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Landscape and World View: The Survival of Yucatec Maya Culture Under Spanish Conquest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Inga Clendinnen
Inga Clendinnen
Affiliation:
La Trobe University
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Extract

The religions of contemporary Middle American Indian communities fall neatly enough under the descriptive category we call ‘syncretic’. Myths and rituals, integrated experiences for the participant believers, betray to the outside observer their Spanish and Indian antecedents. This indicates a methodology of analysing the ongoing flow of religious life into its smallest constituent parts—colours and gestures, sacred objects and sacred locations, the structure and language of invocations—the more precisely to identify the ingredients of the ‘mixed’ religion we see being lived out. When enquiry moves to the process of imposition and selection by which the mix was initiated, in the early days of Spanish-Indian contact, the same familiar methodology lies ready to hand: Spanish Catholicism, and what is known of the traditional Indian religion, can be analysed into elements, those elements arranged in parallel, and the likely ease of transferance inferred, being judged to be the highest where a match seems good and where evidence from the ethnographic present appears to offer confirmation.

Type
Religion and Cultural Resistance
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 374 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1980

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References

A preliminary version of this paper was offered as part of the subsection ‘Interpreting Past Environments’ in the History section of the 48th ANZAAS Congress at the University of Melbourne, August to September 1977. The subsection was devised and coordinated by my friend and colleague Rhys Isaac, whose intellectual vigour and infectious passion for the problems of social history are a constant delight and stimulus to all who work with him.

1 Work done in Papua New Guinea, where the introduction of Christianity has been sufficiently recent to permit the ‘native response’ to be traced in some detail, demonstrates the extraordinary flexibility of native cognitive systems, and the various and to us startling ways in which Christian teachings have been misunderstood. E.g., see Lawrence, Peter, Road Belong Cargo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, and Worsley, Peter, The Trumpet Shall Sound (London: Schocken Books, Inc., 1957).Google Scholar For developments in African studies, see Strayer, Robert, ‘Mission History in Africa: New Perspectives on an Encounter’, African Studies Review 19 (1976): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The best account of the prolonged conquest of the peninsula and of the Great Maya Revolt, as the Spanish named it, remains that of Chamberlain, Robert S., The Conquest and Colonization of Yucatan 1517–1550, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 582 (Washington, D.C., 1948).Google Scholar For a succinct discussion and useful bibliography on the vexed question of the peninsula’s population, and the impact of conquest, see Cook, Sherburne F. and orah, Woodrow, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) II, ch. I, esp. pp. 62–65. Cook and Borah estimate the population of the peninsula (excluding Uaymil-Chetumal) in 1543 at 476,200, and in 1549 to have been 233,776. Those six years saw the final ‘pacification’ of the peninsula. Note also the comment on Uaymil-Chetumal, scene of the bitterest fighting, on pp. 47–48.Google Scholar

3 Most of this information is found in Landa, Fray Diego de, Landa's Relation de las Cosas de Yucatan. A Translation Edited with Notes by Alfred M. Tozzer, Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Papers, XVIII (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1941), esp. pp. 85–106, 124–25, 138–49.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Landa, , RelatiónGoogle Scholar, or as Tozzer, , RelatiónGoogle Scholar, when the reference is not to the text but to the editor's notes. For an attractive and reliable secondary account, see Roys, Ralph L., The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972; first published in 1943).Google Scholar

4 Relaciones de Yucatan, in Coleccion de documentos ineditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organization de las antiguas posesiones espanolas de Ultramar, 2nd series, vols 11, 13 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1898–1900)Google Scholar. Hereafter, R. Y. I and R. Y. 2. R. Y. 2: 209–210Google Scholar. See also 30–31; 68–69; 187. For the ordinances, see ‘Ordenanzas del Lie. Tomas Lopez’ in Fr. Diego Lopez (de) Cogolludo, , Historia de Yucatan escrita en el sigh XVIIpor el reverendo padre Fr. Diego Lopez Cogolludo, 2 vols, 3rd edition (Merida: Manuel Aldana Rivas, 1867–1868). Lib. V.Caps. XVI–XIX, esp. Cap. XVI. Orders for the gathering of Indians into convenient locations occur from the earliest days of Spanish settlement in the Indies, but the policy of congregation or reduction was not systematically implemented elsewhere, at least among settled Indian populations (e.g., in Peru and Central Mexico), for forty or more years after conquest, when it was executed by civil authorities in response to massive Indian population loss, and the consequent debilitation of communities.Google Scholar

