Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival

by Nancy M. Farriss

This book traces the history of the Maya Indians of Yucatan, Mexico, during a four-hundred-year period from late preconquest times through the end of Spanish rule in 1821. Nancy Farriss combines the tools of the historian and the anthropologist to reconstruct colonial Maya society and culture as a web of interlocking systems, from ecology and modes of subsistence through the corporate family and the community to the realm of the sacred. She shows how the Maya adapted to Spanish domination, changing in ways that embodied Maya principles as they applied their traditional collective strategies for survival to the new challenges; they fared better under colonial rule than the Aztecs or Incas, who lived in areas more economically attractive to the conquering Spaniards. The author draws on archives and private collections in Seville, Mexico City, and Yucatan; on linguistic evidence from native language documents; and on archaeological and ethnographic data from sources that include her own fieldwork. Her innovative book illuminates not only Maya history and culture but also the nature and functioning of premodern agrarian societies in general and their processes of sociocultural change, especially under colonial rule.

Genres: History, Latin American History, Anthropology

585 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1984

Reviews

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you live in Chicago and I say “Chilam Balam,” you might think of the Mexican restaurant serving sustainable, shareable dishes in Lake View. But If you live in the Yucatán of Mexico, you might think of the obscure stew of Mayan lore cooked up in the decades following the 16th-century Spanish conquest.

Though written in Latin script, the Books of Chilam Balam were a means of covertly passing Mayan knowledge, ritual, prophecy, and history from generation to generation beneath the noses of Spanish overlords, whether of distant and detached encomenderos or nosy but overworked friars.

The Books of Chilam Balam are both a product and an analogy of the resilience of the Mayans. Though the Mayans were transformed by their encounter with a foreign culture backed by overwhelming military force, the once-lords of Yucatán conserved a Mayan way within a Latin world for centuries.

Nancy M. Farriss, historian and professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, documents in this award-winning study that the Mayans preserved their way better than most New World subjects of the Spanish crown. So successfully did they maintain cohesion that they fought a 50-year war for independence from the Mexican Republic before succumbing to Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorial army in 1901.

What Farriss wants to know is how they did it. She pursues an answer first through a survey of pre-conquest Mayan culture, and secondly through a survey of Mayan adaptation to Hispanic pressure through centuries of colonial rule and the opening decade of the Mexican Republic.

First, the Mayans benefited from geology. The Yucatán is unsuited to produce the gold and silver Spaniards craved, who therefore invested in neither its total conquest nor its total incorporation into a market economy. Mayans remained under a system of agricultural and labor tribute longer than most, often left more or less to their own devices as long as tribute flowed, with the option of flight to unpacified “zones of refuge” to the south and east when imperial demands became too heavy.

Second, Farriss locates Mayan resilience in a conception of reality that encourages communal bonding in a collective act of survival. Prior to the Spanish, she argues, Mayans clustered in urban communities, despite loads of lush and fertile land that would seem to encourage dispersal, because they shared a commitment to ritual and ceremony meant to honor the gods and preserve the universal order.

I think she overstates this case since the evidence for warfare between Mayan city-states seems to me an ample explainer for urbanization driven by a need for mutual defense. However, there’s no denying either that ritual and ceremony were as important to the Mayans as to any premodern people, or that a cult of Mesoamerican gods morphed fairly easily into a cult of European saints.

Farriss argues that Mayan adoption and adaptation of the saints became the organizing principle that kept alive a sense of communal identity. After political and religious horizons were violently reduced to the walls of the local parish church, the celebration and maintenance of the saints allowed the Mayans to retain a degree of cultural autonomy in a form acceptable to their Christian rulers.

As far as I’m concerned, relative Spanish disinterest in the region’s resources is the real reason for the astonishing degree to which a Mayan identity survived. This seems to follow from Farriss’s own account of how thoroughly this identity began to fracture under the energetic and reformist 18th-century Bourbons, and even more so under the militant and ethnic nationalism of independent Mexico.

Nevertheless, Farriss indisputably demonstrates that so long as the imperial ruling class was distracted and indolent, Mayan cultural survival took the form of a soul-deep devotion to the cult of the saints. This has useful implications for interpreting pre-Hispanic Mayan society since, more than most, they had a real shot at adapting to their new world on something approximating their own ancient terms.

Fundamentally, this book confirms me in my conviction that that government is best which governs least. The fact is that an activist state — whether an enlightened monarchy, a well-intentioned democracy, or a corrupt authoritarian regime — is well capable of plowing under any culture, however resilient. The Mayans learned this to their harm, and any people who wish to remain true to their own heritage on their own terms must mark well the fate of the Mayans.

[Estuardo Choc Salazar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed study written in the 80’s, on how the Maya people has undergo several setbacks and disasters -also known as colonial rule-, a glimpse of their way of life, evolution of institutions and their social organization. All of this based on documents the Spanish left not without several blank spaces across the centuries.
There is a profusion amount of statistical data that is interpreted by the author in a very partial way. Sometimes the names of towns and pueblos can be disorienting for a foreigner like me – a Guatemalan Mayan descendant-. It most be noted that this is an investigation on the Yucatán region therefore the society’s structure described cannot be applied to all the Mayan communities spread across Mesoamerica; as the author says, Yucatán was an isolated region, a periphery in the periphery of the world.
The religious system and institutions are described in detail, but some terms are not explained until the last third of the book.
A read just for someone concerned with the Mayan history and willing to spend several pages with description of interrelationships among institutions with Spanish names.

[Marcos Morales]

Me ha ayudado a entender la actualidad cultural de los mayas en la peninsula de Yucatán, el arraigo y peculiaridad de sus costumbres, su adaptación al medio en que viven, toda su magia en su esplendor. Pero como siempre, la experiencia deja más sabiduria, leer esto en tierras mayas es un regalo.

[AskHistorians]

A history of the colonial Maya as actors on their own stage, Farriss argues that their proven willingness for adaptability, even in pre-Columbian times, was critical to the Maya's survival.