Negotiating Colonialism on the Southern Frontier of Spanish Yucatán

Abstract

This chapter describes Colonial Period (A.D. 1546-1750) and Early Mexican Republic Period (A.D. 1750-1847) settlement patterns as a product of individual negotiations. Data come from the Spanish colonization of the Maya in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Investigations in Beneficios Altos, at the southern extent of Spanish administrative control, suggests that colonialism was negotiated between individual agents seeking to maximize their personal, family, and communal circumstances. Sometimes those agents to act in the interests of the Spanish (clearly laid out, regulated, and disseminated in the form of administrative policies and hierarchies). At other times agents resisted hegemonic pressure. The results of these negotiations are explored through settlement patterns and the documentary record of Beneficios Altos in this remote frontier region with its notoriously porous border. The negotiation strategy is traced into the Republic Period, after independence from Spanish colonialism.