5 For the prescriptions for the structures of the new villages, and the behaviours approved within those structures, see ‘Ordenanzas del Lie. Tomas Lopez’, Cogolludo, , Historia.Google Scholar

6 Ralph L. Roys, France V. Scholes, and Eleanor B. Adams, ‘Census and Inspection of the Town of Pencuyut, Yucatan in 1583 by Diego Garcia de Palacio, Oidor of the Audiencia of [Mexico]’, Ethnohistory, 6(1959): 195–225, esp. 204–05CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Report and Census of the Indians of Cozumel, 1570’, Contributions to American Anthropology and History, 6Google Scholar, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 523 (Washington D.C., 1940), pp. 5–30.Google Scholar

7 Testimony of Juan de Villalobos, 27 January 1565, in Scholes, France V. and Adams, Eleanor B., eds., Don Diego Quijada, alcalde mayor de Yucatan, 1561–1565, 2 vols., Documentos sacados de los archivos de España. Biblioteca Historica Mexicana de Obras Ineditas, nos. 14–15 (Mexico City. Antigua Libreria Robredo, 1938), I, p. 66Google Scholar. An official enquiry conducted in 1565 established that 157 Indians had died under torture, and 32 remained crippled. Some 4,549 men and women had been put to the torture, and a further 6,330, who had confessed voluntarily, had been shorn or flogged as penance. Thirteen Indians had committed suicide, and 18 others, who had disappeared, were presumed to have done so. Information collected by Sebastian Vasquez on the abuses committed and tolerated by DrQuijada, Diego, 25 March 1565, Don Diego Quijada II, pp. 213–14.Google Scholar For an account of the trials, see Roys, Ralph L. and Scholes, France V., ‘Fray Diego de Landa and the Problem of Idolatry in Yucatan’, Co-operation in Research, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 501 (Washington D.C., 1938), pp. 586–620. For a revisionist view, see Inga Clendinnen, ‘Fray Diego de Landa and the Problem of Human Sacrifice in Yucatan’, Master's thesis, University of Melbourne, 1972.Google Scholar

8 The head of the secular administration in Yucatan, , the Alcalde MayorGoogle Scholar Don Diego Quijada, had taken up his office only in June or July of the previous year. He officially committed himself to the support of the Franciscans in their inquisitional proceedings, but only, it seems, under pressure. Petition of Fray Diego de Landa to Don Diego Quijada, 4 July 1562, Don Diego Quijada I, pp. 69–71.Google Scholar For Quijada's early identification of Fray Diego de Landa as a man to be wary of, see Don Diego Quijada to the Crown, 15 April 1562, Carlos de Indias, LXVII.Google Scholar

9 Landa, , Relación, p. 80.Google Scholar

10 Landa, , Relatión, p. 132Google Scholar; Thompson, J. Eric S., Maya History and Religion, Civilization of the American Indians Series Vol. 99 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), esp. pp. 194–304.Google Scholar

