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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.
Synopsis
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.
Publishers Weekly
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.)