Middle American Indian

▪ people

Introduction

      member of any of the aboriginal peoples inhabiting the area from northern Mexico to Nicaragua.

      The physical spine of Middle America is the broad mountain chain extending from the southern end of the Rockies to the northern tip of the Andes, with Middle America in the area (Belize) from northern Mexico to Nicaragua. The mountain chain marks off the area into four major regions. The heartland of Middle America is the central valley of Mexico. A second region is the highlands along the southern Pacific slope of Mexico. Beyond the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are the southeastern highlands in the Mexican state of Chiapas and in Guatemala. The arid region in the northwest of Mexico is a fourth region.

      Within these four major geophysical regions there is tremendous variety in ecology, climate, soil, and the possibilities of human life. The mountains crumple the face of the land into a multitude of valleys and microenvironments; the result is a mosaic of crops, peoples, and settlements about which it is difficult to generalize. The high valleys of central Mexico, Oaxaca, Jalisco, and Guatemala have been the most densely settled parts of Middle America. But the lower slopes of mountains near the seacoasts have also carried substantial populations. The steamy tropics of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the hot limestone thumb of Yucatán have also been heavily populated.

      The Indians of Middle America live almost everywhere in the region. The basic requirement for human settlement is water. The major river systems and the high valley lakes have been the primary settlement sites since prehistoric times.

The people

      The Indians of Middle America are all descended from Asiatic forebears who crossed the Bering Strait and moved southward. They tend, except in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to be small in stature (155–160 centimetres or a little over five feet on the average), with brown to coppery skin, straight black hair, and dark-brown eyes often set above high cheek bones, sometimes with epicanthic folds. The Maya facial features are particularly distinctive, being flatter than those of the other groups; the Maya also have more prominent noses, and a tendency to rounder heads. Mexico is basically a mixed (mestizo) nation; there has long been extensive interbreeding between Indians and non-Indians. In Guatemala there has been much less interbreeding. But the term “Indian” is not a biological designation so much as a social, cultural, economic, and linguistic summary of the differences between some rural ways of life and the dominant national culture. Race in and of itself is not socially as important as it is in other parts of the world. The usual census definition of “Indian” is based on linguistic criteria, and the population figures for Indians must therefore be read as figures for speakers of Indian languages.

Cultural areas

      While the social heritage of Middle America is highly complex, within the broad historical flow five separate cultural areas can be distinguished. They are regional configurations of the basic Middle American cultural patterns. One cultural area is that of the Maya. The southern, highland Maya were and are concentrated in western Guatemala and the state of Chiapas in Mexico. The northern Maya inhabited the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and the jungle of Petén in Guatemala. The Maya of these two regions form a continuous territorial and historical entity. (There are also contemporary Maya people in Veracruz and San Luis Potosí in Mexico, known as the Huastec.) The monumental ruins left by the pre-Columbian Maya are one of the puzzles of anthropology; theirs is the only civilization known to have flourished in a tropical rain forest (tropical rainforest).

      The southern Mexican highlands and the adjacent coastal regions form a second cultural area within the basic Middle American pattern. This region covers most of the present Mexican states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, the southeastern part of Veracruz, and parts of Puebla and Morelos. Its highland people developed the traditions of the Mixtec and Zapotec, whose ruins survive at Mitla and Monte Albán, whereas the coastal people seem to have been somewhat isolated from them.

      A third cultural area is the central Mexican highlands, including the valleys of Puebla, Toluca, and Morelos, along with the eastern slopes of the Mesa Central and parts of the Balsas River Basin. This area was the centre of the Aztec Empire. Mexico City is built on the ruins of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, and descendants of the Aztecs still live in the area.

      The mountain chain around the high lake of Pátzcuaro, in present-day Michoacán, forms another cultural area. The relative isolation created by the mountains permitted the Tarascans (Tarasco) to work out their own cultural variant. They reached a level of social and political organization comparable to that of the Aztec and the Maya.