11 For the classifier ‘ac’, see Thompson, ibid., XIX.

12 Cogolludo, , Historia, Lib. IV, Cap. V.Google Scholar

13 Michael Coe has presented an elegant and ingenious model of a complex rotational political system which he claims perhaps operated within Maya communities and replicates the transference of responsibility between deities. His argument is seductive, but I am troubled that Landa, so acute an observer, leaves no account of such a system. Coe, M. D., ‘A Model of Ancient Community Structure in the Maya Lowlands’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 21 (1965): 97–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 The best discussion of the Maya calendars remains that of Thompson, J. Eric S., Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction, Carnegie Institution of Washington publication no. 589 (Washington D.C., 1950).Google Scholar For a series of katun prophecies, see Roys, Ralph L., The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 438 (Washington D.C., 1933), pp. 144–63.Google Scholar The elegance of the interlocking systems is indicated in Father Avendano's 1696 account of the sacred books of prophecy of the Peten Maya. These, he tells us, showed ‘not only the count of the said days and months and years, but also the ages (katuns) and prophecies which their idols and images announced to them, or, to speak more accurately, the devil by means of the worship which they pay to him in the form of some stones. These ages are thirteen in number; each age has its separate idol and its priest, with a separate prophecy of its events. These thirteen ages are divided into thirteen parts, which divide this kingdom of Yucatan and each age, with its idol, priest and prophecy, rules in one of these thirteen parts of this land, according as they have divided it’. Means, Philip Ainsworth, History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and of the Itzas, Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Papers, vol. VII (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1917), p. 141.Google Scholar

15 Landa, , Relatión, pp. 20–39. See also Tozzer's copious notes on the same pages. The mysteries surrounding the identity of the Itza are engagingly rehearsed and partially clarified by Eric Thompson, ‘Putun (Chontal Maya) Expansion’ in Maya History and Religion, ch. 1.Google Scholar

16 ‘The successor of the Cocoms, named Don Juan Cocom after [he became] a Christian, was a man of great reputation, learned in their affairs, and of remarkable discernment and well acquainted with native matters. He was very intimate with the author of this book, Fray Diego de Landa, and told him many facts concerning the antiquities. He showed him a book which had belonged to his grandfather. … In this [book] was a painting of a deer, and his grandfather had told him that when large deer of this kind should come to that country (for this is what they call the cows), the worship of the gods would cease; and this was fulfilled since the Spaniards brought large cows with them’. Landa, , Relatión, pp. 43–46.Google Scholar Landa's steady pen is to be admired, given that he had watched the corpse of his old friend burn, along with his treasured idols, in 1562. Landa was later to bum as many of the ‘books’ as he could lay his hands on, which, he noted, the Indians ‘regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction’, Landa, , Relatión, p. 169.Google Scholar

17 ‘Ordenanzas del Lie. Tomas Lopez’, Cogolludo, , Historia, lib. V. cap. XVII.Google Scholar

18 Late in the enquiry, some Indians confessed to having participated in rituals in which victims suffered crucifixion preliminary to sacrifice by the excision of the heart. The identification of the actual events through the double distortion of forced testimony and interrogators’ perceptions is too complex a problem to unravel here, but there can be no doubt that, from the array of Christian symbols presented to them in those early days, the Maya recognised the cross as meaningful. Even todayjhe cross is ubiquitous in Yucatan, while the elaborated cult of the saints which flourishes ituhainland Mexico is lacking. For the significance of the cross to the Maya before the arrival of the Spaniards, see Green, Merle, Rands, Robert L., and Graham, John A., Maya Sculpture (Berkeley: Lederer, Street, Zeus, 1972)Google Scholar. See also Tozzer, , Relation, p. 42, n. 211.Google Scholar

19 Scholes, and Adams, , Don Diego Quijada, I, pp. 104–05, 108–09, 114.Google Scholar

20 E.g., R. Y. 2, pp. 28, 147, 190, 212Google Scholar; Cogolludo, , HistoriaGoogle Scholar; Scholes, F. V., Roys, R. L., Adams, E. B., ‘History of the Maya Area’, C.l.W. Yearbook 43 (July 1943/June 1944)Google Scholar; Pena, Eva Alexander Uchmany de De la, ‘Cuatro Casos de Idolatria en el Area Maya ante el Tribunal de la Inquisition’, Estudios de Cultura Maya, 6 (1967): 267–300.Google Scholar

21 Aguilar, Pedro Sanchez de, ‘Informe contra idolorum cultores del obispado de Yucatan’, in Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, Tratado de las idolatrias, supersliciones, dioses, ritos, hechicerias y otras costumbres gentilicas de las razas aborigenes de Mexico, 2d ed. (Mexico: Ediciones Fuentes Cultural, 1953), Vol. II.Google Scholar

