Mexcio City, founded on top of the ruins of the Aztec capital which the Spanish conquistadors dumped into the lake, became one cultural center of Spanish American dominion (Lima served as the other). Except for a few codices, the libraries of the Aztecs and the Mayans—when they were found— fueled huge bonfires conducted by the Spanish Inquisition. Any information that survived in oral or parchment form, therefore, formed a natural resistance to the colonial overlords.

With Spanish conquest, literature began appearing in the Spanish language about the Mexican Valley. Most notably, Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican missionary, deplored the treatment of the indigenous at the hands of the Spaniards in The Devastation of the Indies. Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote a three-volume history of the conquest between 1568 and 1580. The most influential writings of the colonial period were those composed by conquistadors in letters and...