Fear, conspiracy, and rebellion in early colonial Yucatan: the enemy without, the enemy within

• Autores: Matthias Gorissen
• Localización: Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas = Anuario de Historia de América Latina ( JbLA ), ISSN-e 2194-3680, Nº. 44, 2007, págs. 67-91
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study describes a brief period of political unrest and turmoil in Yucatan during the penultimate decade of the sixteenth century. Based on previously untapped archival sources, it tries to correct and extend earlier accounts of the two successive "Campeche uprisings". We suggest that these events should be analysed as part of a larger culture of fear which characterized the uneasy alliance between Maya and Spaniards in Yucatan's early colonial period. Consequently, contemporary descriptions of "Indian rebellion" were shaped by stereotyped representational conventions and mythical elaborations. This transformation of accounts into a standardized story of Indian rebellion aimed at the exclusion of alternative interpretations. In a second step, these standardized narratives became politically effective themselves, as they taught Spanish officials how to define, how to detect, and how to deal with cases of "Indian rebellion". The particular form these stories took in a peripheral region of Spain's colonial empire is best described as a regional variant of the political ideology prevalent in the empire's centre. This reading also undermines the more conventional interpretation of colonial Maya rebellions as revitalization movements.