More than Human Sacrifice: Teaching about the Aztecs in the New Latino South

This essay details an extended lesson I created to teach about Aztec/Mexica resistance to Spanish conquest in a sixth grade classroom within the context of the New Latino South. Rather than concentrate on the familiar tropes of human sacrifice and European exploration, I centered Aztec/Mexica philosophy, arts, and resistance in order to disrupt majoritarian narratives reified in Social Studies courses. Decentering and complicating the dominant narrative about Aztec/Mexica culture is one way educators can challenge dominant, and negative, discourse about burgeoning Latinx communities. I argue that in order for schools to help remedy deficit perspectives of Latinx people, especially in newer receiver contexts like the South(east), educators must be willing to find ways to explicitly teach against such narratives.