Native America

(mysterious music) -

Narrator

This is ground zero of the European Invasion, a catholic church built on the ruins, of an Aztec temple in Mexico City. (mysterious music) Davd Carrasco, a Mexican-American historian of religion, at Harvard Divinity School, is on the very spot where in 1521, Spanish Conquistadors slaughtered 40,000 native warriors, and the last Aztec emperor surrenders. It is the end of nearly a century of Aztec rule. The Spanish force Aztec workers to destroy their own temple, and with it's stones construct the church in its place.

-

Carrasco

Spaniards knew that the site itself was sacred, and therefore they wanted to build their church, on the same site. -

Narrator

This church marks the military defeat, of the Aztecs, but it is also the place, where the battle for people souls begins. -

Carrasco

When the Spaniards came to Mexico, what they really wanted was spiritual conquest. They want to get inside of the Aztec mind, and replace their own way of thinking, with the Spanish European-Catholic way of thinking. -

Narrator

Yet today these dancers, and millions of Mexicans celebrate, the clash and fusion of these two cultures. Aztec beliefs do survive, and the fight to keep them alive starts here, with powerful, symbolic acts of resistance. Builders take a stone with the face of an Aztec god, from their temple and embed it into the church. -

Carrasco

The masons who constructed the church, re-utilized Aztec stones, in the very foundation and walls, as a way of saying, yes we may be becoming Christians, but we are Christians of another sort, and we still believe in and worship Old Gods.