It is not an easy matter to disentangle the motives lying back of any great enterprise such as the Spanish conquest and colonization in the Americas. The idea has been very generally held, even among historians, that the Spaniards were universally obsessed with a lust for gold, and however much or little other motives may have entered in, that this lust for gold was the motive above all others which inspired them to feats with few if any parallels in all history for courage and endurance and achievement. “Tell your master,” Cortés is reported to have said to the emissaries of Moctezuma, “that we Spaniards have a fever in our blood which can be cooled only by gold.”
The Mexican of today is proud of his Indian descent, and the heavy discount which he places on what the Spaniard has done for him is typified, for example, in the imposing statue to Cuauctemoc which was given one of the points of greatest prominence on the stately Paseo of Mexico City. One of the large bronze tablets on the base of that statue portrays Cortés and his captains putting the Aztec princes to the torture, roasting their feet to compel them to reveal their hidden treasure; and at that statue today centers the national Fiesta de la Raza.