USS Cortez? Really?

I wasn't sure whether to post this in the DS9 subforum or here, but I decided to post it here because it concerns the politics of Federation and Star Trek in general.

In DS9, we found out that one of the Federation ships used in the Dominion War was called USS Cortez. If there is any doubt if this is really a reference to the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, there is also another ship called USS Malinche (mentioned in another DS9 episode ("For the Uniform"), a reference to Cortes's interpreter/sidekick/lover, Dona Marina aka La Malinche. According to Wikipedia, Hans Beimler (who grew up in Mexico) and Robert Hewitt Wolfe are in fact currently working on a movie called The Serpent and the Eagle, about La Malinche and Cortes.

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/USS_Malinche

This is really a question I'd like to ask Beimler, and other DS9 writers, but since I don't believe they come here, I'm just going to ask if anyone is aware if any of them ever commented on the matter.

Let's see... the Federation apparently chose to honor the man who lead the conquest and colonization of another civilization in order to plunder its natural resources, destroying a civilization and committing mass murders of native population (but it was allegedly for their own good because they needed to be converted from their false religion and inferior culture)...

Am I the only one who finds this - and particularly the fact that it was seen on DS9, considering the themes on this show - both strange and extremely ironic?

Too bad I can't address the question to Ira Steven Behr in particular, because I would especially like to ask him about that, given his tendency to draw comparisons between the characters on his show and real world historical figures, and his public rants that managed to be strangely misguided in their self-righteousness and deeply offensive to the portion of the fanbase. For frak's sake, the guy actually condemned anyone who liked the fictional character of Dukat in any way and pronounced the women who find him sexy as sickos who would write to serial killers or dream about Idi Amin or Pol Pot. But apparently it's perfectly OK for his show to have "good guys" honoring a very real, historical mass murderer/colonizer. So, should I ask why there weren't any Federation ships named after Idi Amin or Pol Pot?

 

Dude, there have been and will be more than one person with the name Cortez.

There's plenty of centuries between now and then for the swellest guy alive, who made peace with the Gorn and some other alien jerks and shoots flowers out of his butt to be named Cortez.

 

The OP makes some good points.

However,

I imagine that you can pick any historical name for a ship in ST and someone is gonna be offended by it. Anyone who is a hero to some is inevitably a villain to others.

 

It's one of two things, in my personal opinion: a different Cortez (certainly possible if we did not hear that the ship is the HERNANDO Cortez), or it's one of those cases where a terrestrial ship name is being carried forward out of tradition. In the latter case, I don't like it personally, but they may be carrying the name forward out of nautical tradition the way the name Enterprise carried forward.

 

Interesting question, DevilEyes. There are lots of places named Cortez. Many/most of them in the New World were presumably named for Hernando Cortez, but I doubt if everything named Cortez was. It's not that uncommon of a name. A quick Google search turns up lots of other Cortezes.

I never really thought about it, but if I had, I would have assumed that the ship was named after the Sea of Cortez or Cortez, Colorado. Admittedly both of these were probably named for Hernando Cortez, but still, naming a ship after a place isn't the same as naming it after the person. At least it isn't to me.

Call me naive, but I can't really believe Trek writers decided it would be a dandy idea to immortalize this particular Cortez. But I see from Memory Alpha that there have been quite a few USS Cortezes in Starfleet history. So I expect subsequent USS Cortezes were simply named after the first one.

 

This is true, but there should be at least a reasonable standard involved, with a little common sense. Most people are going to be able to see that the names of U.S.S. Hernan Cortez, U.S.S. Adolf Hitler, and U.S.S. Whore of Babylon are going to be more offensive to more people than the names of U.S.S. Ronald McNair, U.S.S. Mohandas Gandhi, or U.S.S. Ahura Mazda.

 

I would totally serve on the USS Whore of Babylon... I mean, dude!

 

the USS Cortez is named after Marco Cortez, Captain Discovery NX-04.

 

Source?

I was thinking that, but the probability becomes significantly lower when another ship is named after a historical figure so closely associated with Hernan Cortes/Cortez (La Malinche).

 

source? my fan-fic.

same as the USS Zhukov is named for the captain of the NX-08 Dedalo, not the Russian WWII general

 

Well, there's a difference betyween being offended "just because" and being offended for legitimate reasons.

