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H © Stephen J. Pavlidis 2010 |
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A Brief History of Mexico's Yucatán
Experts in the field believe that the first villages in the Yucatán Peninsula were founded between 1,000-300 B.C., although evidence of an earlier habitation has been found in caves in Loltún. Little is known about these early settlers, called the Olmec, save that they may have originated from the Petén in Guatemala, and other areas where early Mayan civilizations had already begun to evolve such as the Gulf Coast of Mexico. These early colonists founded villages throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and primarily cultivated corn. Over the years some communities became important ceremonial centers such as Cobá, Kohunlich, Muyil, and Dzibanché during what is known as the Classic Period of the Mayan civilization, between 250-1000 A.D. Cobá, Muyil, Tulum, Xel-Há, and Tankah on the coast became vital trading centers with links to other cities in the peninsula as well as other Mayan communities in Guatemala’s Petén as well as Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico. Muyil was in fact linked to the coast by canals that wound their way through the wetlands. So strong were these links that the architectural styles of the Maya in Quintana Roo was influenced by the styles of the Petén evidenced by the ruins of Dzibanché, Calakumul, and Tikal.
The following years are known as the Post-Classic Period and during this time Tulum and the inland port of Muyil prospered as Cobá developed into an important regional trade center. The Yucatan came to be dominated by Mayan cities at Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and later by Mayapán (1263-1461), and many cities in present-day Quintana Roo, particularly those along the coast, reached their apex during this period as commercial centers trading with other cities such as Tabasco and Campeche by canoe. Following the fall of Mayapán the region was divided into 19 chiefdoms, or cacicazgos. One cacicazgo was located at Chactemal in Northern Belize, the area now known as Chetumal, the capital of Qunitana Roo.
The coming of the Spaniards had been foretold in Mayan prophecies. It was written that a pale-skinned people from the east who worshipped one God would arrive and catastrophe would soon follow bringing the end of their world. The first Europeans to visit the Yucatán Peninsula were probably Juan Dias de Solis, and Martin Pinzon, former companions of Christopher Columbus, who were shipwrecked on the peninsula in 1511 and held captive by the Maya.
When Spanish soldiers first set foot on the Yucatán Peninsula they found a Mayan civilization, estimated at up to one million people, beset by hardships and at war with itself, but this did not deter the Maya from putting up a fierce resistance to the invaders. In 1517, a Spanish expedition led by Francisco Hernandez de Córdoba set sail from Cuba in search of slaves and new lands and landed on Isla Mujeres claiming the island for Spain. On the island Córdoba found idols of the Goddess Ixchel and her daughter Ixchebeliax, and her daughters-in-law Ixhunie and Ixhunieta, do he named the islands Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés, with a fleet of 11 ships and a force of 550 men landed at Isla de Cozumel, a Mayan commercial and religious center, where he rescued Friar Jerónimo de Aguilar. In 1511, a Spanish galleon foundered on Arrecife Alcaranes near Cabo Catoche, north/northeast of Isla Contoy, and thirteen people washed ashore. After two years, only two members of the party survived the rigors of life in the Yucatán amid the Maya, Guerrero and Friar Jerónimo de Aguilar, who were kept as slaves by the Maya. Aguilar was only given field work, but Guerrero, with his knowledge of European war tactics, earned the favor of the chief of the Chetumal Maya, Nacanchán, when he advised him on inter-Mayan conflicts. When de Aguilar was rescued by Cortés, Guerrero decided to stay with the Maya, he had already married Nacanchán's daughter, and had earned the rank of nakóm, the equivalent of a captain. Guerrero and his wife had three children, the first mixed race children, mestizos, in Mexico. Guerrero is said to have been responsible for Mayan victories against the Spanish at Chetumal and several other battles in the Yucatán. Nobody knows what happened to Guerrero but it believed that he died in Honduras fighting the Spanish around 1536. Branded a traitor by Cortés, there was a flip side to the betrayal coin in the Yucatán. An Aztec princess from Jalisco named La Malinche, was captured in war and eventually given to Cortés. She had several children with Cortés and help him defeat the Aztecs, explaining which tricks the Aztecs would use and how to counter them. Cortés rewarded her by abandoning her to return to Spain and marry a high-born Spanish noblewoman.
After rescuing de Aguilar, Cortés eventually headed north and then west on a journey that would lead him into the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz and culminate in the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs who were at the height of their thousand-year-old civilization at this time and who, within three years of the arrival of Cortés, were conquered by 500 Spanish Conquistadors and treacherous Indian allies such as La Malinche.
