IntroductionYucatán, the Maya, Mexico and Spanish Colonialism: A six
part report on how and why one stand alone Mayan faction was the only
group of Indigenous in all of the Americas to hold out against
Spanish conquistador colonialism. I start this report in Chetumal,
State of Quintana Roo, Mexico, situated on the Caribbean Sea coast in
extreme southeastern Mexico, a focal point of this history.
CHETUMAL, the state
capital of Quintana Roo is a new city to the Americas and has the
distinction of being the second least populated capital in all of
México with nearly 200,000. It recently came into existence after
many years of political strife and drawn-out war.
The history surrounding Chetumal reaches far back in time when
Gonzalo Guerrero trained as a
military combatant in
the Spanish Inquisition era of King and Queen Ferdinand and Isabella.
He
fought in
the
bloody military action
to drive the last of the
Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula by 1492, ending eight centuries of
Islamic occupation. Then courageous
Gonzalo Guerrero took
up his next position of soldier/sailor on Columbus’s first ocean
crossing expedition, one
of three ships aboard
the small open caravel
vessel named Niña.
He does not appear in the annals of history again until 1511 when
Gonzalo on a September day set sail in good weather from the Gulf of
Darien on the Colombian coast of South America north bound with
looted treasure and slaves.
What happened next is one of the worst nightmare stories that
could happen to anyone.
Gonzalo was forty years old at the time. Blasted by a fierce
September hurricane his ship floundered, and he was plummeted into
the sea. Aboard a makeshift raft with no food or water, Gonzalo and
the seventeen men and two women survived the wrath of a hurricane
that had dismasted and sunk their ship. They drifted to the Yucatán
Peninsula. Gonzalo and his shipmates were taken as slaves by the
local Maya.
Read the rest of Gonzalo Guerrero’s fascinating story that
ultimately brought him to Chetumal next.
An examination of political maps of the America’s showing
Spanish dominance since 1500 discloses the one exception to Spanish
imperialistic colonial control. The Caribbean Sea coast of the
Yucatán Peninsula was never conquered due to one exceptional
individual who left a lasting legacy.
Before
the prolonged Caste
War, a British Admiralty chart of 1840 described the jungle
area of the Caribbean coast of eastern Yucatán Peninsula as “Parts
said to be very thinly populated”. This Mayan holdout against
Spanish conquistador takeover endured through a multitude of
conflicts you will next read about in the following six parts of this
presentation.
IN SEARCH OF GONZALO
GUERRERO, FATHER OF THE FIRST MESTIZO* Chapter one
This is a true story of an
exceptional man who left a legacy enduring over centuries, from the
1400s until the present.
*(In Yucatán, Mexico, a mestizo is a
person of mixed Spanish and Mayan parentage.)
Gonzalo Guerrero was trained
as a Spanish military combatant. He fought with savagery having
acquired the subversive military tactics of Inquisition motivated
Spanish to drive the last of the Moors off of the Iberian Peninsula
by 1492, which was a seven century undertaking. This ended the
Islamic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and countless bloody
conflicts where the Spanish military honed and polished their crafty
military tactics. They were then geared up for imperialistic
colonialism and the American indigenous had no idea what awaited
them.
Gonzalo Guerrero next took up
a position of soldier/sailor on Columbus’s first ocean crossing
expedition aboard one of three ships, the smallest an open caravel
vessel named Niña.
This soldier of fortune’s story did not
reappear again in the annals of history until 1511 when Gonzalo set
sail in good weather from the Gulf of Darien on the Colombian north
coast of South America with a cargo of looted treasure and slaves
from the Inca Empire heading northbound back to his homeland in
Spain.
What happened next is one of the worst nightmare stories
that could happen to anyone.
Forty year-old Gonzalo was
plummeted into the sea aboard a makeshift raft with no food or water,
one of eighteen men and two women to survive a hurricane that had
dismasted their ship and sunk it.
Only eight lived to make
landfall, having to resort to cannibalism to survive.
Salvation
did not happen.
The group of eight survivors
were apprehended and enslaved by their Mayan Cocom captors on the
Yucatán coast. The Cocom were one of twelve separate Mayan groups
that never managed to unify among themselves into a nation.
Four
of these survivors were sacrificed and eaten immediately. The others
were caged and fattened for a future festival of flesh feasting. The
fattening gave the remaining four the strength to escape to the Tutul
Xiues tribe of Mayas who were enemies of the Cocom’s.
Tutul
Xiues made slaves of these surviving Spaniards. Due to extreme hard
work and exhaustion, only Gonzalo Guerrero and Geronimo de Aguilar
survived.
