258 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
Figure 7.2 Spreading coffee beans for drying on a Guatemalan plantation in the nineteenth
century. Courtesy of E. Bradford Burns. Reprinted from E. Bradford Burns, Eadward Muybridge
in Guatemala, 1875: The Photographer as Social Recorder.Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1986, p. 118.Costa Rica—had acquired the essential mestizo character that persists today, with
the exception of a major presence of mixed Afro-Americans along the eastern coasts
of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.Oscillation Between Centralism and Federalism
The administrative centers of the Mesoamerican region’s new nations, once formed,
typically did not enjoy effective territorial and political sovereignty. One of the rea-
sons for this situation was demographic. Most of the new nations of the region had
a series of noncontiguous heartland settlement areas, separated by vast hinterlands.
This noncontiguous, nucleated settlement pattern led to various political expres-
sions of regionalism, for authority systems were in effect local, not national. To some
extent, then, the new nations were fictions, and central governments had neither
the communication and transportation systems nor the political control to exert ef-
fective national authority.
Regionalism was thus related to the important current of federalism as a model
for governing. The powerful creole elites, however, lived in the old capital cities and
provincial capitals. This old aristocracy of land, army, and church interests was linked
by ties of kinship and common interests in such a way that their power bases—the na-
tional and provincial capitals—expressed a political preference for central authority,
which was usually conservative, proclerical, and favorably disposed to large land-