Patch - Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century

MAYA REVOLT
AND
REVOLUTION
IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Robert M. Levine, Series Editor

AFRO-BRAZILIAN CULTURE AND POLITICS

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MAYA REVOLT AND REVOLUTION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Robert W. Patch

MAYA REVOLT
AND
REVOLUTION
IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ROBERT W. PATCH

First published 2002 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Patch, Robert.
Maya revolt and revolution in the eighteenth century / Robert W. Patch.
p. cm.(Latin American realities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7656-0411-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-7656-0412-4 (alk. paper)
1. MayasHistory18th century. 2. InsurgencyGuatemala18th century. 3.
RevolutionsMexicoYucatn (State)18th century. 4. GuatemalaHistory18th
century. 5. Yucatn (Mexico : State)History18th century. I. Title. II. Series.

F1465 .P37 2002
972.6502dc21 2002066518

ISBN: 9780765604125 (pbk)

ISBN: 9780765604118 (hbk)

To Beatriz Cceres Menndez

There can be no proper relation between one who is armed and one who is not.

Machiavelli, The Prince

The Latin American Realities series presents aspects of life not usually covered in standard histories that tell the stories of governments, economic development, and institutions. Books in this series dwell on different facets of life, equally important as those mentioned, but not often analyzed or described. How have underground economies worked? How have marginalized people coped with hardship and improved their lives? How have government policies affected everyday life? What has been the importance of popular culture? How have social and economic changes shaped the lives of ordinary people?

In Maya Revolt and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, Robert W. Patch positions Mayan culture in the context of Spanish colonialism and examines both this culture and this era from below. Colonialism, he argues, as well as the enslavement of Africans, which went hand in hand with a parallel enslavement in the form of forced labor of indigenous peoples under Spanish rule, was one of the greatest evils in human history. This book asks two key questions: How did colonialism work? and What difference did it make? His study encompasses four revolts in eighteenth-century Guatemala and one large-scale revolt or revolution in Mexicos Yucatn during the same period. The study explores in depth those who ran the colonial bureaucracy, how those bureaucrats saw the world, how judges dispensed justice, how the Roman Catholic Church functioned, and how the Maya managed to turn the colonial regime against itself. The actions of the Maya, Patch shows us, illuminate history and prompt us to pay attention to them. Although their efforts ultimately failed to drive the Spanish from Maya ancestral land, the Maya negotiated and renegotiated the terms of their domination. The Spaniards stayed throughout the century, and even though their descendants are partly Maya in ancestry, today their culture is more Hispanic than Maya, the price of survival into the twenty-first century.

Robert M. Levine
Series Editor

This book was made possible by a Fulbright Foreign Area Fellowship, administered by the U.S.-Spanish Joint Committee for Cultural and Educational Cooperation. I would therefore like to thank the Fulbright Program for its support. I would also like to thank the Academic Senate of the University of California, which provided funds to aid in the transcription of the microfilm of documents from archives in Spain. And I thank those who helped in the transcription, namely, Elizabeth Leonard, Mark Anderson, Eloy Zrate, Lore Kuehnert, and Jason Ward. I hope that the income they earned in return for reading some pretty difficult stuff made their lives as graduate students a bit more pleasant. I am eternally grateful to the staffs of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and the Archivo Histrico Nacional in Madrid. I would like to thank the many people who read and commented on drafts of chapters, namely, Bruce Castleman, Joseph Green, Keith Cox, Owen Jones, Karen Wilson, Mark Campos, Richard Godbeer, Lucille Chia, Irwin Wall, Michele Salzman, Kenneth Barkin, Piotr Grecki, Alena Simunkova, and Beatriz Cceres. I would also like to thank the people who have provided me with intellectual advice, inspiration, and comradeship in my professional development, namely, Gilbert Joseph, Sergio Quezada, Pedro Bracamonte y Sosa, Gabriela Sols, Antonio Calabria, Eric Van Young, Eugene Anderson, and especially Stanley and Barbara Stein. None of these people is responsible for the errors that remain.

Speak, hands, for me!

Casca, in Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene i

Colonialism is one of the most important factors in modern world history. The European people who carried it out justified their actions by claiming that they were spreading Christianity, thereby saving souls from eternal damnation and civilizing backward people contaminated by cannibalism, homosexuality, devil worship, immorality, savagery, and barbarism. Theologians and humanists of the time, while sometimes denouncing the abuses of the European colonists, added moral support to colonialism in their scholarly writings. All of this was consistent with the hubris developing alongside the rise of European civilization as a world force; by 1914 this force had made the world economically and politically Eurocentric.