you along the way. I mean, even finding out that Isabel Moctezuma lived, had six marriages, had a child with Hernan Cortes. But what has most surprised you about looking into the lives of Mesoamerican women at the time of the conquest?
- [36:10]
B
I don't know if it's surprising, but just inspiring, like just the resilience, the endurance, the practicality, and just making the best of systems that were designed to kind of suppress them. And, you know, I find it really just a powerful reminder of what women are capable of, even when we're kind of being told that we're secondary, that we're property, that we're nothing essentially, except what we're told to be. So I find that just really sad, but also important to kind of honor those women and to kind of keep their voices and bring, bring their voices out a bit more.
- [36:56]
A
Well, Sofia Robleda, thank you so much for joining me. And your novel is called the Other Moctezuma Girls. Thank you for your time.
- [37:05]
B
Thank you so much. It's been so lovely to meet you. And thank you to everyone who's listening. I hope you enjoy my book if you read it.
- [37:16]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode, But Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thanks also to my researcher, Max Wintle and my producer, Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line. And not just the tutors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.