Aztec Autumn

After the fall of Tenochtitlan, Tenamaxtli refuses to accept that Spanish victory has ended Indigenous resistance. Travelling through a country disrupted by epidemic disease, enslavement, tribute and missionary rule, he recruits survivors from communities divided by their earlier relations with the Mexica Empire. His campaign depends on secrecy, mobility and the difficult attempt to turn local grievances into a common rebellion against the colonisers.

The novel places Tenamaxtli’s fictional insurrection beside the historical Mixtón War in western New Spain. Francisco Tenamaztle, Pedro de Alvarado and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza connect the narrative to the Caxcan resistance of 1540–42 and the large colonial campaign that suppressed it. Rather than recreating the lost empire unchanged, the story follows people trying to define freedom and political identity in the first generation after conquest.