Geronimo de Aguilar kept his Catholic religion and
cultural ways, but Gonzalo Guerrero took up the Mayan ways and became
a military adviser and trainer teaching the Maya the combat tactics
he acquired in the Spanish military. This instruction would enable
these Maya to remain out of the clutches of the Spanish Conquistadors
for nearly five centuries.
It has been speculated that
this Spanish combat training gave the Mayan people of the eastern
jungle of the Yucatán Peninsula the ability to drive out the
conquistadors. Because of this military tactical training the Mayan
of the Quintana Roo region, (eastern jungle) had the advantage of
never being completely subdued. It wasn’t until Méxican federal
forces attempted to put down the protracted Caste War in the early
1900’s that this area became a territorial part of México.
A note: The protracted Caste
War did not end here and that story is expanded upon in the next
chapter.
Back to the Gonzalo Guerrero story: He left an enduring
legacy with his newly adopted countrymen.
Next Gonzalo kills an
alligator attacking his master and gains his freedom from slavery. He
then engaged in the Mayan ritualistic custom of mutilation and
tattooing that included piercing his ears and cheeks. These acts
assimilated him into the Mayan way of life.
Gonzalo next took a
Mayan princess named Zazil Ha as his wife, had three children and was
granted temples of Ichpaatún north of Chetumal on the bay front,
presently designated on maps as Oxtankah.
Chetumal Bay, Gonzalo’s
newly acquired home site, had for thousands of years been a major
route of commerce since the days of the ancient Chontal Maya because
it linked their sea-going trade routes to rivers incorporating
man-made canals. Lamanai is only one of the three most prominent
Mayan settlements that remained continuously active through the
post-classic period and even after European arrival that is linked by
river/canal system into Chetumal Bay.
These
seagoing Maya were
from the Tabasco area.
Tabasco has
a huge extensive
river system extending into the
Guatemalan mountains
and connecting to the
Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. The
Chontal Maya developed
far-reaching
trade routes from their
riverfront kingdoms using
huge dugout cargo canoes.
An
excerpt from the book The
Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America
by James Wilson:
Anthropologists
point to the many similarities of belief, mythology and ceremony
among different peoples as proof that, far from being becalmed in a
kind of changeless, timeless prehistory, Native American societies
were open, vital and dynamic, pragmatically accepting new cultural
practices from each other. This appears to be borne out by the
evidence of extensive trade networks, linking areas as far apart as
present-day Mexico and Canada, which carried, presumably, not only
materials and artifacts
but people and ideas back and forth across the continent.
In Comalcalco, Tabasco, the
land of the ancient Olmec Indians ancestors of the Mayan civilization
and the cradle of American civilization is located the western
most Mayan temples of the Chontal Maya, uniquely built of brick.
These Olmec ancestors of the
Chontal Maya were the ones to discover chocolate, corn [maize], and
the nixtamalization of it that unlocked its nutrients for human
consumption and provided the abundance of sustenance that laid the
foundation for this stand alone civilization to expand and excel in
medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. They developed a maritime fleet
of large sea going sailing canoes that ranged to all points around
the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and to South America. The Chontal
were known as the “Phoenicians” of the new world. Products of
their commerce included chocolate, copper, corn [maize], cinnabar,
salt, rubber, and native medicines ranging from hallucinogenics to
curatives uniquely discovered by them. More than twenty-five of their
miraculous medications are still listed in the present Pharmacopoeia.
Their knowledge base and
commerce were spread to all points of their trading territories. An
example is their agricultural influence around the entire Gulf of
Mexico, that flourished due to their influence. Corn, Squash, and
bean, cultivation were exactly the same as that found all across
Mexico. Remarkably the Indigenous surrounding the northern coast of
the Gulf of Mexico not only replicated Mayan agriculture but actually
began building pyramids. They engaged in the trade of copper mined on
far away Lake Superior. The Chontal Mayan then traded the copper
across their expansive trading territory.
July 30, 1502, Christopher
Columbus during his fourth voyage arrived at the Bay Islands of
Honduras. While exploring he spotted a large sailing trading canoe
and approached. Columbus along with his crew members boarded and
discovered this vessel to be a Maya trader from Yucatán, with
elegantly clothed Mayan crew members, and an impressive shipment of
quality merchandise. Columbus pillaged whatever took his interest and
abducted the captain for an interpreter. The vessel was set free, and
this became the first recorded encounter of Europeans with Chontal
Maya.
A note: Christopher Columbus
never did actually set foot on the North American continent though he
is credited with its discovery.
In 1519 Hernán Cortés, the
Spanish conqueror who had plundered the Aztec Empire, arrived at the
island of Cozumel and attempted to rescue the two Spanish survivors,
Geronimo de Aguilar
and Gonzalo Guerrero from the Maya. Gonzalo Guerrero replied;
“I married a Mayan woman, have three children, am chief and
captain, taken their ways with tattoos, pierced ears and scared
face…this is my place.”
