The Conquest

The history of Antigua Guatemala took a very interesting and sudden twist.

It was neither superior tactical ability nor weaponry that decided that battle and led to the eventual conquest of Guatemala's native population, but European diseases that traversed the Atlantic with the Spaniards and decimated Guatemala's native population four years before conquistadors arrived.

The terrible story of the plagues was recorded by Guatemala's Maya-Cakchiquel people. "After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people ran away from the towns. Dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible...That is how we became orphans, oh, my children!"

The Spaniards almost certainly encountered an army of young, inexperienced fighters, fielded from a population that had not begun to recover from the devastating effects of the plagues. This native army was led by a gallant Maya-Quiché captain, Tecun Uman, attired in quetzal feathers and wearing crowns of precious metals and jewels.

A Quiché chronicle, written in the 1550s, tells how Captain Tecun "became an eagle covered with real feathers that sprouted from his body. He had wings that also sprouted from his body and three crowns--one of gold, another of diamonds, and a third of emeralds."

The authors describe how Tecun Uman rose in flight to attack Pedro de Alvarado, who pierced him in the breast with his spear. They tell how the conquistador "called all his soldiers come and see the beauty of this quetzal Indian.

He told them he had not seen another Indian so handsome and regal and so full of quetzal feathers and so beautiful, not in Mexico, nor in Tlascala, nor in any other town they had conquered. And so Alvarado said that the name of this place would be Quetzaltenango (the 'place of the quetzals')." Today a statue of Tecun Uman stands at the entrance to Quetzaltenango, fiercely guarding the road climbed by the Spaniards into the Guatemalan highlands, where their conquest of the Maya began. The last Maya city to be conquered belonged to the Itzá, on the island where the town of Flores is now found in Guatemala's Petén department, near the abandoned city of Tikal.

SURVIVING CONQUEST (The Maya of Guatemala in Historical Perspective - jstor.org)

"Little by little heavy shadows and black night enveloped our fathers and grandfathers and us also...All of us were born to die!"

The Maya of Guatemala are today, as they have been in the past, a dominated and beleaguered group...Commenting forty years ago (Oliver) La Farge observed that 'these people undoubtedly suffer...they are an introverted people, consumed by internal fires, which they cannot or dare not express, eternally chafing under the yoke of conquest, and never for a moment forgetting that they are a conquered people.'

La Farge's observation is important because, among other things, it views conquest not as a remote historical experience, but as a visible, present condition," serving as a prescient reminder to us all.

Palacio de Doña Leonor

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