Nicole Fano
Dr. Barrett
World Civilizations: Latin America
21 Oct 2013
Paper One: Guatemala According to World-O-Meters, a real time world statistics website, there are more than seven billion people in the world. Is that not incredible? Over seven billion people. Yet, most of us will never truly or try to understand all the different types of cultures or their history that make up the total population in the world. Being a young lady who is half Filipino and Italian, it has always interested me how different the Filipino and Italian cultures are when comparing the two. These differences range from the food to mannerisms and traditions. However, there is one thing in common with these two very different cultures, they have a history of how they came to be. In order to truly understand all types of people, we must take the time to look at their history and learn about it. In this paper, I’ve chosen to take a deeper, more in-depth look at Guatemala and the ways people lived prior to the 1800s in terms of transculturation, hegemony, and the Columbian Exchange. “Transculturation” is the merging and converging of cultures. According to Maureen Shea, author of Culture and Customs of Guatemala, when Christopher Columbus arrived, it was “an encounter between European and Mesoamerican worlds” (2). The Europeans had arrived to establish “dominance while the Mesoamericans fiercely resisted the invaders, especially initially”. However, they found it “advantageous to acculturate themselves to the ways of the native population”. After Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec empire in 1521, “Cortes sent one of this most able and ruthless generals, Pedro de Alvarado, into Central America in 1523” which then he eventually “entered what came to be Guatemalan territory” (3). Alvarado, after defeating the Quiches leaders and enslaving hundreds of Quiches, “established his dominance in the Kingdom of Guatemala” which consists of which consists of present-day Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Belize, and Chiapas in southern Mexico. In Four Keys to Guatemala by Vera Kelsey and Lilly De Jongh Osborne, Alvarado returned to Spain “where he was named adelantado (governer) of the Kingdom of Guatemala” (9). This was much different to the way the Mayan Indians hierarchy of power worked. Instead of the Spanish’s method of having a governor that was given power via the Spanish Crown, the Mayan’s had clans in which power was passed down by birth. Alvarado’s brother, Jorge de Alvarado, moved the capital to a base of a “towering volcano called Volcan de Agua” and also two other volcanos, Fuego and Acatenango, ringed the area” (3).
The year 1541 ended up being an unfortunate year for the Spanish and the Mayans because there was a “massive eruption [that] devastated the entire city” and also their leader Alvarado died in the battle of Mexico” (4). Peter Calvert wrote in Guatemala: A Nation in Turmoil, that after the death of Alvarado, the Spanish government created a “complex, bureaucratic system to establish more control over the colonies” (57). For decades after that, the Spanish utilized their “position of power to enforce their domination over the Indians, initially enslaving them and later imposing the encomienda (indentureship) and repartimeiento (draft) system of labor on them” (Shea 4). The colonists went as far to use the approval of Spanish Crown to force the Mayan Indians to “abandon their lands and relocate into reducciones, which were villages solely populated by Indians” (4). This can be compared to when the enslaved Jewish people were forced to live ghettos during the Holocaust and World War II time period. By having the Indians move into reducciones, instead of it protecting them from the Spanish, this was a means to “takeover the lands by the settlers and the enforcement of the encomienda and repartimiento systems of forced labor” (4). “The encomienda system was finally abolished in 1720 by King Felipe V, it is still continued to exist in practice until some 40 years later” (4). “The Spanish Crown ruled that Indians had to be paid for their labor, which lead to a decline in encomiendas” which ended up being replaced by the repartimiento system (4). This ended up being another form of “forced labor” despite the fact that the Indians were supposed to be “paid a minimum wage and we re allowed to return to their villages at the end of the work period,” but this system was also “fraught with all kinds of abuses and was another form of forced labor” (Kelsey 60).
Once these systems were abolished, in result of these policies during the Colonial period, the “best lands “ were in the “hands of a small number of settlers who had won favor with the Spanish Crown” (Shea 5). Indians were removed from the lands that they had forced into labor for new landowners, and there were “numerous rebellions and other forms of resistance by the Mayan Indians” (5). Essentially, the Mayan Indians were stripped of any chance of having any land and were forced to move.