Geronimo de Aguilar went with
Cortés taking a job as translator.
Gonzalo’s fate would soon
be determined in battle against these disgruntled vindictive Spanish
Conquistador crusaders who would go to any extreme to stamp out
anything or anyone not in accordance with their Spanish Inquisition
crazed mentality.
Gonzalo’s temple home north
of Chetumal was plundered by the conquistador Spanish, and a Catholic
chapel constructed over it. A stone fortress of similar design to
those found in St. Augustine, Florida, Havana, Cuba, and Campeche was
begun. The San Juan Felipe fort began construction at nearby Bacalar
but it was not completed for nearly two hundred years until the 1720s
when its finishing was inspired by plundering pirates. After all the
Spanish went through to steal all the Indigenous gold in the first
place, they certainly didn’t want any one stealing it from them.
These stone monuments exist to this day as a testament to the
unrelenting Spanish Inquisition.
In spite of this Spanish
incursion into the Caribbean Sea coast of Mayan territory, it would
be nearly five centuries before the Spanish would dare to set foot or
return to present day Quintana Roo.
The Catholic chapel at
Oxtankah and stone fort at nearby Bacalar north of Chetumal stand to
this day, and little is currently known of this monumentally historic
story.
After the independence of Mexico, a change took
place. Some Mexicans descendants of the conquerors now began to feel
a real passion for the Mayan culture. From the Maya, one name that
symbolizes the struggle in opposition to colonial imperialist power
and the struggle for independent freedom was Gonzalo
Guerrero.
Ultimately Guerrero would go from villain to hero and
from traitor to a champion of freedom.
The Mayan ruins and
Church at Oxtankah in the jungle north of Chetumal, Quintana Roo,
Mexico, have been restored and memorialize this extraordinary man and
his wife, Zazil Ha, the parents of the first mestizos. An adjacent
lagoon in the area of the Oxtankah ruins near Bacalar bears his
name.
On the prestigious Paseo de Montéjo in Mérida a monument
now commemorates his memory. On the boulevard entering Chetumal a
Gonzalo Guerrero memorial depicting Gonzalo, his wife Zazil Ha, and
their three children sits atop a large pedestal These bronze
monuments sculpted by Raul Ayala are also found on the Island of
Cozumel and at Akumal, a tourist spot north of Tulum.
Note: A word about the Maya.
There are at least twelve distinct Mayan groups that occupy the
Yucatán area with a common language and similar cultural attributes.
A common thread that bound them was their collective rule of land
ownership. There were no land titles or profiting from land sales and
the land belonged to those who worked it. People in need were
provided for without question or exception. The different Maya
factions have never been able to get along as a united nation, and
therefore were easy for the Spanish Conquistadors to divide and
conquer.
Note: A word about the
Spanish. The people occupying the Iberian Peninsula are united and
have been for centuries under the strick dictates of the Roman Catholic
church. Their doctrine of confession of sins and simple absolution
instilled a mentality of bribery and graft that is ingrained in them.
Indigenous people even after conversion to Catholicism were still
unable to assimilate into this discriminatory system.
Another item that the Spanish
Conquistadors couldn’t resist commandeering from the Maya was the
extensive salt production of the Yucatán peninsula. Due to an
anomaly of nature the north and northwestern coast of the Yucatán
peninsula is semiarid six months of the year, and this coast is also
surrounded by low barrier islands creating shallow bays ideal for the
natural evaporation of sea water making the extraction of sea salt a
natural industry. The Chontal Maya developed this labor intensive
salt production into a lucrative commerce that they carried on for
centuries.
The Spanish conquistadors
found no gold or silver in Yucatán, but the sea salt production was
a great substitute especially accompanied by the availability of free
labor by the Indigenous Maya. That sea salt production continues to
this day, though now it has become mechanized and corporate owned.
When my wife and I first took up residence in Yucatán back in the
1980s several primitive Mayan sea salt evaporation operations were
still in production along what was then known as the Coconut Coast of
Yucatán.
Next we will take a look at
the Prelude to the Caste War.
Prelude to the Caste War, Chapter 2
Links to: The Maya, Mexico and Spanish Colonialism:
Introduction and Chapter 1.
Prelude to the Caste War, Chapter 2.
A Brief History of the Caste War, Chapter 3.
While the Caste War still Smoldered, the Mexican Revolutionary War Commenced, Chapter 4.
Juan Bautista Vega, Chapter 5.
Lázaro Cárdena's Years, Chapter 6.
Recommended Reading and Notable Authors.