Unlike the Aztecs, the conquest of the Maya was not such an easy task, they had no centralized government whose fall would be the end of the conflict, in fact, so scattered were the communities that the Spaniards were sometimes able to turn one group of Indian against another. However, when it came to the Spanish, the Mayan warriors put up a fierce resistance, but despite their valiant struggle, the superior weaponry of the Spaniards, combined with their ability to attack on horseback, proved too much to overcome even though it took the Spaniards until 1546 to finally gain control over the peninsula. On December 8, 1526, Francisco de Montejo was put in charge of a military force set to conquer the Maya and colonize the Yucatán Peninsula. In October of 1527, Montejo and his men landed on the coast in an area where the Maya were friendly to the Spaniards, so friendly that the Maya even helped the invaders build thatched-roof huts. Montejo’s settlement was called Salamanca de Xel-Há and was short-lived as the Spanish fell victim to tropical disease. Before long Montejo returned to the Yucatán Peninsula at Campeche where he headed inland to the north leaving his son, known as El Mozo, in charge of the garrison at Campeche. Another of Montejo’s officers, Alonso Davila, headed for Quintana Roo in search of gold in 1531, and finding none arrived in Chetumal only to find the city in ruins. The Maya, upon learning of Davila’s approach, torched the great city before fleeing into the jungle to return time and time again over the next 18 months in guerilla raids against Davila’s men, finally forcing the Spaniards to retreat from Chetumal.
Several more years passed until the Spaniards again returned to Quintana Roo fully bent on conquest. Gaspar Pachero, and his son Melchor, landed on the peninsula in 1544 and found a Maya civilization debilitated by disease and drought and split into two rival groups making conquest by the Spaniards that much easier. Savagely fighting their way to Bacalar, the father and son founded Salamanc de Bacalar, but the poverty and desolation of the area forced many colonists to abandon Bacalar and return to Mérida.
The Spaniards, victorious at last, divided the Yucatán into landholdings called encomiendas that they seized as “spoils of war”. The conquerors became the new masters as colonial plantations sprang up throughout the region and the Maya were forced to labor for the estates (haciendas) planting and harvesting cacao, cotton, and tropical hardwoods as well as gathering honey and beeswax, all for export. The Maya were enslaved and treated harshly, but their spirit was not broken, which led to several uprisings against their colonial masters. The first Mayan rebellion occurred in 1546 in Valladolid and Bacalar, and in later years more revolts occurred from 1639-1761 when an uprising with religious overtones at Jacinto Creek was the forerunner of the Caste War of 1847, which lasted for more than 50 years.
Between 1546 and the Caste War of 1847 the eastern shore of the Yucatan came to be the home of numerous pirates who sought shelter along the coast between Bahia de la Ascención and Honduras. In 1630, Bacalar had a population of only about 30 people, but the town was a major supply station on the merchant shipping route to the provinces in Guatemala and Honduras and a haven for pirates who prowled the waters of the northwestern Caribbean. In 1640, a pirate by the name of Peter Wallace, settled on the shoreline of the Hondo River, the southernmost limit of Spanish influence in the region. Wallace began to harvest hardwoods and began a colony that was the origin of British Honduras, or Belize as it is now known. In 1652, a Cuban pirate known as El Mulatto sacked Bacalar, the first of many such attacks that lasted into the 1700’s when the Spanish authorities decided to construct a fort for self-defense in 1729. When the fort was complete Bacalar again prospered from the export of hardwoods, sugar, cattle, and citrus. Other famous piratical names associated with the Yucatán were Captain Henry Morgan, later the British Governor of Jamaica, and Miguel Molas, who enjoyed Isla de Cozumel as a base. One priate/slaver, Fermín Mundaca, retired to Isla Mujeres and built a private hacienda to enjoy his latter years.
Inland, resident Franciscan friars had discovered the Maya and were shocked at what they thought to be the work of Satan, body mutilation and human sacrifice in the name of religion. The friars decided that it was their sacred duty to God to eliminate these blasphemies and bring the surviving Maya to Christianity. The friars, under the direction of Friar Diego de Landa, destroyed thousands of Mayan idols and de Landa personally manipulated the destruction of 27 codices filled with characters and symbols that he could not understand but took to be the words and drawings of Satan. The destruction nearly wiped out all traces of Mayan civilization, and today only three codices from that era remain intact, one in Madrid, one in Paris, and one in Dresden. De Landa did however write a manual for other priests concerning the Mayans, his scribe was the source of much of this information, especially the Mayan alphabet. Unfortunately nobody could make the Mayan alphabet work and the work was ignored for over 4 centuries. A volume of Maya text was rescued from a libray in Berlin when the Russians liberated the city in 1945. The Russian soldier who rescued the works was a student of languages and he struggled for years but finally put the pieces together using the text and de Landa’s alphabet. But the true key to Mayan languages was not discovered until the 1970s.
