Chilam Balam November 27
There was once a “good time“ for the Maya, before the Conquest, when legend held that the rocks were soft and could be moved by whistling, when a single kernel of corn could feed a whole family, when the generations rolled on two giant celestial wheels, with eternal divine guidance. Then came the goddamned Spaniards.
They brought with them their swords and guns, their bloody contagions, their white Deity and His killing crucifix. The Catholics added Him to the pantheon of Amerindian gods—San Miguel and San Gabriel came to animate the native spirits of the rains and the animals. White wooden crosses proliferated in the cities of Merida and Valladolid, and in the jungle frontier of Yucatan. For the Maya slaves, possession of a holy native idol was a crime punishable by death, but no one could begrudge a man for keeping a white cross. It was the Christian thing to do. The Spaniards never realized that the Catholic idol was speaking to the Maya in an altogether different language.
By his own account, Father Diego de Landa of the Yucatan Inquisition was a changed man in his waning years. Starting in 1549, barely eighteen months after the conquest, he spent the next thirteen years as a zealous Franciscan priest, launching a bloody genocidal campaign in his capacity as omnipotent Bishop of Yucatan—torture, destruction, enslavement, all the usual fare for a brutal tyrant. He shattered the false idols, erased the vital images, dismantled the stone temples, victimized the lost souls—in the name of Christianity.
Then he burned all the books, evidently tens of thousands of them. Some claim many were saved and hidden from the nonbelievers. Nothing like a good book-burning to stir the ire of a suppressed population. Indeed, Diego de Landa fairly succeeded in removing all traces of Maya recorded history. By removing their written language, he effectively eradicated their memory.
Only years after this, in 1566, did the friar put quill to parchment and write a detailed description of the Maya he had come to know during their final throes. For those with anthropological interests, his small book provides a unique window into the lives, rituals, language, numeracy, and customs of these people—on the eve of their terrible subjugation. The fact that he composed this text much later, entirely from memory—he was, by then, an old man living in Spain—scholars dispute the accuracy of his accounts. They most certainly dispute his motivations. Was this book a legitimate act of contrition, as his defenders assert? By taking pains to document the lost lives of a people betrayed, was he truly confessing his monstrous sins, his mutated piety, his misguided holy mission?
No, replies the chorus of critics. Instead, his change of heart sprang from the evolving policy regarding native conversions. Such genocidal methods had fallen from favor by 1560, and his reputation was in free fall. To the end, he was a politician dedicated to self-preservation, and he wrote a book that would not be burned.
Just in case there is any suggestion of some newfound communion with the Maya, one need only consult the treacherous correspondence (presently housed in the Hispanic Society Museum of New York), in which the Bishop forges a letter that sings his own praise to the Spanish King, signed by Maya elders under pain of death. Only days later, these very same wise men managed to send their own letter to the King. “Your Catholic Bishop is a madman,“ is essentially what it said. They never lived to receive a response.
In 1847, almost three centuries to the day after Montejo’s capture of T-Ho, afterward to be the site of colonial Merida, the ancestral descendants of Yucatan raised machetes and contraband muskets against the Latinos, both European and Creole and Mestizo, all of them, using their own god as the rationale:
“You were always recommending the name of God to us, yet you never believed in His name, and now you are not prepared nor have you the courage to accept the exchange for your blows. If we are killing, you first showed us the way.“
“Kill those who have shirts!“ cried one warrior. Thousands laid torch to the cane fields and the henequen twine plantations. They cut the telegraph lines, and they poisoned the Cenote water sources. They tortured the men and defiled the women and beheaded the children. They met genocide with genocide. It was the Christian thing to do.
“The whites say they do not believe in Jesus Christ, because they have burned the cornfield. If we die at the hands of the whites, patience. The whites think that these things are all ended, but never. It is so written in the book of Chilam Balam, and so even has said Jesus Christ.“
The immortalized words of the 16th-century Maya prophet foresaw the coming of the conquistadors and, in the 19th-century, starting in Valladolid, the 40-year Caste War of the Talking Crosses—and everything that followed on the peninsula: Eat, eat, thou hast bread;
Drink, drink, thou hast water;
On that day, dust possesses the earth;
On that day, a blight is on the face of the earth;
On that day, a cloud rises,
On that day, a mountain rises,
On that day, a strong man seizes the land;
On that day, things fall to ruin,
On that day, the tender leaf is destroyed,
On that day, the dying eyes are closed.
On that day, three signs are on a tree,
On that day, three generations hang there,
On that day, the battle flag is raised,
And they are scattered afar in the forests.
On that day, the battle flag is raised,
And they are scattered afar in the forests.
Chilam Balam