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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas
  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
2000
Online ISBN:
9781139053464
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521652049
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, Archaeology of The Americas, Area Studies, American Studies, Asian Studies, History, Archaeology, History of Native American Peoples
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - American History
Series:
The Cambridge history of the Native Peoples of the Americas
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume II: Mesoamerica (Part Two), gives a comprehensive and authoritative overview of all the important native civilizations of the Mesoamerican area, beginning with archaeological discussions of paleoindian, archaic and preclassic societies and continuing to the present. Fully illustrated and engagingly written, the book is divided into sections that discuss the native cultures of Mesoamerica before and after their first contact with the Europeans. The various chapters balance theoretical points of view as they trace the cultural history and evolutionary development of such groups as the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztec, the Zapotec, and the Tarascan. The chapters covering the prehistory of Mesoamerica offer explanations for the rise and fall of the Classic Maya, the Olmec, and the Aztec, giving multiple interpretations of debated topics, such as the nature of Olmec culture. Through specific discussions of the native peoples of the different regions of Mexico, the chapters on the period since the arrival of the Europeans address the themes of contact, exchange, transfer, survivals, continuities, resistance, and the emergence of modern nationalism and the nation-state.

Reviews

‘It is profoundly reassuring that this kind of scholarly publishing continues to flourish at the start of a new millennium, and it is even more profoundly to be hoped that these books acquire the wide readership that they deserve.’

