I'm reading about all this while it snows here at home. I-5 is shut down due to the snow. I hate snow. I spent a decade in heavy snow, with winters that boasted so much snow, you couldn't see the snow plow coming towards you on a two lane road because the berms were THAT HIGH. I'm not a snow pansy. I just hate snow. So instead of thinking about the snow, I'm doing my travel homework.
I love history, but I've never really studied the Yucatan beyond the Spanish conquest. I seem to get confused between Mayan and Aztec, so studying this stuff will do me good. So I start with reading the basics.
The Mayans were hunter gatherers who migrated to the Yucatan in 2500 BC. The Yucatan was fairly isolated from the rest of Mexico until recently, so the Yucatec people developed their own culture. They built great cities including Chichen Itza.
From about 250 AD to 900, the Maya built city-states in Central America that included huge pyramids and temples and public plazas with huge stone columns that recounted their history. Excavations at Tikal, Guatemala, one of the oldest Maya centers, revealed thousands of structures and artifacts including temples, pyramids, ball courts, stone monuments, tools, ceremonial objects, and pottery fragments.
The limestone of the Yucatan Peninsula was easily quarried and used for building and tool making. In this way, it reminds me of Budapest and their limestone quarries, which were a shock to me on my visit. I'm glad I'm reading about the Yucatan because I would never have pegged it as a limestone mecca.
The Inca began settling in a valley in the Andes Mountains of central Peru around the year 1200. (Interesting side note: there's a commercial making the rounds right now about DNA. In it, a woman gets her DNA report and it lists "Native Indian - Andes" which means the Inca! Who knew?!) Between 1440 and 1500, they expanded their empire until it extended nearly 2,500 miles from north to south and included as many as 16 million people. The lands they occupied included mountains, coastal desert, and low-lying jungle.
The Aztecs also emerged around 1200. The center of the Aztec civilization was in the Valley of Mexico, a large high-elevation basin in the Sierra Madre Mountains. Around 1325, the Aztecs settled on an island in Lake Texcoco, where they built their capital and largest city, Tenochtitlán. They called themselves the Mexica (pronounced me-shee-ka) and became accomplished corn farmers, warriors, and temple builders. The aggression and warrior skill of the Aztecs allowed them to conquer neighboring people. Eventually, the empire stretched over most of central Mexico and included millions of people.
So the Mayans came, built a culture, and lived peacefully until the Toltecs arrived in the tenth century. The Toltecs influenced the Mayans and dominated them. Then, around 1200 CE, the Mayan period ended. Most of the cities were abandoned but nobody knows why. This is the period of time when Aztec and Inca cultures flourished..
Then, in the 1500's, Cordova and Cortes found the Yucatan. The Spaniards finally conquered the people after several failed attempts, and built 30 churches in the hopes of converting the natives to christianity. A Fransiscan monk ordered all the handwritten records destroyed, and smallpox killed almost 2 million natives, so the culture suffered terribly under the Spanish.
In 1761, a church-educated Mayan led a rebellion against Spain, but the Yucatan didn't win independence until 1821. Even then, they were still part of Mexico until 1840 when they succeeded, then rejoined in 1843, and then annexed again in 1846.
The Yucatan was neutral during the Mexican-American war, but by 1848 the Yucatecans drove all Hispanic citizens out of the area except those in the walled cities on the peninsula. The government of the Yucatan asked Britain, Spain, and the US to stop the Mayans, and the US actually considered intervention. In the end, the US did not intervene but told Europe "look but don't touch."
The Yucatecs fought with Mexico on and off for years. Up until recently, elections have been held for 100 years with only Hispanic politicians gaining political support based on their Hispanic purity. The first governor of Yucatán born of pure Mayan descent, Francisco Luna Kan, was elected in 1976. His victory represented a political break from tradition.
I had no idea the Yucatan was so oppressed and dominated. We as tourists have only really been visiting the area since the 80's. I can't imagine how they can stand us. But what's fascinating is the geology, which I'll talk about in my next post.
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