Aside from power (in a hierarchy sense), there was more blending of the Spanish and Mayan Indian cultures that became more and more frequent: at a racial level. John Palmer Hawkins, author of Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity, and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala, “interracial relations between the Indians and Spanish, whether coerced or chosen, became more and more frequent” (24). Due to this, the majority of the population of Guatemala today is of “mixed blood,” and the “distinctions between Indians and non-Indians (or Ladinos) are more of a question of ethnicity than race” (5).
Transculturation between the Spanish and the Mayan Indians was not a smooth process. There was much force imposed on the Mayans by the Spanish and also much resistance by the Mayans toward the Spanish. However, the process in which ideas and beliefs, like religion, are accepted without any force is hegemony, which was also seen in the midst of the Spanish conquest.
Just like in any other culture, religion is one of the biggest elements and driving forces in an individual or populations’ lives. When the Spanish came to Latin America, not only did they bring their ideas but also their belief system too: Christianity and Catholicism. The church played an important role in subduing the Mayan Indians. In 1543, Dominican friars came with a plan to “consolidate control over the Mayan Indians, thereby making it easier to Christianize them and keep them away from pagan practices” (Shea 4). The Mayan Indians were converted to Christianity and teaching them “that they would receive their just reward after death” (5). In a sense, this justified the settlers’ and Spanish Crown’s treatment of the Indians and that the Indians “should bear the suffering of this life in good faith” (Kelsey 19). The Spanish did not force the Indians to believe in their religion but more coerced them to believe in it by stating this. Who would not want to believe in something like this when, despite everything they believed in, being enslaved was still happening?
Not only did the Spanish bring over their system of beliefs and ideas, but they brought over some unexpected things during the time period of the Columbian Exchange.
The Columbian Exchange is extremely well-known with the crops that were brought over from the Old World to the New World. Little did the Spanish know, they were also bringing over some microscopic organisms that the human eye cannot see: disease. When the Europeans arrived in 1492, it is estimated that the population of Central America consisted of eight million inhabitants (Shea 20). “It [Guatemala] suffered badly from the ravages of disease and locusts (Calvert 58). “Hundreds of thousands died of epidemics such as smallpox and pulmonary illnesses. Some of the native populations came close to extinction, especially in the Antilles. In Central America, it is estimated that one-third to one-half of the population perished” (Shea 20). Not to mention, the Europeans brought over advanced weaponry. Despite the advantage the natives had in numbers, “the Spaniards had far more superior weapons, such as cannons that killed many people at once” (20). Therefore, the Spaniards “terrorized and disseminated entire native populations” (20).
The Spaniards were more of a negative aspect in the Mayan Indians’ lives. When the Spaniards came to conquer the lands, they enslaved the Mayan Indians to do their farming in harsh working conditions. Also, the Spanish made the Mayan Indians believe that they were inferior to the “almighty” Spanish, by coercing them to believe in Christianity and the “suffer in good faith.” Lastly, the Spanish brought over diseases and advanced weapons during the Columbian Exchange that assisted in the decline of the Mayan population. The Mayan population was better off without the Spanish. We’ll never know what life would be like had they lived and not been conquered by the Spanish, but due to these aspects, the Mayan Indians would have been better off without the Spanish.

Works Cited
Calvert, Peter. Guatemala: A Nation in Turmoil. Boulder: Westview P, 1985. Print.
Hawkins, John Palmer. Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity, and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico P, 1984. Print.
Kelsey, Vera, and Lilly De Jongh Osborne. Four Keys to Guatemala,. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961. Print.
Shea, Maureen E. Culture and Customs of Guatemala. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2001. Print.
"World Population Clock: 7 Billion People (2013) - Worldometers." World Population Clock. Worldometers.info, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 21 Oct. 2013. <http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/>.