The Mexican State of Chiapas

The Mexican State of Chiapas

Historically, the preservation of culture and the progress of development have been conflicting ambitions. Mexico, in particular, has been a frequent witness to the violent clash of the Old and New Worlds ever since European explorers set foot on American soil in 1492. In particular, the Mexican state of Chiapas has resisted the desecration of Mayan culture for the past 500 years, culminating in the Zapatista Revolution that began on New Year’s Eve of 1994. This paper seeks to explore both the chronology of the Mayan fight for political and educational autonomy, as well as detail the historic reformation of the past decade.

Mayan culture is one of the most ancient in the world, with origins reaching well into 1500 B.C. The Mayans inhabited various regions throughout Central and Latin America, though most were centralized on the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico. The Mayans were innovators in agriculture, art and architecture, and were organized into small villages run by tribal councils. The Spanish conquest of the late 1400s and early 1500s forced a horrific halt to the traditional Mayan way of life.

The human cost of the European conquest of the ‘New World’ was horrific. When quantified, the genocide becomes a multiple of the Holocaust by ten…Of an estimated 100 million indigenous people who populated the Western Hemisphere from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego before the Conquest, 40 million resisted the genocide and survive today.

The Europeans not only killed those Indians who resisted their colonization, but the introduction of foreign disease alone accounted for close to a million deaths in the early years of the Spanish conquest. Though it drew little interest...

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