In many historical narratives, the Spanish conquest of the Mexica Empire is portrayed as an inevitability, a predetermined clash between a technologically superior European power and a declining Indigenous civilization. Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires systematically dismantles this sense of inevitability. In the novel, the initial encounter between Cortés’s expedition and the Mexica is a moment of profound uncertainty, shaped by miscalculation on both sides, individual psychology, and pure chance. Unlike the counterfactual events that occur later in the novel, this account hews closer to the conventions of historical fiction, inventing details without contradicting any of the known facts. By showing how easily Cortés and his whole expedition could have been killed at the outset, Enrigue makes clear that the eventual fall of Tenochtitlan was by no means a foregone conclusion. By immersing the reader in the paranoid thoughts, cultural misunderstandings, and hallucinatory states of its key figures, the book argues that historical outcomes are fragile, contingent constructions, not the fulfillment of destiny. The very structure of the narrative, which culminates in a counterfactual ending, posits that the world we know is just one of many possibilities that might have been.

The novel undermines historical certainty by emphasizing altered states of consciousness, allowing the characters to move between real and imagined worlds until the line between reality and imagination becomes impossible to pin down. Even when the Spanish are not under the influence of hallucinogens (though they almost always are, as most of the foods they encounter are at least mildly hallucinogenic), the Mexica world is so different from Europe that it appears as a dream. For Jazmín Caldera, dressed as a Colhua and wandering alone through the imperial city, Tenochtitlan is the closest the real world has come to realizing the Renaissance dream of perfect, harmonious design as an expression of spirit. For his less-discerning compatriots, it often appears as a nightmare or a religious vision of hell. When reality itself seems impossible, it is easy to imagine that things could have been otherwise, paving the way for the novel’s counterfactual ending, in which historical reality is portrayed as a dream while the fictional dream of a Mexica victory becomes reality.

Emperor Moctezuma relies on “magic mushrooms” (13) to guide his actions, a habit that worries even his own closest advisors. Atotoxtli, arguably his most trusted confidant, is continually pleading with him to cut back on hallucinogens, worried that he is losing his grip on reality. His decisions are filtered through a haze of esoteric visions and personal melancholy, rendering his behavior unpredictable to his own court and to the arriving Spaniards. However, the riddle of the ant threaded throughout the narrative foreshadows Moctezuma’s ultimate vindication. Though he appears withdrawn and diminished, the novel’s ending reveals that, like the ant, he “always shows the way” (219). Since the most potent hallucinogen in the Mexica world—the formidable “cactus-of-tongues”—is the instrument of his victory, it becomes clear that Moctezuma was right to trust in these substances. Far from being deluded or misled by his hallucinations, he emerges as a master of the overlap between alternate possible worlds.

This element of radical uncertainty is mirrored in Hernán Cortés’s experience. After consuming the cactus-of-tongues, he hallucinates a rapid, surreal montage of the actual, historical timeline of the conquest and its aftermath. By framing recorded history as a drug-induced vision, the novel highlights the contingency of history. After fast-forwarding through 500 years of history, the vision ends with a metafictional address to the novel’s reader: “another hundred years and this book and you reading it and it was then that Cortés woke up” (217). By placing the reader within the hallucination, Enrigue suggests that the world we know as real is just one of many equally possible worlds.

The novel counters the myth of the confident, destined conquerors by dwelling on the Spaniards’ acute sense of their own fragility. Through the eyes of Captain Jazmín Caldera, the expedition is revealed to be a precarious gamble. During the opening lunch with Princess Atotoxtli, Caldera is nearly paralyzed by the realization that in the eyes of the Mexica court, he and his comrades are merely “provincials, nobodies, hicks” (6). Cortés repeatedly fails to grasp the rigid protocols of the court, most notably when he attempts to hug the emperor and later tries to sit on the sacred throne of Acamapichtli. These missteps expose the Spaniards’ ignorance and undermine their claims to authority, highlighting just how easily their mission could have been terminated.

Ultimately, the novel’s most direct challenge to historical determinism is its subversive ending. By concluding with an alternate history, Enrigue makes his central argument clear: The conquest was not preordained. It was a chaotic, uncertain affair that could have tipped in any direction, decided by the anxieties, visions, and choices of flawed individuals in a moment of extraordinary contingency.