The inhabitants are the most forlorn and treacherous in all the lands
discovered to this time. . . . In them I have failed to find truth touching
anything.

-- Francisco de Montejo, 1534

May [the Spaniards] suffer the penance for the evils they have done to us,
and may our descendants to the fourth generation be recompensed the
great persecution that came upon us.

-- Francisco de Montejo Xiu, 1567

The conquest and colonization of the peninsula of Yucatan has long
been symbolized by the founding of the Spanish city of Mérida on the
ruins of the Maya city of Tihó. The image of destruction and construction,
of Spanish Yucatan as phoenix rising from the ashes of Maya civilization,
was modified in the iconography of the celebration of Mérida's 350th
birthday in 1992, in which a bearded conquistador made way for an indig-
enous warrior in resurgent pose. This interpretation says as much about
the old historiography of New Spain as it does about the political potency
of indigenous imagery in modern Mexico, but it has little to do with the
history of the postconquest Maya.

A more accurate metaphor would be that of colonial-era Tihó, a Maya
community neither destroyed nor unaltered by the conquest. In such set-
tlements the indigenous people of Yucatan continued to speak and write
their own language, now supplemented by a sprinkling of Spanish words
to describe the new objects and institutions that affected their lives, and
officially written with the Latin alphabet in formulas and formats bor-
rowed from Spanish legal procedures. The Maya of Yucatan continued to
produce consumable and woven goods, a good deal of which went in
tribute or forced sales to Spanish settlers and officials. They still chose their
own leaders and administered their own affairs, though only at the com-
munity level and sometimes along guidelines laid down by the colonial
authorities. Above all, the Maya maintained a sense of identity and affilia-
tion with the communities in which they continued to live, the integrity
and internal structures of which were sanctioned by a Spanish regime
dependent upon indigenous mechanisms of tribute and labor provision.
The Maya called such communities cahob (in the singular, cah).

Second only to the cah as a social unit determining Maya identity was
the patronym group or extended family lineage, the chibal. These two
social foci helped determine not only how the Maya reacted to coloniza-
tion but also how they reacted to the military phase of the conquest.

A regional federation of some kind centered on the cah of Mayapan
had broken up, following a massacre of Cocom nobles by the rival Xiu
chibal, a half-century before Christopher Columbus traded with Maya
merchants off the Yucatec coast in 1502. Although Columbus never set foot

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