274 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
Mesoamerican Indians’ culture was based more on traditional Mesoamerican prin-
ciples, and in some ways was in dialectical relationship with the mestizo system. Com-
pared with the mestizos, for example, the Indians were less open to change, less
willing to take risks, less socially ambitious, more oriented to collective than indi-
vidual goals, and far less articulate in the Spanish language. These differences pro-
vided the mestizos with a comparative advantage over the Indians as the two groups
struggled against creole repression during the long neocolonial period.
The differences between mestizos and native Mesoamericans, of course, were
partly based on their respective social class positions. The mestizos shared a com-
mon social alienation and exclusion, and thus formed a marginal lower-class status
within Mexican and Central American society. They functioned in a wide variety of
low-prestige occupations, as petty officials, small ranchers, low-level priests, humble
artisans, petty traders, half-employed paupers, cattle rustlers, and town thieves. The
Mesoamerican Indians also shared a common alienation within the dominant creole
world, but their lower-class status was more clearly defined for them in ethnic terms—
and at times legally—as members of the inferior native caste. The Indians were less
economically diversified than the mestizos, most of them working in agriculture ei-
ther as peasant cultivators or hacienda peons.
The differences between the Indian communities in language and custom made
it more difficult to unite into larger political groups on the basis of common class or
ethnicity. Only on a few occasions were the Mesoamerican Indians able to challenge
the creole establishment: As described later, by means of neocolonial nativistic move-
ments.
The identification of the mestizos and Indians as culturally distinct sectors in
neocolonial society theoretically made both of them eligible candidates to serve as
symbols for the emerging nations of Mexico and Central America. In Mexico during
the early years following independence, a few enlightened creoles proposed that the
new nation adopt the native Mesoamericans as the central identifying ethnic symbol.
One creole leader even suggested that a descendant of Motecuhzoma be crowned em-
peror of a new Mexican empire, after which the monarch should take a wife from
among the “Whites,” thus binding the races together. These suggestions did not pre-
vail, and, as might be expected, the Spanish and creole Whites emerged as the dom-
inant ethnic identity. For example, Hernán Cortés was glorified and hailed as the
true founder of the Mexican nation.
Later, when upwardly mobile mestizos began to challenge creole leadership in
Mexico, the creole rulers hit upon the idea of fomenting a massive immigration of
Europeans (particularly the French) and North Americans as a means of preserving
the country’s ethnically White identity (and not coincidentally, preserving the creole’s
political control). Of this policy, a modern Mexican scholar has remarked: “... it
seems inconceivable that our creole liberators were willing to hand us over to the
North Americans or English rather than accept an Indian (identity) for Mexico”
(Aguirre 1983:328). In the end the mestizos could not be denied, and during the Por-
firio Díaz dictatorship they began to replace the creole Whites as the symbol of na-
tional race (“raza”). Consistent with Díaz’s liberal positivism, however, ethnicity came