      A fifth cultural area is northwest Mexico. This region is not historically or culturally a single unit; it exhibits three major types of ecology and three major types of human adaptation. The high mountains provided possibilities for simple agriculture without irrigation, whereas the desert required settlements around valley bottoms dependent on floodwaters in the rainy season. In the west the abundant shellfish were the basis for a coastal culture. The historical forces at work in the northwest area were different from those in the four other cultural areas. The population was taken over by the Jesuits, who built mission communities. The relative isolation of the region following the collapse of Spanish power, together with the weakness of the succeeding Mexican governments, permitted the survival of a blend of Spanish–Indian culture.

Language groups

      Hundreds of languages were spoken in Middle America (Mesoamerican Indian languages). Some linguists have grouped them in a number of phyla, or superfamilies, each phylum being at the same classificatory level as, say, Indo-European. The Hokaltecan superfamily includes the Yuman family (four surviving languages, two extinct); the Serian family (one surviving language, four extinct); the Coahuiltecan family (four extinct languages); the Tequistlatecan family, with one living language; the Supanecan family (one surviving language, two extinct); and the Jicaquean family, with one living language. A second phylum, Uto-Aztecan (Uto-Aztecan languages), comprises the Piman family (four surviving languages, eight extinct); the Taracahitian family (two surviving languages, 39 extinct); and the Aztecoidan family (three surviving languages, 18 extinct).

      Attempts have been made in the past to associate the large family of Mayan languages (Maya languages) (about 27 living languages) with several other Mesoamerican Indian languages (the Mixe-Zoque and Totonacan families, primarily) as the Macro-Mayan or Macro-Penutian languages; the latter term supposes an association also between the Mayan languages and the Penutian phylum of North American Indian languages. These groupings are not generally accepted by modern linguists.

      The Oto-Manguean (Oto-Manguean languages) phylum includes the Oto-Pamean family (six surviving languages, one extinct); the Chinantecan family (one living language); the Zapotecan family (two surviving languages, one of which, Zapotec, is so diversified that its many dialects constitute mutually unintelligible languages); the Mixtecan family (three living languages); the Popolocan family (four surviving languages, one extinct); the Chorotegan family (eight extinct languages); and the Amuzgo family (one living language).

      In addition to the four phyla there are the Tarascan family of one living language; the Huavean family of one living language; and the Xinca-Lenca languages spoken in small enclaves in the southern part of the region. Finally, there are also 39 extinct languages that linguists have not been able to relate to each other or to any other (see Mesoamerican Indian languages).

Characteristics of Indian cultures

      This linguistic variety shows how diverse were the aboriginal cultures. Even though it is possible to generalize broadly about cultural resemblances or patterns, the actual cultural unit was local or regional. This is true despite the existence of larger political units, such as the Quiché of classical Guatemala, or the Aztec Empire. The broad characteristics of the Indians of Middle America may nevertheless be sketched in profile, with the caveat that the profile is everywhere varied by local circumstance. When the Spaniards conquered the Indians, they removed the indigenous ruling class and placed themselves at the apex of society. They also brought Roman Catholicism, horses, cattle, wheels, iron, and new forms of political and economic organization. The Indian culture of today is a blend of indigenous elements, the culture of the Spanish, and the historical precipitate of the 500 years since the conquest.

      Middle American cultures exist in located, named communities, each of which has a physical centre housing the patron saint of the community. The basis of subsistence is maize (corn), cultivated in small plots; but there is a myriad of crafts and artisans, and communities tend to be economically specialized. The family is the basic social unit, each living in a separate structure. Males and females wear distinctive costumes; where they have adopted modern dress, it is chiefly among the men rather than the women. Men do the heavy agricultural tasks and women the domestic chores. Men are in charge of the indigenous cults; women are more prominent in the Catholic aspects of religion. There is little restriction on any economic activity, and no taboos hedge occupational choice; but modern economic organization is little developed. The marketplace is the focus of economic life.

      Families are internally hierarchical, with males and elders dominating. Both the father's and the mother's kin are recognized in tracing relatives, but there is a patrilineal emphasis in the transmitting of names and of some real property. Marriages (marriage) are arranged for sons and daughters by their elders, who negotiate among themselves through a series of fixed visits and gift exchanges. Often the groom must perform service for his in-laws; during this period he may reside with them, later to set up his own abode. Marriages are easily dissolved in the absence of children, and a man may have a succession of wives; when children arrive, however, they stabilize a marriage.

