Regarding Yucatán, says Wolfgang Gabbert, “government institutions, the press, and many scholars are firmly convinced that . . . the regional population consists of two main ethnic communities—the Maya Indians . . . and the descendants of the Spanish conquerors.” But this involves a “contradiction between self-identification and identity ascribed by others” (p. xi)—with “ethnicity” defined to encompass the first and “ethnic category” the second. He demonstrates this contradiction between community and category by a survey of Yucatecan social history since the Spanish Conquest.
Part 1 deals with the period from the conquest to independence, part 2 with the period from independence to the 1910 revolution, and part 3 with the time from the revolution to the present. Topical chapters address subjects such as native sociopolitical diversity in the sixteenth century, the colonial estate system with its tribute arrangements, the increasing privatization of land, the development of henequen cultivation and...
