In 2017, I was having a rough time.
I was two years removed from the birth of my first child, and my once-promising Silicon Valley career had just taken a serious hit. The third startup I had worked for in four years had just let me go. Truthfully, I expected it. I kind of wanted it to happen. I had even talked that morning, on my commute, with a close friend about what I’d do if it happened.
My wife knew it too. So when I called her immediately after getting laid off, she didn’t panic. She didn’t ask questions. She just said, “Well, head on home and let’s go get some ice cream.”
And just like that, I was unemployed. Again.
So what now?
We decided it might be a good idea for me to stay home with our kid for a while. A reset. A pause. Something different. And that’s what I did. About a year into it, a buddy of mine from Wall Street called me out of the blue and said, “Dude, what are you doing? Would you hurry up already and just become a teacher?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
“JT, just call a few schools. You live in Oakland. Someone could probably use help.”
So I did. I found a posting for a paraeducator position at a middle school in East Oakland. A teacher’s aide. I talked to the principal briefly, and he said, “Why don’t you come in tomorrow and we’ll talk?”
The next day, I sat in his office for three hours. We talked about life, kids, education, burnout, expectations. At the end of it, he leaned back and said, “Well, we don’t actually have a paraeducator position open. But school starts in three days and I still don’t have a seventh-grade social studies teacher. Would you like your own classroom?”
My worst nightmare.
But I didn’t have many other options on the board.
“Um,” I said. “Sure. I guess?”
He handed me a battered social studies textbook and told me to write out my curriculum and lesson plans over the weekend. And just like that, I was dropped back into a world I hadn’t thought about in decades.
Being a white dude teaching in East Oakland, where roughly ninety percent of the student body was Hispanic and the rest largely Asian and Black, I quickly realized I had some learning to do myself. The book started with the Romans. I skipped ahead and chose to focus on the Aztecs instead.
And learning the story of the Aztecs at around forty years old in the context of present day America was…eye-opening.
Growing up in a predominantly white area, I don’t think I had ever really learned the story. Not fully. And I wish I had earlier, because it completely reframed things for me.
The abridged version goes something like this: in the 1300s, the Aztecs built an extraordinary civilization centered around the city of Tenochtitlan, located on an island in Lake Texcoco. Floating gardens. Causeways. Canals. Engineering that rivaled, and in some cases exceeded, what Europe was doing at the same time. By most accounts, it was one of the most advanced cities on Earth.
And then, about two hundred years later, a Spanish conqueror named Hernán Cortés arrived with roughly six hundred men. He allied himself with Indigenous groups on the outskirts of the city who resented Aztec rule. Montezuma welcomed Cortés, unaware that he was orchestrating a takeover. Within two years, Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Mexico City was built on its ruins. Smallpox wiped out much of the population, along with vast amounts of knowledge, culture, and tradition.
Which brings me, oddly enough, to sneakers.
In his memoir Shoe Dog, Phil Knight explains that in 1967, Onitsuka Tiger sent him and Bill Bowerman a prototype they were collaborating on and asked for suggestions on a name. With the 1968 Olympics scheduled for Mexico City, Bowerman suggested “The Aztec,” as a tribute to the civilization that once inhabited the region.
There was just one problem.
Adidas already had a track shoe called the Azteca Gold and threatened legal action. The name was off the table.
Knight recounts driving up to Bowerman’s house, frustrated, when Bowerman suddenly asked, “Who was that guy who kicked the shit out of the Aztecs?”
“Cortez,” Knight replied.
Bowerman nodded. “Okay. Let’s call it the Cortez.”
And that was that.
The shoe that began life as the Aztec became the Nike Cortez, named not after the civilization it honored, but the man who helped erase it.
What started as a running shoe eventually found its way onto the streets of New York as a breakdancing staple, and into Los Angeles as a deeply embedded cultural symbol tied to gang identity and Chicano heritage. Today, there are roughly seven hundred and fifty Cortez colorways floating around resale platforms. Not exactly rare. Not exactly hyped.
And yet, somehow, it’s always there.
I was once asked by Complex what the most underrated Nike shoe was, and without hesitation I said, “The Cortez.” Which, in hindsight, might have been a dumb answer. It’s been in production since 1972. It’s appeared in Forrest Gump, on George Costanza, on Eazy-E, and on Kendrick Lamar. It’s everywhere in pop culture.
And yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-Kenny or non-Lasered Cortez on a sneaker convention table. Ever.
I’ve owned several pairs over the years. Some I wore into the ground. Others never made it out of the closet because I couldn’t get past the loaf-of-bread shape or the narrowness of the more faithful retro versions. Right now, I have a handful of basic pairs I actually wear, plus a few oddities: a 1994 sample sitting in a Pou Chen factory box, and a sample from the 2004 Laser Pack with Tom Luedeke’s pattern etched into the upper (update: SOLD).
There are still pairs I’ve wanted but never found in my size. The Mister Cartoon Aztec Cortez, where the swoosh is replaced by an illustrated Aztec profile. Some of the J.Crew colorways from the early 2010s that softened the silhouette into something more wearable and less declarative.
At one point, I remember Sean Wotherspoon getting his hands on a massive run of OG Cortez Jewels and dipping them in red paint for an art installation at Round Two in Los Angeles. That memory might be imperfect, but the feeling sticks.
The Cortez has always existed just off to the side of the conversation.
It’s not trendy. It’s not rare. It’s not expensive. It doesn’t need explaining. Nike doesn’t have to sell it very hard. It just…exists. Which is kind of the point.
Nike wasn’t even Nike yet when the Cortez was born. They were still Blue Ribbon Sports, distributing Onitsuka shoes in the U.S. And yet they had the audacity to take a shoe, rename it after a conqueror, slap a swoosh on it, and make it bigger than its origin ever imagined.
That moment set the tone for everything that came after.
The Cortez has survived not because of marketing, but because of culture. Because someone claimed it. Because it meant something different in different places. Because it was accessible. Affordable. Familiar.
And maybe that’s why it never quite disappears.
When Mister Cartoon removed the swoosh from the Cortez and replaced it with the face of an Aztec warrior, he wasn’t erasing history. He was flipping it. Reclaiming it. Rewriting it.
He once said he wanted to put a Chicano on the shoe. Born in this land, influenced by another. That mix. That tension.
Which, to me, is what sneaker culture does at its best.
It takes things that weren’t meant for us and makes them ours. It reinterprets. It reframes. It carries contradictions forward instead of smoothing them over.
For a long time, the Cortez was just another Nike sneaker to me. But once I understood what the name really meant, it stopped being just a shoe. It became a story. A takeover. A reclamation. History doesn’t go away. It just gets worn differently. Just like the Cortez. And telling the story can sometimes feel like the Long Way Around.