English Version:
PREFACE The Maya as a people and as a culture did not vanish into space. They did not leave and go to Asia or anywhere, for that matter. They did leave the cultural religious centers and returned to small villages where they went on with life growing corn, squash, beans and other vegetables. They hunted deer, pheasants and wild turkey for meat and raised pigs and chickens. After the Spanish Conquest of the Mayab, life for the individual Maya became increasingly difficult. The "White Spanish" were called "Ts'uul" and held a much higher station in life than the Maya who considered themselves to be Indians or "Máasewaal".
This race distinction exists even today in the Mayab and has been the source of countless battles between the Maya and the "Whites". Even today the distinction is very evident.
The Maya felt persecuted by the Ts'uul, and history shows this to be true. The Ts'uul took land wherever they pleased and the Máasewaal in these areas were collected and put to work for little or no pay.
The Ts'uul built plantations and factories exploiting the labor of the Maya masses. Spanish slavers hauled thousands of Maya to the mines in northern Mexico where most died.
But, the struggle between the races was not merely manifested in forms of near slavery as this was only part of the problem. Besides bringing diseases from Spain that killed entire villages of the Maya, the whites built cities on top of sacred Maya Temples.
They had no understanding of the spiritual life of the Maya. This became a problem that brought the Ts'uul and the Máasewaal to the point of bloodshed, on numerous occasions.
The Maya wanted to hold on to their culture. The culture and lifestyle that had sustained them for thousands of years. So many of the Maya moved away from the Ts'uul. Entire villages pick up and left the lands of their ancestors. As far away from the whites as they could get.
They went into uninhabited parts of the jungle from Guatemala and Belize to the wilds of Chiapas and even into the southern remote lands of Quintana Roo. And there, in these places, they tried to live free from the ever changing world of the Ts'uul. David L. Smedley Calvert, Valladolid, Yucatan, 2000
C H A P T E R :
Chapter 11
Return from Belize
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