Spain built the largest empire the world had ever seen. Then it tried to conquer North America - and failed. This is that story, and most Americans have never heard it.

Ambition and Avarice: The Spanish Imperialistic Attempt to Conquer the USA begins where the empire began - with the secret marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, the unification of Spain, and the Reconquista ideology that would drive Spanish expansion for two centuries. It ends with the exhausted remnants of a colonial project that spent over 150 years attempting to replicate in North America the staggering wealth it had extracted from the Aztec and Inca empires - and found only dust, hostile terrain, and Indigenous peoples who refused to disappear.

In between is a history that should be taught in every American school and almost never is.

The book moves from the Caribbean crucible - where the mechanisms of Spanish conquest were first perfected on the Taíno people of Hispaniola - to the long, brutal march northward into the continent. Hernán Cortés and the fall of the Aztec Empire. Francisco Pizarro and the silver mountain at Potosí that funded a century of imperial ambition. Hernando de Soto's devastating march through the American Southeast. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's obsessive search for the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola across the American Southwest. The founding of New Mexico, Texas, and California - not as colonies of opportunity but as defensive buffers to keep rival empires at bay.

And then the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 - when the Indigenous peoples of New Mexico expelled every Spanish colonist from their territory in a single coordinated uprising, the most successful Indigenous revolt against European colonization in North American history.

The men who have been romanticized throughout history as bold explorers were, in documented fact, architects of systematic brutality operating within a machine designed to extract maximum wealth at minimum cost to the Crown. This book does not look away from that record. It also does not reduce the Indigenous peoples, the enslaved Africans brought to replace exterminated populations, or the colonists themselves to background scenery in someone else's story.

This is the Spanish Empire in North America on its own terms - a system born from ambition, sustained by avarice, and ultimately defeated by the reality that no amount of imperial will could turn strategic wastelands into profitable colonies.

Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook in English and Spanish.