Source: The Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute

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Contents

Contents
  • 12 - Mesoamerica Since the Spanish Invasion: an Overview
    pp 1-43
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This introductory chapter provides a general introduction to some three centuries of colonial, and about 175 years of national, history. It first highlights the content available in other chapters of the book, which surveys the history of Native American peoples in Mesoamerica since the Spanish invasion. In the national period, the emphasis is on the areas constituting the nation states of Mexico and Guatemala, although other Central American states are mentioned from time to time. What has become ever more apparent during the writing is the extent to which native peoples have been written about by others and how little we have from native peoples about themselves. This situation, fortunately, offers radical and startling prospects for a more equitable history. In general, the leaders of the Mexican Revolution have been benevolently authoritarian and have believed in incorporation of native peoples into the modern state. The revolutionary political movements of the early decades of the twentieth century were the parents of widespread intellectual movements that came to be called indigenismo.
  • 13 - Legacies of Resistance, Adaptation, and Tenacity: History of the Native Peoples of Northwest Mexico
    pp 44-88
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Centuries ago, Paquimé in the Casas Grandes Valley in Mexico was a Mesoamerican trading outpost there were extensive irrigation systems, a ceremonial complex, and large amounts of trade goods. During their colonial intrusions, Spaniards encountered a disparate array of peoples whose disaggregation apparently increased during the sixteenth century. This chapter outlines several patterns of Spanish infiltration and indigenous responses of the native Indian groups of North Western Mexico in the form of first-generation rebellions and the later revolts to the European contact and Spanish rule. The natives discussed are Mayos, Yaquis, Seris, Pimas, Guarijíos, Rarámuri, and Tepehuanes. The chapter elucidates the impact of many factors conditioning cross-cultural contact in the region including the demographic shifts, the availability and accessibility of labor and natural resources valuable to the dominant society, and the intensity of extractive pressures and assaults on communal autonomy.
  • 14 - The Native Peoples of Northeastern Mexico
    pp 89-135
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the key elements in the history of the native peoples in northeastern Mexico since the Europeans, particularly Spanish, began invading the region around the year 1545. Before that time, the northeast lay beyond the vague line that separated the settled, agriculturalist civilizations of Mesoamerica from the bewildering variety of indomitable hunting-and-gathering peoples known collectively to central Mexicans as Chichimecs. The key elements in this history of conquest include ethnocide, the fate by and large of the indigenous people of the region; the mass migrations, planned and unplanned, that brought in Purepechas, Otomis, Mexicanos, and Tlaxcalans from Middle America to acculturate or replace the local 'barbarians'. Accusations of inhuman cruelty, and especially of cannibalism, were routinely used in the early years of Spanish colonization of the northeast, roughly 1545 to 1590 in the southern part of the region, and lasting into the seventeenth century in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon.
  • 15 - The Indigenous Peoples of Western Mexico from the Spanish Invasion to the Present
    pp 136-186
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The history of Mexico has been coterminous with the history of its indigenous peoples. The categories native, indigenous, and certainly Indian are themselves artifacts of European colonial rule, present still in the modern public discourse of the Mexican successor state. A brief synoptic look at the history and organizational complexity of the Tarascan culture area can give some idea of the havoc sown by the Spanish Conquest and of the shattered foundations on which colonial society was built. This chapter discusses the history of the Huichol, Cora, and Tarascan peoples to bring the story of the indigenous cultures of the Mexican Center-West into the modern period. In some ways the postcolonial history of the Coras and Huicholes who followed Lozada in substantial numbers illustrates, albeit in an extreme form, the political and economic pressures acting to deethnicize indigenous groups after independence.
  • 16 - Native Peoples of Colonial Central Mexico
    pp 187-222
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The central Mexican peoples were fairly homogeneous in language and culture. For the indigenous peoples of central Mexico, the Conquest marked the breakup of the superstructure of the Aztec empire, but many of the component polities became bastions of indigenous social, economic, and political life under Spanish Colonial rule. Like the Spanish colonial political organization, which was built on existing native patterns, the structure of the Spanish religious structure also was. In the colonial period class divisions and family structure changed. Central Mexican native society at the time of the Conquest was divided between elites and commoners, with gradations of status within these two categories. Early sources in Spanish describing prehispanic land tenure delineate a number of different categories of land. Some major shifts occurred in the colonial period in economic relations, particularly in economic exchanges. The importance of shifts within the Nahuatl language in the colonial period has been postulated as indicators of shifts in native culture.
  • 17 - Native Peoples of Central Mexico Since Independence
    pp 223-273
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter provides a glimpse of the native experience in central Mexico since independence. Before independence, many legal and historical documents relating to central Mexico were still written in Nahuatl, and native litigants could present their cases in their own languages. Between independence and the present, most native peoples were culturally absorbed into a more Europeanized, Spanish-speaking nation. At the time of independence, many native people in both central and southern Mexico were members of former Indian republics or native pueblos, with their own land base and separate administrative structures. The social structure of native pueblos, throughout Mesoamerica, is usually depicted as a closed corporate community. Going back even before Mexican independence, the struggle of native peoples for land has been intrinsically related to legal battles in the courts, ideological debates, and armed rebellion. The logic of native political participation takes on a different form during times of relative political stability on the national level.
  • 18 - Native Peoples of the Gulf Coast from the Colonial Period to The Present
    pp 274-301
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter talks about the history of the indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast. It focuses on the modern-day geographical territory of Veracruz. The jurisdiction of Misantla seems to be the most extensive area of Totonac speech. The Gulf Coast populations were devastated by the Spanish presence, a combination of disease, Spanish atrocities, and enslavement and deportation to the Antilles, although the impact was by no means homogeneous throughout the region. The process of evangelization in the Gulf Coast region and indigenous responses to Catholicism during the colonial period is poorly studied. The eighteenth century witnessed considerable economic growth in Mexico, a characteristic of which was the incorporation of peripheral regions into a wider market economy, and an increase in the power of the colonial state. Such growth resulted in increased conflict between Spanish and indigenous communities, and the Gulf Coast is no exception, although the conflict was confined to particular zones.
  • 19 - The Indigenous Population of Oaxaca from the Sixteenth Century to the Present
    pp 302-345
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Oaxaca is the state reputed to have the highest percentage of indigenous population in Mexico. During the prehispanic epoch, Oaxaca occupied a position in the heart of Mesoamerica that permitted it to enrich itself through contact with Mayas and Nahuas, and to establish an exquisitely refined culture of its own. Mixtec and Zapotec writing and calendars are the oldest in Mesoamerica, and they used some phonetic signs. On the eve of the Spanish arrival, the territory of Oaxaca was by no means a single political entity. As the end of the sixteenth century approached, the scales tipped in favor of the Spaniards. The villages of Oaxaca tried to rebuild their battered economy. Since the middle of the century the liberal governments themselves had tried to find a substitute for cochineal, promoting new products for export, such as coffee, tobacco, cotton, and other items.
  • 20 - The Lowland Mayas, from the Conquest to the Present
    pp 346-391
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The lowland Maya people had long been accustomed to outside influences due to interaction with other Mesoamerican peoples from beyond their borders and to the dislocations that resulted from their own expanding and contracting spheres of political influence. Spanish conquest and colonization, although probably more devastating in their impact than any of these earlier events, must be seen as an another major stage of Maya history. The Mayas of the northern lowlands constituted a single ethnic group of Yucatec speakers. Like all Mesoamericans, the lowland Mayas believed in a complex, hierarchical supernatural world of gods and other spiritual forces. The impact of migration and resultant population growth in tropical forest regions, along with rapidly increasing cattle production and logging operations, not only threatens the survival of indigenous societies but also has a disastrous impact on the stability of fragile ecozones, especially in Peten, Belize, Chiapas, Campeche, and Quintana Roo.
  • 21 - The Highland Maya
    pp 392-444
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter delineates some of the ways in which the highland Maya have reacted and responded in order to survive almost five centuries of conquest. In constructing a narrative, evidence is laid down in the form of a pyramid, the base of time past narrowing toward the peak of time present. Such a structure is designed to emphasize the historical forces that shape, and the cultural context that frames, current predicaments. The colonial experience, which spans the years between 1524 and 1821, receives particular attention, for it was during this period that the inequality that pervades later times was irreducibly cast. The vicissitudes of highland Maya life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are dealt with more summarily in two periods, one of reform and revolution from 1821 to 1954, and one of marginalization and neglect from 1954 on. Chiapas and Guatemala were best known at Tenochtitlan for the quality of the cacao, cochineal, and quetzal feathers they produced.
References

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