255CHAPTER 7 MESOAMERICANS IN THE NEOCOLONIAL ERA
Any effort to synthesize the neocolonial history of the Mesoamerican Indians—from
independence to the beginning of the modern era—must necessarily be carefully
framed and qualified. Although the beginning of this period is clearly marked by
political and state-level events that established the region’s independent nations that
we recognize today, it could be argued that the end of the period—the radical break
symbolized by the emblematic Mexican Revolution (1910–1940)—did not occur in
all of the region at the same time or in the same ways or on the same scale.
In Guatemala, for example, typically nineteenth-century neocolonial political
and social forms appeared to find closure with the revolutionary events of the
mid–twentieth century. Thus, in this chapter we are considering nineteenth-century
and early-twentieth-century social and political adjustments to the postcolonial order
that evolved in similar ways throughout the region, but with decidedly different
chronologies and national characteristics. For the most part, we will examine the
general trends and patterns of the region as a whole rather than on the basis of in-
dividual countries.
In keeping with the overall theme of the text, our focus is on the biological and
cultural descendants of ancient Mesoamerica, a world whose coherent social system,
as we have seen, was broken into a hundred pieces by the Spanish colonial regime.
The Mesoamerican Indians were segregated into isolated rural communities during
the colonial period, where they were deprived of native leadership at regional and
national levels and sorely exploited by the colonial ruling class. The new creole and
mestizo leaders of the neocolonial period, and the liberal reforms that many of them
advocated, resulted in exploitation of the Mesoamerican Indians as severe as that by
the Spanish colonialists. Indeed, these so-called liberals were perhaps even less sym-
pathetic to the native cultures than had been the Spaniards.
Our story of the native Mesoamericans in the neocolonial period, then, cannot
be a saga of glory or triumph. Nevertheless, it will be shown that the Mesoamerican
cultural tradition continued to provide an important reservoir from which the native