Maya Conquistador

by Matthew Restall

Overview

Exploring firsthand accounts written by Maya nobles from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries-many of them previously untranslated-Restall offers the first Maya account of the conquest. The story holds surprising twists: The conquistadors were not only Spaniards but also Mayas, reconstructing their own governance and society, and the Spanish colonization of the Yucatan was part of an ongoing pattern of adaptation and survival for centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807055076
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	08/30/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Matthew Restall, author of Life and Death in a Maya Community and The Maya World, is associate professor of Colonial Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University and lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

At last, the Mayas' perspective of the Spanish Conquest! Evocative and poignant. -Susan Schroeder, author of Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco

"Matthew Restall has discovered the lost world and re-awakened the silent voices of Maya conquistadors. Now everyone can read some of the surprising sources he has wrested from neglected archives, which make colonial society vivid and intelligible as never before." -Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Before Columbus and Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years

"Now joining The Broken Spears in importance. . . . Maya Conquistador is provocative and highly recommended. It will undoubtedly alter previous views of the relationship between the Mayas and the Spanish conquerors of the Yucatan." -James C. Harrison, Multicultural Review

From the Publisher

Restall intends the title of this revisionist history to be provocative. Instead of Spanish conquistadors, his "Maya conquistadors" (or perhaps "collaborators" is more exact) are Mayan natives, mostly of the upper classes, who accommodated themselves to Spanish rule. For example, Paxbolonacha, chief of the Chontal Mayas, in 1525 sided with Hernan Cortes, thereby abetting colonial expansion; his grandson, christened don Pablo Paxbolon, acted as an agent of colonial consolidation, rounding up unconverted Mayas until 1604. Boston College historian Restall (The Maya World) focuses on the brutal Spanish conquest of the Yucatan peninsula in southern Mexico in the 1540s, and he reproduces in translation Mayan accounts of the Conquest--community histories, letters, petitions, annals, municipal records--dating from the late 16th century to the early 19th. These dense, often conflicting primary sources, written mostly by Christianized Maya notables decades after the events described, are a shaky platform on which Restall bases his sweeping assertion that the Mayas perceived the Conquest as continuity rather than change, as a perpetuation of life's daily hardships. For devotees of Mesoamerican history, the source documents gathered here--some never before translated into English--offer some candid, if somewhat controvertible Mayan perspectives on the atrocities inflicted by the Spanish, the imposition of tributes, the introduction of Christianity and the survival of indigenous cultures under Spanish rule. Editor, Deb Chasman. (Oct.)

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