      The community's political organization is housed in a central building, usually opening upon a plaza. The personnel of the political organization form a hierarchy, with its top members recognized as spokesmen or representatives of the Indian community by the national government. The political offices are closely interwoven with a similar hierarchy, whose personnel serve the local church and the religious brotherhoods (cofradías), and plan the annual festal cycle. The personnel of the two hierarchies tend to alternate their periods of service between the civil and the religious wings. All adult men serve in this civil–religious hierarchy; in small communities they eventually reach the top posts and retire to become respected elders (principales). The annual change of personnel is accompanied by ritual.

      There are no social classes in the Indian communities, but there are considerable differences in prestige, wealth, and individual achievement. There is an age hierarchy, especially among males, largely based on previous public service in the civil–religious hierarchy.

      In the life cycle of these Indians, the important events are baptism and marriage. There are no puberty rites; and death is accepted matter-of-factly, followed by a Catholic wake. The concepts of sickness and disease (Central American and northern Andean Indian) are various. Illness is often thought to be caused by invasions of wind (aires) into the body or by disturbed emotional states, or it is thought to be most likely to strike during certain periods. Foods and natural substances are thought to be hot and cold, strong and weak; these conceptions are used both in diagnosis and in curing. Those who cure are specialists or semispecialists, frequently believed to perform witchcraft or other noxious magic.

      In the realm of the sacred there are a large number of supernatural beings and places. The deities are arranged in a vague hierarchy, sometimes with the Christian (Christianity) God at the apex. Christian saints are the chief focus of worship, but with them are associated various pagan attributes and forces, including the natural forces of wind, rain, and lightning. Some saints have strong cults, their effigies being housed in a cult house or special temple and cared for on a daily basis. Liquor is consumed during sacred ceremonies and in that context is itself sacred.

      The annual cycle is regulated by the European calendar. There is a series of religiously derived festivals, the chief of which are All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day, Easter week, and the Day of the Cross (in September). At least 82 different Indian communities still use the old (Mayan calendar) pre-Conquest (Aztec calendar) calendars in some agricultural rituals and for purposes of divination.

      The world view is animistic in the sense that the Indians see the world as peopled by spirits, souls, ghosts, and witches (witchcraft) capable of inflicting harm if the proper ritual precautions are not taken. Omens, dreams, and talismans are of great importance. People are also believed to transform themselves into animals and mystically eat the life from a victim. Some communities execute witches. In religious practice, ritual conformity is more important than inner piety; if a person does not hold a ritual office, he engages in very little daily religious activity.

      Slander, gossip, and envy are strongly condemned, although they are an important means of influencing social behaviour. In general, however, the rule of law, as expressed in the formal organization of the civil–religious hierarchy, is much more important than personal leadership. Great ambition is discouraged, but industry and diligence are much lauded.

      This generalized profile of Middle American cultures fits most closely the areas of the former high cultures—the Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, Tarascan, and Mixtec areas. It needs modification for the northwest culture area, where the communities have less economic specialization and interdependence. It also does not fit some coastal Indians who have become part of the export economy, such as the vanilla-growing Totonac of Veracruz, or the Indians who work on the sisal plantations of Yucatán, where many approach the status of a rural proletariat.

The prehistoric period

      More than 10,000 years ago, the Middle American Indians were hunters who roamed the country in bands of four to ten persons. Their quarry were mammoths, llamas, bison, and wild horses, as can be seen from the remains found at Tequixquiac, north of the central valley of Mexico. Some also hunted small game and gathered the seeds of wild plants. The seed gatherers and the big-game hunters coexisted for thousands of years, until a climatic shift around 7500 BC favoured the seed gatherers.

      About 4500 BC, cultivated squash and gourds became part of the subsistence of the Indians, and they adopted a seasonal nomadic pattern. Around 3500 BC the basic crops were domesticated: maize, beans, and squash have been found in remains at Tehuacán. The Neolithic Period was beginning. By 2500 BC farming supplied about 10 percent of the food intake of the people, and by 2000 BC the first permanent settlements based on farming had been established, apparently villages of fewer than 100 persons. After 2000 BC farming became of major importance, and in the main areas the people were fully sedentary. They now produced forms of pottery.

