There are many gaps in the historical record surrounding the nearly two years between Cortés’s first entry into Tenochtitlan and the city’s fall to Spanish forces in August of 1521. Author Álvaro Enrigue, in his acknowledgments, cites “the standard sources” (222), including Cortés’s own 1520 letter to King Charles V and Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s A True History of the Conquest of New Spain, completed around 1568. These texts, both written by Spanish colonizers who participated in the imperial project, provide a first-hand account of the Spanish experience but are necessarily limited in their understanding of the city’s people. Enrigue also cites Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History (1590), also known as the Florentine Codex. This work is unique in that it was written in collaboration with the Nahua people of Mesoamerica, including some who had survived the fall of Tenochtitlan. In this way, the book functions as an oral history of the first encounters between Europe and Mesoamerica from an Indigenous perspective. None of these sources fully explains the enduring mystery of this historical period: How a small, heavily outnumbered contingent of Spanish soldiers managed to take the emperor of Tenochtitlan hostage, precipitating the eventual fall of the Mexica empire.