While scholarly interest in Yucatan’s pre-Columbian past has remained constant, research on its four centuries of documented history is currently undergoing a revival after several decades of comparative neglect. Like much earlier work, this volume focuses on the native Maya inhabitants and their responses to alien domination, a subject that, as part of the widespread confrontation between Western and non-Western cultures, provides for many the principal enduring significance of the history of this isolated region.
The ten contributions contain much new information and some new emphases, the broader implications of which the editor assesses in an admirably lucid introduction. They tend to round out rather than recast the already established outlines of lowland Maya culture history, except for Eric Thompson’s persuasive—if not yet wholly compelling—case for the existence of a fluid but perceptible and longstanding boundary between the Maya of Yucatan proper and various ethnic subdivisions to the south.
Although adaptation to external influences is a principal theme, all but three of the authors deal with Maya groups whose main response to alien rule was escape or open resistance. Nigel Bolland recounts a slow Maya retreat in Belize until the British advance overran what territory remained, while earlier inhabitants of the same area, despite occasional visits like the one that produced the 1656 census presented here by Eric Thompson and France Scholes, managed to elude any effective Spanish control. The independent chiefdoms formed during the nineteenth-century Caste War, the best known example of Maya resistance, are surveyed by Donald Dumond. Grant Jones uses evidence on one of these groups to suggest links with pre-Columbian forms of political organization. Oral traditions concerning the Caste War, analyzed by both Victoria Bricker and Allan Burns, indicate how accurately this movement is remembered and how forcefully it still shapes attitudes and actions among the protagonists’ descendants.
The effectiveness of these various forms of resistance depended on the remarkable degree of physical mobility the Maya displayed. Exactly how many of them drifted or fled into the southern and eastern zones of refuge may be impossible to tell, but James Ryder argues that his demographic profile of the town of Pencuyut can be explained only by such migrations in a fairly large scale, evidence that will have to be reconciled with Thompson’s case for the persistence of an ethnic boundary since the Classic period.
Cultural continuity based on the Maya’s innate conservatism is another recurrent theme, and some of the most convincing evidence comes from the one group that would seem to have been under the strongest pressure to change: the Maya who remained rooted in their post-conquest villages. Irwin Press’ brief history of one such village, Pustunich, emphasizes how few drastic adjustments had to be made even to the conquest, and Anne Collins traces ties between the colonial Maya assistants to the Catholic clergy and both their pre-conquest predecessors and Caste War successors.
This volume demonstrates how, despite the fragmentary and often intractable nature of the written sources, it is possible to continue to substitute information for speculative leaps in bridging the gap between Yucatan’s archeological past and ethnographic present.