De Landa was recalled to Spain and spent a year in prison while awaiting word on his guilt or innocence of the charges of “despotic mismanagement”. Although de Landa can be blamed for the loss of the history of the Maya, he did in fact pen a book in his own defense, Relaciones del as Cosas de Yucatan, which describes daily living in a Mayan village in great detail including the growing and preparation of food, the social structure, and the Mayan priesthood and the sciences including a formula that unlocked some of the secrets to Mayan mathematics and astronomy. Redemption for the loss of a culture? Hardly…but it was all that we were left with. De Landa was eventually cleared of all charges and returned to the Yucatán as a Bishop where he remained until his death in 1579.
But not all Catholic missionaries were as hard line as de Landa, in fact de Landa’s replacement while in prison, Bishop Toral, was far more compassionate to the Maya than his infamous predecessor. Toral was a humanitarian who was appalled by the treatment of the Indians and attempted to make changes to alleviate their suffering. The Franciscan hierarchy refused to see things Toral’s way and no changes were made until shortly before Toral’s death in 1571 when his changes were implemented in a Royal Cedula that prohibited the Franciscan Friars from shaving heads, flogging the Maya, and keeping prison cells in their monasteries as well as bringing about the release of Indian prisoners. Many of the Maya were baptized into the Catholic faith and the friars educated the people and did their best to protect them from hacienda owners in search of slaves.
On September 28, 1821, after three centuries as a Spanish colony, the independent republic of Mexico was born. But many wealthy hacienda owners in the Yucatán, dissatisfied with their new centralized government and the land reforms that it was imposing upon them, declared their independence from Mexico, and in 1847, with the Mexican government, preoccupied with the Mexican-American War and the hacienda owners still bickering about independence, the Maya became lost in the cracks. They Maya had suffered for years and nobody cared enough about them to do anything to alleviate their suffering. A fostering hatred for the ruling class, the blancos, exploded with a fury in 1847 in what has come to be known as the Caste War, a conflict that was to last for seven years and decimate the Mayan people and encourage a further half-century of guerilla encounters.
The Caste War, so called because of the complex racial levels or castes that the Spanish had developed to differentiate the mixed bloodline of the Mexican people, began as a rebellion in Tepich and quickly spread to Tihosuco, Ichmul, and Sacalaca on the Yucatán-Quintana Roo border. Showing no mercy to the white landholders, the Mayan goal was to remove them from the Yucatan so that the Mayan people could be free once more. So fierce were the Mayan warriors, and so successful, that by the Spring of 1848 they had the majority of the blancos trapped inside the cities of Mérida and Campeche. The blancos appealed for assistance from Spain, France, and the United States but no help came and the mayor of Mérida was within one day of evacuating the city when something quite unexpected occurred. Historians suggest that the Maya were within a week of driving their foes into the sea when the tide of battle turned almost overnight. To understand what happened, one must understand the religious significance of the land, and specifically of corn, maize, to the Mayan people. Within days of victory, the entire Mayan army to a man packed up their belongings and returned to their fields to plant their corn thanks to the appearance of a winged ant. In Mayan philosophy life and time are cycles, and the cycle at that time indicated it was time to plant their crops. The Maya knew that the rains would soon come and if their corn, the gift of sustenance from the gods, was not in the ground the gods would be insulted and angry. Just as the dawn of their victory approached the winged ant made its appearance. The winged ant, the harbinger of the rains, was a bit early but the Maya still returned to their fields to plant their corn. Not a very good move from a military standpoint, their return to the fields allowed the entrapped blancos to re-fortify their defenses and send for reinforcements offered by the Mexican government if the landowners would forget their independent views and support a unified Mexico. Soon troops from Mexico City and Cuba arrived along with 1,000 mercenaries and it wasn’t long before the Maya found themselves under attack and the lands the blancos had lost were regained and the captured Maya sold as slaves to Cuban plantation owners. Thousands of the Maya hid in the jungle for decades or fled across the border into British Honduras, now Belize to escape the slavers. By 1855, the Caste War was officially over and although the government controlled the peninsula, the Mayan rebels fled to the jungles of central Quintana Roo where, with the help of gun-runners from British Honduras, they sustained regular guerilla attacks will into the early 1900s when disease, starvation, and repeating rifles finally put an end to the conflict.
