Mayan works worth including in curriculum development From a Colonial Perspective

It must be said that, although colonization and evangelization took a toll in Mesoamerican Indigenous communities, there are also important documents written by colonizers and priests that serve as an approximation to understand ancient cultures. One of the most well-known documents detailing the Mayan world from an entirely Western perspective is Relación de las cosas de Yucatán written by Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatan. He is mostly known for the violent campaign he led against idolatry and was involved in the needless deaths of hundreds of Mayans (Bracamonte y Sosa 58). Diego de Landa invested time to learn about Mayan culture, specifically trying to find similarities between their religion and Christianity. In this Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, he documents important information about Mayan history, culture, beliefs, and ways of living. The pre-Columbian calendar and the brief commentary on the mysterious Mayan hieroglyphic writing stands out among the information collected in this work. The text was written as a record of Mayan Yucatec society at the time of the conquest, with the main purpose being to help new evangelizers carry out their task in a more efficient and didactic way. The publication of this document represents a source of the study of Mayan archaeology and history, and it could be considered an important contribution to the literature in this field. It should be noted that De Landa had the help of informants who were native to the peninsula, such as Gaspar Antonio Chí. As an informant, Chi helped De Landa fight idolatry. During this time, the Church delivered many sentences related to the destruction of ancestral spaces, as well as hangings, lashings, and torture involving Chi’s own people, the Xiu, and their enemy, the Cocoms of Yucatan (Bracamonte y Sosa 58, Yannakakis 7-8).

De Landa knew the knowledge of the old ways and religion was still engraved in the minds of his informants, and he used these informed sources to learn about their religion and then destroy it. De Landa is also known as the person responsible for the destruction of most of the Yucatec Mayan codices and culture (De Landa 3). His Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán was written in the same fashion as Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España by Bernardino de Sahagún (2008). Both of them based their work upon information provided by Indigenous informants who had reached adulthood living their Indigenous ways of knowing before the Spanish conquest. Both of these works remain a canon, so to speak, each in its particular field; they also set the path for new research to be done in Indigenous communities, creating a sense of connection and solidarity in a reciprocal way, and emphasizing the need to decolonize traditional research, where Indigenous communities were/are seen as passive subjects and not as protagonists fighting back colonial practices put in place to erode their traditional knowledge, languages, and territories.