[Aztlan] Re DVD "The Other Conquest"

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Kier Salmon sent the following note to the Nahuatl email list,
has given permission to forward it also to the Aztlan list,
and can receive any personal replies at
k_salmon at ipinc.net.

Best wishes
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics

***

 I also got it from Amazon and had never heard it before.  I viewed it 
with the subtitles off, since I'd like to learn to "hear" nahuatl as I 
begin to learn it.  I find myself envying my friends who buy CDs of 
different languages and pop them into the player on their car.  They 
don't utilize them well!  As a fully bilingual person with smatterings 
of three other languages; there's a way to use them to get the best 
use out of them!  I want those CDs in Nahuatl.
I wish I had a script of the movie so I could listen to the nahuatl 
and see the nahuatl (in roman characters, albeit) as they speak.
As for the movie, I've been doing a lot of studying of stuff published 
on Cortés and the aftermath of the destruction of Tenochtitlan and I 
have to say that the historical inaccuracies sort of grabbed me by the 
neck.  In particular, Tecuichpo/Doña Isabel's role in the movie was a-
historical to the nth degree.  As I remember my studies, her rape by 
Cortes happened in his house while Malina was still present; she was 
never an interpreter for him, by that time he spoke that language well 
enough and he used her as a prize for his upper class followers (three 
of them, I believe?)  The scene where she embraces her unborn child 
and tells HC that it is "her" child certainly doesn't square with the 
known facts... she bore the babe, refused to see it, and in her will 
that was the only child of her body never mentioned.
Cortés "giving" her the name of "Doña Isabel" in the middle of what 
was essentially a trial is ridiculous.  The naming thing happened 
during baptism.
Still, it's better than a lot of films I've seen trying to depict the 
amerind.  I couldn't bring myself to watch "Apocalypto."  THe reviews 
on the religious implications bothered me.
The "easy" interpretation of christian theology was wrong as well.  
Many of the concepts did not exist in nahuatl (grace? salvation? etc) 
and it was many years before the indio population had grown up with 
those concepts that they could be talked of easily.

On Dec 11, 2007, at 8:33 AM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote:
[snip]


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