After the debacle at Mérida and Campeche the Maya were defeated and demoralized, but certain Mayans resurrected a religious cult that allowed the Mayan to regain their spirit and reorganize, all it took was a “miracle” involving some carvings on a tree, a priest, and a ventriloquist. In 1850, a mestizo from Peto named José Maria Barrera carved three crosses into the bark of a tree in a community located near the border with present day Belize. The cult of the Talking Cross dated to a pre-Columbian oracle representing the gods of the four cardinal directions and the symbols of the three crosses supposedly transmitted a message from God that was given to the faithful on October 15, 1850 in a sermon by Juan de la Cruz. The priest employed a ventriloquist named Manuel Nahuat as the mouthpiece of the crosses to tell the Maya what God wanted them to do. The community came to be called Chan Santa Cruz, Little Holy Cross, and the inhabitants became known as cruzobs, followers of the cross. A temple was built to house the crosses that were kept in the inner sanctum called La Gloria. The community thrived selling timber and dealing in arms and the people that came to Chan Santa Cruz in large numbers rediscovered their self-esteem and began to organize. Taking advantage of period of poor relations between Campeche and Mérida which ended with Campeche seceding from the state of Yucatán in 1857, the Chan Santa Cruz Indians took the fort at Bacalar which gave them control of the coast from Cabo Catoche in the north to the border with British Honduras. At first the Indians killed their captives, but beginning around 1858 they began to keep white male prisoners as slaves working in the fields and forests and the women captives as domestic servants or concubines. The Chan Santa Cruz Indians were in complete control of Quintana Roo for over 40 years as a truce with the Mexican Government was sometimes in effect, sometimes not. Quintana Roo was isolated, it was not connected by road to the rest of Mexico, which was unified and progressing as a nation and a people, so when President Porfrio Diaz came to power in 1877 he cast his eye on the Yucatán Peninsula.
In 1892, Mexico and British Honduras signed a peace treaty and arms sales to the Mayans were outlawed. This did little to put a halt to Mayan hostility and the peninsula remained a dangerous no-man’s land of sorts and the military campaign against the Chan Santa Cruz Indians continued. In 1898, Payo Obispo, now known as Chetumal, was founded by Lt. Othón P. Blanco and designated capital of the territory.
In 1901, the Mexican army, under the command of General Ignacio Bravo, attacked the Indians and set up a garrison in Quintana Roo that was regularly supplied by a railroad that the army constructed. Over the ensuing years the army continued to raid Mayan settlements and on November 15, 1902, President Porfrio Diaz made Quintana Roo a Territory of the Mexican republic after years of being part of the state of Yucatán. Although the area was ripe for colonization, President Diaz used the region primarily as a penal colony for years (until this practice was ended after the Revolution) and the government of Mexico had little control over the region until around 1910 when the army began to make inroads in their control of the Mayan population. During these years the Mexican army continued to raid Mayan settlements until around 1915 when the army left the peninsula to the Maya who refused to submit to the Mexicans. That same year the region was again declared to be part of the state of Yucatán until 1931 when Quintana Roo was again separated from Yucatán.
From 1917-1920 hundreds of thousands of Indians died from influenza and smallpox, which had been introduced by the Spanish. As the older leaders passed away, new Mayan leaders emerged, once such man was General Fransisco May, the headman of Yokdxonot-Guardia, the site of the Talking Cross. May led his troops in skirmishes against the Mexicans for years before seeing the inevitable and demanded, and received, a negotiated settlement with the government. In 1935 peace officially came to Quintana Roo when the Chan Santa Cruz Indians, under the leadership of General May, signed a formal peace treaty with the government of Mexico. The Maya were granted land parcels thanks to President Lazaro Cardenas who gave half the usable land in Quintana Roo to the poor.
In December of 1959, President Adolfo López Mateos visited Chetumal and a new era of development began culminating in Quintana Roo begin granted statehood on October 8, 1975, making the region Mexico’s youngest state. Today Quintana Roo is one of the most visited areas of Mexico with tourist havens such as Cozumel and Cancun ranking as two of the top vacation destinations for people the world over.