Matthew Restall

After invading highland Guatemala in 1524, Spaniards claimed to have smashed the Kaqchikel and K’iche’ Maya kingdoms and to have forged a new colony—with their leader, Pedro de Alvarado, as Guatemala’s conquistador. This volume shows that the real story of the Spanish invasion was very different. Designed to be an accessible introduction to the topic as well as a significant contribution to conquest scholarship, the volume presents for the first time English translations of firsthand accounts by Spaniards, Nahuas, and Mayas.Alvarado’s letters to Cortés, published here in English for the first time in almost a century, are supplemented with accounts by one of his cousins, by his brother Jorge, and by Bernal Díaz and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Nahua perspectives are presented in the form of pictorial evidence, along with written testimony by Tlaxcalan and Aztec veterans who fought as invading allies of the Spaniards; their claim to have done most of the fighting emerges as a powerful argument. The views of the invaded are represented by Kaqchikel and Tz’utujil accounts. Together, these sources reveal a fascinating multiplicity of perspectives and show how the conquest wars of the 1520s were a profoundly brutal moment in the history of the Americas.

This is the first book to deal primarily and specifically with relations between Africans and native peoples in colonial Latin America. Matthew Restall has collected nine essays that represent contributions to the larger fields of colonial Latin American history, African diaspora studies, and ethnohistory. Among the subjects addressed are marriage and miscegenation, identity and nomenclature, cultural exchanges, labour, and co-operation in resisting colonialism versus collaboration. The authors examine core areas such as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Brazil, and peripheral ones such as Florida, Colombia, and the Orinoco basin. The contributors find that relations between black and native peoples were sometimes harmonious, sometimes hostile, depending on local dynamics and individual agendas. Native and black soldiers fought sometimes as comrades, sometimes as adversaries, and couples in mixed marriages might identify as Indian or as black depending on where the advantage lay in a given society.

This pathbreaking work is a social and cultural history of the Maya peoples of the province of Yucatan in colonial Mexico, spanning the period from shortly after the Spanish conquest of the region to its incorporation as part of an independent Mexico. Instead of depending on the Spanish sources and perspectives that have formed the basis of previous scholarship on colonial Yucatan, the author aims to give a voice to the Maya themselves, basing his analysis entirely on his translations of hundreds of Yucatec Maya notarial documents—from libraries and archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States—most of which have never before received scholarly attention. These documents allow the author to reconstruct the social and cultural world of the Maya municipality, or cah, the self-governing community where most Mayas lived and which was the focus of Maya social and political identity. The first two parts of the book examine the ways in which Mayas were organized and differentiated from each other within the community, and the discussion covers such topics as individual and group identities, sociopolitical organization, political factionalism, career patterns, class structures, household and family patterns, inheritance, gender roles, sexuality, and religion. The third part explores the material environment of the cah, emphasizing the role played by the use and exchange of land, while the fourth part describes in detail the nature and significance of the source documentation, its genres and its language. Throughout the book, the author pays attention to the comparative contexts of changes over time and the similarities or differences between Maya patterns and those of other colonial-era Mesoamericans, notably the Nahuas of central Mexico.