      From 1500 BC to the beginning of the Christian Era (often called the Formative period), the basic techniques of intensive agriculture were worked out, the full range of cultivated plants was developed, the pottery and art styles were formed, and the transition from small villages to ceremonial towns of 5,000 inhabitants was completed. The archaeological evidence of this may be seen in the central valley of Mexico at El Arbolillo, Zacatenco, Tlatilco, and, finally, Ticoman. The same developmental sequence occurred in the Formative period of highland Guatemala, as shown in the excavations at Kaminaljuyú near Guatemala City.

      From the beginning of the Christian Era to about AD 1000 the cultures of Middle America passed through their Classic, or Florescent, period. In the Pyramids at Teotihuacán and at Cholula, in the Oaxaca valley at Monte Albán, in the ruins at Tikal and Uaxactún in Petén, and at Copán and Piedras Negras, there is monumental testimony to the rise of theocratic civilizations. The differentiation between the earthbound peasants and the class of priests is marked by the spread of the hieratic art called by archaeologists the Olmec style, the greatest example being at La Venta in Tabasco, Mexico. Olmec art made much use of carved jade and the symbol of the jaguar. In the symbolic vocabulary of Middle America, the jaguar is associated with Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, and therefore represents the forces of nature that make the crops grow. Tlaloc also dwells in caves from which lightning is thought to come; caves mean towns and settlements, so the jaguar probably represents the control of society as well as of nature. Jaguars are carved on axes, pots, and human likenesses; men wear jaguar skins; and human faces are depicted with jaguar-like mouths.

      This symbolism fitted well the new theocratic societies of the Maya—the Nahuatl, the Zapotec, and the Mixtec. Large raised pyramids (pyramid) were built for the public enactment of religious rites by the ruling priestly class. These structures were ceremonial centres where priests and specialists lived, and where the populace assembled for periodic rituals. The priests were important in the agricultural cycle, for which the ancient calendars were first devised. These calendars evolved into precise instruments for the measurement of time and came to express the philosophical ideas of the priestly intellectuals. The full poetry of Middle American calendrics is expressed in the Maya calendar “long counts,” for which stone pillars were erected.

      The ceremonial centres of the Classic period produced many luxury items made from imported goods such as seashells, feathers, obsidian, fine flint, jade, cotton, and cocoa beans. The centres paid for these imports by exporting finished ceremonial objects to the peripheries. The economy of the city-states of this period depended on the intensive cultivation of maize and on huge drafts of peasant labour for the building of the temple complexes. The building was done with a rather simple technology for beasts of burden, a functional wheel, and metal tools were lacking. The major achievements of the Classic period were its calendrics and its religious thought, which represented the efforts of the priestly class to systematize the universe and make it predictable.

      Around the end of the Classic period a warrior group came into power. With the coming of the warriors a period of militarism began. War gods replaced the rain gods, and the jaguar symbolism gave way to the eagle complex in iconography. human sacrifice, an occasional thing in the Classic period, became a mass phenomenon under the warlords of the Toltec and Aztec empires. The Toltecs, and later the Aztecs, were expansionist. When the Spaniards arrived, the Aztec Empire extended over most of Middle America, from the central valley to Yucatán, with garrisons, frontier fortifications, and foreign colonies. With the fall of the Aztec capital in 1519, the Guatemala conquest of 1524, and the long-drawn-out battles with the Indians of the northwest region, the Spaniards ended the isolation of Middle America.

Evolution of contemporary cultures

The Conquest and its effects

      The Spaniards overthrew the urbanized, class-structured high civilization of the Aztecs and established a system of alliances with the tributary states. The conquerors decapitated native society, substituting the Spanish for the Indian nobility. They introduced a host of new agricultural techniques and crops, along with steel, horses and cattle, mines, European crafts, and new forms of social organization. They also created dichotomies between ethnic and racial groups, giving them different rights and obligations.

      In the early colonial period following the conquest, a small minority of Spaniards administered and controlled vast Indian populations. The religion of the conquerors spread rapidly, as did many of their domesticated plants and animals. In this period the Indians were grouped into villages modelled on the grid plan, with a central plaza on which stood the church and town hall. The basic economic institutions were the encomienda and the religious reservation: the encomienda was an allotment of land and labour to a Spanish overlord, used in the densely peopled areas of the former high civilizations; the religious reservation was established by the Jesuits in the northwest.

