Maya Conquistador [Paperback]

Matthew Restall (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807055077 | ISBN-13: 978-0807055076 | Publication Date: August 30, 1999

Exploring firsthand accounts written by Maya nobles from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries-many of them previously untranslated-Restall offers the first Maya account of the conquest. The story holds surprising twists: The conquistadors were not only Spaniards but also Mayas, reconstructing their own governance and society, and the Spanish colonization of the Yucatan was part of an ongoing pattern of adaptation and survival for centuries.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Spanish conquest of the Maya homeland in southern Mexico and Central Mexico, writes historian Matthew Restall, had three major episodes: the arrival of reconnaissance parties soon after Cortez's first landing in 1520, the subsequent arrival of conquistadors and their newly subjugated Aztec allies, and finally, the arrival of Spanish colonists. These episodes have been related in official Spanish documents. Now, with Restall's translation of hitherto unknown Maya codices, they are related through the eyes of the Maya themselves, who recount, for instance, the advent of "Castilian men [who came] to ask for the way to Uloa, to the land where gold and plumage and cacao come from." Such reversed-perspective documents abound in Aztec literature, but this is the first discovery of similar accounts from the Maya, and it makes an important contribution to the ethnographic and historical literature. --Gregory MacNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

These cultural excursions into the "conflicted yet enamored history" of Mexican American interchange sporadically catch fire, but more often they're too thinly researched and too dense with theory to do more than set off sparks. It's not for lack of subject matter. Limon, a professor of English and anthropology, is interested in how everything from the meteoric rises of Texas politicians Henry Cisneros and Ann Richards to the fiction of Cormac McCarthy speaks to a complicated history of border crossings and power politics. In the face of repeated Anglo romanticization of Mexico as sensual and fatalistic, he wonders, how can artists and intellectuals on both sides of this divide present affirmative imagery? Limon finds answers in the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, such classic Westerns as High Noon and Southwestern kitsch as expressed in the ballad "El Paso," in whose cross-cultural love affair he discerns "a kind of victory for that culture and its people at a time when such recognitions were few and far between." Yet only his discussion of the career of pop singer Selena ("at a moment of absolute perceived political failure," she provided "the only remaining possibility of freedom and triumph with integrity") fully supports his arguments. Some readers will enjoy the author's theoretical play, but others will prefer an interpretation capable of more than suggestion.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (August 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807055077
• ISBN-13: 978-0807055076
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #840,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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