 

Sure, you could apply that proviso to anything, but it's pretty obvious that the ship was named after Hernando Cortez. I mean, do you really think the U.S.S. Roosevelt, the U.S.S. Truman, and the U.S.S. Gandhi (to name just a few from the actual series) were really named after Tom Roosevelt from the 21st century, Dick Truman from the 22nd, and Harry Gandhi from the 23rd? No. They were named after who we think they're named after. Same with the Cortez.

Your fan-fic has nothing to do with the U.S.S. Cortez from DS9.

 

Some more extreme examples there.

How about USS Werner von Braun? Now is he the guiding force behind man's first steps on the moon or is he the Nazi who helped drop V2 rockets all over London in WW2 killing innocent civilians? You'll probably get fairly persausive arguments from either side.

Seem that Starfleet's (and the producers of ST) best bet would be to name ships after very non-specific personages and the like.

Or for folks in the audience to dial back the sensetivity meter a notch or three.

 

My question is how far back do you go? People seem to forget that the migration from Europe to the Americas was not the first mass movement of population. History is full of incidents where the more populace, powerful and persistent groups push into new areas and become dominant. In many cases the groups they dispose (Aztecs, Egyptians) were guilty of doing the same thing in an earlier time.

 

Why not? I don't recall Zhukov doing anything particularly nasty, other than enforcing Soviet rule over Eastern Europe and not preventing genocide and ethnic cleansing in western Pol... oh.

I'll take Cortez over Yamato, though. Maybe they just don't care. There's probably a USS Bismarck too.

It's conceivable. I'd use von Braun for a ship name, if for no other reason to set it into the future. As 500 years out, people care much less about Hernan Cortez, in 400 years, they might care less about von Braun's involvement in slave labor (I'm personally not very offended by the V2s) and be more interested in his assistance to the United States space program.

Then again, I think it'd be neat to see a runabout called the USS Enola Gay, so I might be somewhat insensitive.

 

Ronald D. Moore addressed this question ten years ago on his AOL board.

From the archives:

ETA:

For my money, I don't buy that the Federation would ever name anything after a murdering imperialist like Hernán Cortés. I choose to interpret the U.S.S. Cortéz mentioned in DS9 as being named after someone else -- perhaps a key figure in the establishment of United Earth, or of the Federation, or of the post-WW3 peace, or a founder of the Martian colonies, or something.

I can't really come up with a plausible alternate explanation for the U.S.S. Malinche, though.

 

If the idea behind naming a ship USS Cortez was to be provocative and purposefully make the Federation look more morally ambiguous, hey, you know, I'd be the first to find that brilliant. But I doubt it. From all the quotes above (by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ron Moore) it seems that it's simply the case of not thinking things through: it seems that Beimler was using the opportunity to mention a few well known figures from Mexican history just for the sake of it, while the other writers were just clueless or indifferent. And in my book, cluelessness and not thinking things through is a far worse crime from a writer than intentionally inserting something that could be offensive to some viewers.

I find it especially ironic because so much of DS9 was about Cardassian Occupation of Bajor, which works as a pretty good analogy to colonialism (better, IMO, than those Nazi analogies everyone seems so fond of). Am I using this opportunity to take another swipe at Behr? Oh yes, yes I am. But I do find it funny that he was so upset by the possibility that some percentage of the audience might not have acknowledged just how evil this fictional occupation was, and not just that, he claimed that the writing team was devastated by the mere fact that some fans found something likable in their fictional former head of occupation, or that the show might have contained any kind of moral ambiguity on the matter ... But at the same time, those same writers apparently don't have the same problem with a real world, historical example of imperialism, subjugation of another culture and mass murder?

 

La Malinche is also a dormant volcano that spans across the borders of the states of Tlaxcana and Puebla in Mexico. There's a nice resort area 3000ft up, and the place sounds like, in the future, it could be the locale for any number or events - anything from the summit where the unification of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico into the United States of North America took place, to the signing of the first formal Earth treaty with the Vulcans, to a turning-point battle in the Eugenics War or WWIII.

 

It's a good enough retcon for me.

 

Just an off-remark regarding that fan's question: La Malinche is certainly a controversial figure since she was Cortes loyal aide in his conquest, but I see no reason to call her a 'traitor'. Based on the known facts from this woman's biography, I don't see what loyalty she should have had towards the people who sold her into slavery (her own family, in fact) or to the her Maya slave masters who gave her to Cortes.