Pedro de Alvarado

Se dominance in Alvarado was not the patient sensory awareness of careful scouts or craftsmen — it was pure kinetic reflex, the instinct to act on whatever the body registered in the instant it registered it. During the Toxcatl festival in May 1520, with Cortés away confronting Pánfilo de Narváez, Alvarado watched hundreds of unarmed Mexica nobles dance inside the walled courtyard of the Templo Mayor and decided, on the spot, that their gathering concealed an ambush. He gave no order to investigate further; he sealed the exits and set his men on the crowd with steel. The uprising it triggered nearly annihilated the entire Spanish expedition.

The same reflex produced the campaign's most famous image of physical nerve. Weeks later, retreating from Tenochtitlan on the night the Spanish called La Noche Triste, Alvarado reached a gap in the causeway where a bridge had been destroyed and the water ran deep with bodies and cargo. Without breaking stride he planted a lance in the wreckage and vaulted the gap — the Salto de Alvarado, still marked by street names in Mexico City today. It is the same mind at both ends: no deliberation, just a body that trusted itself to solve the problem directly in front of it.

In Guatemala, commanding his own expedition, that same immediacy scaled into a style of conquest built on speed and terror rather than negotiation — forced marches and a willingness to burn captured lords alive whenever he judged that fear would move faster than diplomacy.

Alvarado's Ti never functioned as a brake on Se — it functioned as its lawyer. Called to account for Toxcatl, he produced a rationale on the spot: the Mexica were arming for revolt, the gathering was cover, his men struck first only because the danger was imminent. The argument was coherent and almost entirely unsupported by what his own soldiers described under questioning — a crowd of dancers, not warriors, sealed unarmed inside a courtyard. That is Ti auxiliary in a violent extravert: fast, confident reasoning deployed after the act to make the act look considered.

The same pattern recurs in Guatemala, where his letters frame each atrocity as tactically necessary — burning the K'iche' lords at Q'umarkaj was, in his telling, a proportionate response to an ambush plot, not terror meant to break resistance before it could organize. He was a genuinely capable tactician, reading terrain and exploiting cavalry with real skill. But the logic served the sword, not the reverse.

None of this made him hated, at least not at first. Fe tertiary gave Alvarado a real, working charm — the Nahua who named him Tonatiuh were not being ironic; his golden hair and bright temper genuinely read as something solar. Díaz's chronicle, unsparing about the violence, is equally consistent about the loyalty Alvarado inspired: generous, sociable, the kind of captain soldiers wanted beside them.

That same warmth built alliances the empire depended on. Alvarado took as consort doña Luisa Xicotencatl, daughter of a leading Tlaxcalan lord — a bond that cemented the Tlaxcalan alliance and that he carried with him into the Guatemalan campaigns. Fe simply never functioned as an ethical compass; it told him how to be loved by his own circle, and had nothing to say about the nobles dancing at Toxcatl, who were never inside it.

Why ESTP Over ISTP

What separates Alvarado from Cortés, his commander, is instructive too. Cortés orchestrated alliances and betrayals with a chess player's patience — a dominant intuitive playing a long game. Alvarado never played a long game; he read the room in front of him and acted immediately. That is Se in its purest form, and it explains both his greatest feat of physical nerve and his single worst decision, because for an ESTP dominant, they are not really two different faculties at all.