Song of the Hummingbird

An Aztec princess describes the Spanish conquest of Mexico. She is Huitzitzlin, 82, of the court of Montezuma and she tells her tale to a priest so history will know who the Aztecs really were. By the author of The Memories of Ana Calderon. Father Benito questions the forces that brought him to Huitzitzilin. She seems intent on chronicling her life. And hers is a tale that both intrigues and repels him. Distracted from his mission to confess and absolve Huitzitzilin, the priest presses her to tell her compelling story. He has heard the tales of the conquest: the accounts of atrocities, of barbarism, of despair suffered by the conquistadors in the quest for glory. Huitzitzilin speaks of the same death and destruction, but in her tale the roles are reversed. The natives are the victims. . Her words are a revelation. The priest accepts Huitzitzilin's account because she was a witness to the events he learned of only second hand. As he listens to the song of Hummingbird, the priest beings to question his firmly-held convictions. Against his will, he is imbued with unexpected empathy for Hummingbird and all the Mexica people. A novel idea take hold of his consciousness: he begins to share Huitzitzilin's nostalgia for what is irrevocably gone. From Aztec princess to slave and concubine, Hummingbird--or Huitzitziln in her native Nahuatl--recounts her life during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Expressing a confidence and freedom that women have strived for centuries to attain, Huitzitziln passionately relates her tale to Father Benito, the priest who seeks to confess and convert her, to offer her an absolution she neither needs nor wants. Instead, she forces him to see the conquest, for the first time, through the eyes of the conquered.