You Dreamed of Empires

You Dreamed of Empires reimagines the 1519 encounter between Hernán Cortés's expedition and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II in Tenochtitlan, compressing the meeting into a single hallucinatory day inside the emperor's palace. Rather than treating the fall of the Aztec empire as historical inevitability, Álvaro Enrigue plays with the contingency of the moment — Moctezuma is under the influence of psychoactive mushrooms, court intrigue and factional infighting swirl around him, and the Spaniards are as bewildered and vulnerable as they are dangerous.

The novel moves between registers — political satire, sensory description of Tenochtitlan's grandeur, and passages that gesture toward alternate outcomes — using anachronism and authorial intrusion to underline that this history could have gone differently. Enrigue is less interested in reconstructing what happened than in dismantling the myth of Spanish conquest as an unstoppable historical force, restoring agency and absurdity to a moment usually rendered as tragedy.

Translated by Natasha Wimmer, the novel won Spain's Premio Herralde and was widely praised for its formal inventiveness and its refusal to romanticize either side of the encounter.