Mayalar

There is now a pan-Maya movement in eastern Mesoamerica, and a profound sense among these people of their glorious past. This has sometimes taken a millenarian form. For instance, the Yukateko of the Talking Cross villages in Quintana Roo prophesy a coming Great War, an Armageddon when a new king will awaken in Chichen Itza, along with thousands of petrified beings from a past creation, and a stony Feathered Serpent will come to life and inflict havoc on the creatures of this creation.

Mertcan Bulak

Retribution by the Guatemalan government, its army, and its police came swiftly: under a series of military regimes (some actively supported by the Reagan administration), the official security forces and governmental death squads unleashed a reign of terror against the Maya that was almost unprecedented in its ferocity. It is estimated by anthropologists that over one million Maya were displaced. According to a report by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, approximately 150,000 people were killed, and an additional 40,000 “disappeared” – almost all of them Maya. This was indeed ethnocide and genocide on a grand scale. Uprooted communities were forced into “model villages” (a move recommended by American military advisors), where able-bodied men were required to perform service in civil patrols. For hundreds of thousands of K’iche’, Ixil, Mam, and other Maya, the traditional ties with the land had finally been shattered – or so the army leaders thought. As these immense disruptions took place, fundamentalist Christian missionaries from the United States, with government support (two recent presidents have been evangelical Protestants), began to make vast numbers of converts among Guatemala’s Maya.

Reklam

Mertcan Bulak

The storm that became known to rich whites in Yucatan as the “War of the Castes” broke out in 1847. Almost all the Maya of the peninsula took up arms against the hated whites; eventually, the government troops held only Mérida, some towns along the coast, and the main road leading from Campeche. The Conquest had been reversed! The dénouement of this story is well known: when the time came for the Indians to plant corn in their milpas, the native army disintegrated.

Mertcan Bulak

But the European invaders brought with them more than their civil and religious order: they imposed a new economic order as well. Iron and steel tools replaced chipped or ground stone ones, and the Maya took readily to the Spaniards’ axes, machetes, and billhooks, which in the lowlands enabled them to cope with the forest as they never had before. Cattle, pigs, and chickens began to replace game as the main source of meat in the diet.

Mertcan Bulak

There was, of course, a great deal of syncretism or blending between Spanish and Maya religious institutions and beliefs, since in many respects they were so similar. Both burned incense during rituals, both had images which they worshiped, both had priests, and both conducted elaborate pilgrimages and processions with effigies set by their respective calendars. Both had a hero god who died and was resurrected – for the Spaniards, this was Jesus Christ, and for the Maya, the Maize God.

Mertcan Bulak

Over the next two centuries, then, the Spaniards were able to impose their own cultural pattern on regions that had been devastated by disease. By order of Church and Crown, the scattered populations were “reduced,” that is, concentrated into villages and towns on the Spanish pattern, where they could be better controlled and converted.