      The later colonial period saw the abolition of the encomienda and the secularization of the religious reservation. Where previously the upper strata of the Indian population had intermarried with the Spanish, the later colonial period brought a more rigid separation of the Spanish and the Indians. Although the encomienda was legally dead, its economic consequences persisted: the colonial-plantation economy developed, along with the cattle ranch and the mining complex. Indian lands were taken over at an increasing rate, and the Indians gave up whatever illusion they may have had as to the benefits to be gained from the white man's culture.

      Mexico and Guatemala became independent of Spain in 1821. The early republican period involved the Indians only marginally. As the native Spanish and mestizos threw off European domination with the slogans and banners of the French Revolution, they neither considered the Indians nor involved them in their struggles. For the Indians it was a time of cultural and social consolidation, spent in the building of defenses against land encroachment and in the erection of communication barriers to protect their cultural heritage.

      The later republican period was for Mexico and Guatemala a time of nation building, of moderate industrialization, and of commercial agriculture. The Indian was seen as anachronistic, an obstacle to the march of triumphant nationalism. For the Indian, the consequences were drastic. The national and international economy led him to develop a social structure and cultural pattern that would keep the Indian community intact, even at a low economic level. The strong corporate Indian community reached its most definitive form under the pressures of land-grabbing and anti-Indian social policies.

The 20th century

      In the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the Indians won a place in the political structure. The official policy became pro-Indian. This policy exalts the Indian heritage and makes it the root of the national heritage. In its economic and political aspects it aims at “incorporation” of the Indian into national society on terms set by the Indians themselves. It also provides special services to Indians, as demonstrated in the many programs of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista de Mexico in health, road building, agriculture, and literacy. It employs themes from Indian culture, as in the murals of the Mexican neo-Realists and the music of modern Mexican composers. In Guatemala a similar policy had a brief vogue, but it was reversed following the counterrevolution of 1954.

      But the forces shaping contemporary Indian life lie largely outside these official policies. Population increase, the expansion of physical and cultural communication, industrialization, urbanization, and the power struggle between factions of the left and right are the basic forces that influence the lives of the Indians of Middle America.

Manning Nash

Additional Reading

The chapters on prehistoric Central America in Jesse D. Jennings (ed.), Ancient North Americans (1983), also appear in his Ancient South Americans (1983); and further information may be found in M. Coe, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson, Atlas of Ancient America (1986). The question of how many people lived in the Americas when the Europeans arrived is addressed by William M. Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. (1992). Descriptions for the general reader of the major tribes in eastern and southwestern North America through Mexico to Andean South America may be found in Jamake Highwater, Native Land: Sagas of the Indian Americas (1986).The most authoritative specific work on all aspects is the monumental Handbook of Middle American Indians, ed. by Robert Wauchope, 16 vol. (1964–76); these volumes cover all aspects of the area, from physical geography, linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and ethnology to social anthropology. Works on the pre-Columbian history and culture of this area are listed in the bibliography of the article pre-Columbian civilizations. The reference work by James S. Olson, The Indians of Central and South America: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary (1991), includes alphabetically arranged articles of varying length on individual tribes and on language groups. Eric R. Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959, reissued 1974), is still an excellent introduction to the cultural history of Middle America. Sol Tax et al., Heritage of Conquest: The Ethnology of Middle America (1952, reprinted 1968), is a professional anthropological estimate of the content of Middle American Indian culture. An understanding of the colonial period is provided by two essential works: Bernardino De Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex, trans. by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (1959), pt. 9–10; and Alfred M. Tozzer (ed. and trans.), Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1941, reissued 1966). George McCutchen McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico (1923, reissued 1971); François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda (1963, reissued 1982; originally published in French, 1952); and Nathan Laselle Whetten, Rural Mexico (1948, reissued 1968), give an adequate historical picture. Indigenous religions of both continents are explored in Åke Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians (1979); and Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody, Native American Religions: An Introduction (1993), both covering North, Central, and South America; and in Gary H. Gossen and Miguel León-Portilla (eds.), South and Meso-American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation (1993). Modern studies of Middle American communities are listed in Handbook of Latin American Studies (annual).Manning Nash Ed.

* * *