on the peninsula, within a decade Spanish survivors of a Caribbean ship-
wreck were washed ashore. Their fate was a symbolic one. Most were soon
killed -- sacrificed, according to one of two survivors, Gerónimo de Agui-
lar, who in 1519 was able to join Hernán Cortés on the Yucatec island of
Cozumel and subsequently to take part in the conquest of central Mexico.
The other survivor, Gonzalo Guerrero, has a place in Mexican legend as
the father of the first mestizo; by Aguilar's account, Guerrero had "gone
native," marrying a Maya woman, wearing a warrior's earplugs, and lead-
ing a successful attack on a Spanish expedition at Cape Catoche in 1518 -- a
feat he repeated through the 1520's. Guerrero's appeal today is romantic
and figurative, the prototypical Maya-saving non-Maya whose twentieth-
century successors might include Felipe Carrillo Puerto and Subcoman-
dante Marcos; yet it was ultimately Aguilar who came to represent the
future of Spanish-Maya relations.

Maya resistance to Spanish intrusion was effective for another genera-
tion, with expeditions under one or more of the Francisco de Montejos
(father, son, and nephew all bearing the same name) turned back between
1527 and 1535. Because Maya loyalties were localized rather than cen-
tralized, the invaders were unable to match the collapse of the well-
organized Nahua resistance that followed the destruction of Tlatelolco-
Tenochtitlán. Nonetheless, owing to a number of favorable conditions, the
elder Montejo, styled adelantado after his conqueror's license, was able to
establish a permanent colony in the 1540's. Many of these conditions were
a direct consequence of the Spanish invasions -- the damage wrought by
repeated invasions and the economic disruption caused by the collapse of
long-distance trade following the conquests of first the Nahuas and then
the Guatemalan Mayas, and the demographic devastation of the Maya by
smallpox epidemics (a population reduced by some 70 to 80 percent in the
early sixteenth century was halved again in the first three decades of
colonial rule). There was also a period of drought exacerbated by a plague
of locusts. The Spanish use of large numbers of Nahua auxiliaries (who
feature prominently in the Calkiní account of the conquest, for example)
was added to the ongoing interregional conflict, highlighted by the Cocom
taking their revenge on the Xiu in 1536 both for Mayapan and for the
friendly Xiu reception given to Montejo.

The Xiu were not the only ruling chibal interested in making common
cause with the Spaniards; the Pech were likewise persuaded to cooperate
with the founders of the colonial settlement at the southern end of the
region they dominated. The Spaniards were thus able to turn around what
had been the disadvantage of Maya decentralization and to combine this
divide-and-conquer strategy with periodic and systematic violence, ex-
emplified by the brutal suppression of a Maya "rebellion" in 1546-47 and
what one Xiu leader would later call "the great persecution" of 1562 in

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