Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Return to the Author's seat

Abstract

On the year 2012, the book La Crónica de la Eternidad proposed an audacious interpretation about the text that had hitherto been one of the pillars of the historiography of the conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz’s Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España. Such interpretation has presented a narrative where Díaz, Hernán Cortés’s former soldier, was merely an obscure pretender who took as his own a text that Cortés had supposedly authored in a “noneducated” writing style in an attempt to circumvent a then-existing ban on his writings. Whereas some analysts have accepted such interpretation, other scholars have strongly contested it. This article, validating Díaz authorship, shows the weak basis of La Crónica’s argument, its lack of historical accuracy, and its rhetorical character, which draws on the key strategy of dismissing and neglecting essential documentary evidence, lying thus grounds for fiction. Conversely, this article is based on the perspective of the meticulous historian who places historical evidence at the center of the analysis, examines it with rigor, and draws interpretations based on contextualization. Historical documents clearly demonstrate that Bernal Díaz actually existed. He did participate in the conquest of México. And he was fully able to -and actually wrote- the work that has been known as his for almost four centuries.