Yucatán, 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:
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.
