so to disambiguate a little, let’s separate 1) the Aztecs (a political alliance of cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan), 2) the Mexica (the group that ruled Tenochtitlan as the pre-eminent party in the alliance), 3) the Nahuas, speakers of groups of related languages that lived in and around the Valley of Mexico which included the Aztecs, and 4) other, non-Nahuatl speaking people that were allied with the Spanish. After the Totonacs (4) submitted to Cortez in Veracruz, they formed auxiliary forces to the Spanish and helped in turn submit the Tlaxcallans (3), a rival polity to the Triple Alliance that still spoke the same language.

the Tlaxcallans were historically enemies of the Aztecs, and provided the bulk of the fighting force for besieging Tenochtitlan. some of the junior Triple Alliance cities were also split on their alliances - if I remember correctly the Culhuas sided with Cortez eventually. from the indigenous perspectives, the Spanish were a powerful ally for resolving domestic political concerns.

for several decades after the conquest, these same political actors were operating in their traditional roles with a new layer of Spanish hierarchy on top, managing their communities and leveraging rights as nobles or traditional land claims (there is s rich history of nahuatl court cases litigating deeds!), with an argument to be made that the severe consequences of smallpox on the indigenous population were more profound than a new foreign class of rulers - after all, for many of them, the Mexica (1) had also occupied that position

the Conquest of course didn’t stop with Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), and Náhuatl speaking troops traveled under other conquistadors, such as Pedro de Alvarado and Nuño de Guzman. these troops importantly served as logistical coordinators, diplomats, and guides in addition to infantry, and this is why we get Nahuatl names for areas far outside their area of influence at the conquest - both Guatemala and Michoacan, for example, are areas that were named in a language that their ruling class and population didn’t really speak because of this

as the decades move into the late 16th and early 17th century, many of the noble prerogatives that indigenous descendants claimed were actually eroded by similar processes to those that were happening in Europe - taxation, enclosure, confiscation - which separated the title from the land and assets that formed their wealth base.

there’s a lot to be said generally about the attrition of long term institutional prejudice, the racial hierarchy of the caste system, and the systematic abuses of the population as a labor pool, but i wanted to highlight this lesser known slice of administrative history as a window into the fact that the Spanish initially didn’t have the population or expertise to run the Empire they’d conquered, and that in the immediate aftermath of conquest the inevitability of Hispanic assimilation of the political structure wasn’t necessarily a given

Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, Oxford University Press 2003

Camila Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Oxford University Press 2019