I figured out why Spanish people don’t nod back when I walk past them on the street.  In America, even timid, white, prep school kids do the raised eyebrow acknowledgement face when I nod at them.  It’s a greeting, polite, simple, noninvasive – hello.  Yet most Spaniards ignore me completely.

It’s because these people come from a long line of savages.  You wouldn’t guess it, seeing them in their ball hugging shorts and their fair, untarnished skin.  And their fast walking women with thin, tightrope noses and unwavering eyes.  But in reality, these are the softened descendants of barbarians.

For a while, the Spanish conquered everything they could get their delicate little hands on.  They mashed out the Muslim power in a 700 year long struggle and named it the Reconquista.  That wasn’t enough, so they sent a bunch of Christopher Columbus looking motherfuckers out to rape and pillage on an international scale.  They were killers.  Cold blooded, sword wielding, gold hungry goons.

Hernan Cortes got Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic next.  Turned them upside and shook the change out of their pockets.  To the Spaniards, new regions meant unapologetic genocide, human kibble, and target practice. 

Unsatisfied, Cortes sent a ship with 100 men to the mainland (Central America).  The Mayans caught the Spaniards slipping and killed seventy of them.  While the Mayans were a gruesome pack themselves, the law of the land came from a group you may have brushed over in world history - The Aztecs.  Do you think threat of an enormous Aztec Empire stopped Cortes?

Nope.  This little mustachioed Spaniard was on a mission.  In 1519, Cortes took all 11 ships, 490 men, 16 horses, and a grimy pack of attack dogs, and put his feet on what would eventually be his next conquest.

Right…490 Spaniards up against an Aztec fleet of over 200,000.   Good luck Senor Cortes.  You thought the Mayans were brutal?  The Aztecs made them look like geriatric nannies.  There were 30 million people in that region in 1519.  They all answered to, and were sacrificed by The Aztec Empire, with none other than Moctezuma II at the throne.  “The Mexica” was the original name of the Aztecs.

The Aztecs were the merciless motherfuckers who stained the pyramid steps red with blood.  Hundreds of thousands of hearts pulled from chests of young men and women of neighboring tribes.  Sacrificial appetizers for Moctezum’s psilocybin incarnated War God, Huitzilopochtli.  (I don’t know how to pronounce it either).  The arms and legs were cut from the bodies, cooked into stews, and eaten.  The heads were displayed on decorative stakes and the limbless bodies nudged down the pyramid steps for hungry animals.

If you fucked with the Aztecs, this was your fate.  And a little old Spaniard, Hernan Cortes, in his tight pants, thought he was going to defeat the superpower.

Cortes was so confident, or crazy, that he sunk all eleven of his own ships.  Win or Die.

Numbers wise, it was a suicide mission, but the Spaniards had some tricks up their sleeve.  Steel was a big one.  The Aztecs were still using wooden mallets with sharp obsidian blades.  Guns and cannons that short grapeshot (steel shrapnel) would surely help Cortes’ odds.  Still, two-hundred thousand men lined up against four-hundred and ninety doesn’t make sense.

The Spanish also had dogs which they draped in armor as well.  Sounds like something out of a video game.  The dogs of Mexico at the time were Chihuahuas, and typically a food source.  Hernan Cortes brought Mastiffs and Wolfhounds with a taste for blood. 

Horses, which had been extinct in the Aztec region for quite some time, were the kicker.  A charge of 16 armored men atop armored horses was enough to freak the Aztecs the fuck out.  The ground shaking, glares of light off iron shields, and boom sticks filled with buckshot death.

To borrow an old hiphop term, Moctezuma was shook.  They thought the horses and the men on top o them were one creature.  They’d never seen anything like it.  Instead of smothering them with man power, Moctezuma invited the newly arrived “Gods” into the city, Tenochtitlan.

Cunning Cortes accepted the God vibe, captured Moctezuma from within his own walls, and used him like a puppet to control the Aztecs.  In the power position, Cortes held the reins to the most fearsome force in the land.

Eventually, Moctezuma would be killed by his own Aztecs people, who recognized the manipulation.  Cortes and his men had to fight their way out of the city, only to return a few days later to enact one of the most esteemed massacres in history.  Tenochtitlan was under the rule of the Spanish by August of 1521.

There you have it.  In a nut shell – why the people of Spain don’t nod back at me when I pass them on the street.