22 Landa, and Tozzer, , Relacion, pp. 27–29Google Scholar; Roys, , The Book of Chilam Balam of ChumayeiGoogle Scholar, Vasquez, Alfredo Barrera and Rendon, Silvia, El Libro de los libros de Chilam Balam (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1948).Google Scholar One scholar claims that ‘soon [after the conquest] almost every village or town in the northern half of the peninsula had a copy either of these early chronicles…or of later ones written by their own native priests…’ Alfredo Barrera Vasquez in Vasquez, Alfredo Barrera and Morley, Sylvanus Griswold, ‘The Maya Chronicles’, Contributions to American Anthropology and History, 10, no. 48, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 585 (Washington, D.C., 1949), p. 10.Google Scholar

23 Roys, , Book ofChilam Balam, p. 192.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., p. 93.

25 Ibid., p. 89.

26 R.Y.I, p. 256.Google Scholar

27 Landa, , Relatión, p. 203.Google Scholar

28 With the imposition of monogamy, a number of women with their offspring were cast into a social void. Landa noted a decline in women's chastity and an increase in violence between marriage partners. He also recorded a decline in the age of marriage from twenty to twelve or fourteen with the likely consequence of earlier, more frequent, and less successful pregnancies. Landa, , Relatión, pp. 100, 127.Google Scholar

29 Reply of Fray Diego de Landa to charges made by Fray Francisco de Guzman, n.d., in Don Diego Quijada II, p. 416.Google Scholar

30 Roys, , The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, p. 10.Google Scholar

31 Landa, , Relatión, pp. 62,97.Google Scholar By the end of the sixteenth century through most of Spanish America those native lords who continued to command deference did so by virtue of their position within the Spanish system. Charles Gibson tells us that in the valley of Mexico Indian lords retained Tecuhtli titles within their own communities into the sixteenth and even into the seventeenth centuries, but that by late colonial times cacique status of its own was no longer of any significance. Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 156, 163–65.Google Scholar In Yucatan the almehenob, members of traditional ruling lineages, even although otherwise indistinguishable from commoners, were accorded their titles by those commoners into the nineteenth century. Roys also notes that in the Chan Kom area territorial boundaries which had received no official validation since the sixteenth century were still known and acknowledged by the native inhabitants as late as the 1930s. Roys, Ralph L., The Titles of Ebtun, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 505 (Washington, D.C., 1939), pp. 47, 62.Google Scholar

32 Burns, Allen F., ‘The Caste War in the 1970's: Present Day Accounts from Village Quintana Roo’, Anthropology and History in Yucatan, ed. Jones, Grant D., Texas Pan American Series (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1977), p. 261.Google Scholar

33 Roys, , Book of Chilam Balam, p. 78.Google Scholar

34 ‘Ordenanzas del Lie. Tomas Lopez', in Cogolludo, , HistoriaGoogle Scholar, lib. V, cap. XVI; Aguilar, Sanchez de, Informe…, 325; Cogolludo, Historia, lib. IV, cap. VI.Google Scholar

35 E.g., Roys, , Book of Chilam Balam, pp. 72–77.Google Scholar

36 E.g., Roys, , Book ofChilam Balam, p. 79. ‘Then with the true God, the true Dios, came the beginning of our misery. It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues…the beginning of forced debts, the beginning of debts enforced by false testimony…But it shall still come to pass that tears shall come to the eyes of our Lord God. The justice of our Lord God shall descend on every part of the world…’Google Scholar

37 ‘Documentos de Tierra de Sotuta’, appendix in Roys, , The Titles of Ebtun, pp. 421–33.Google Scholar

38 Vogt, Evon Z., Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 582.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 E.g., Roys, , Book of Chilam Balam, pp. 98–107; 120–25.Google Scholar

40 The conscientious conservatism of the Maya persists. In parts of modern day Yucatan where plantation henequen production has long dominated the milpas, many towns must import the h-men (Maya priest) from other areas for the annual Maya cha chaac ceremony. In some areas, where government redistribution of former plantation land has permitted the restoration of the milpas after a long hiatus, the milpa ritual has also been revived. Press, Irwin, Tradition and Adaptation: Life in a Modern Yucatan Maya Village (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 34.Google Scholar