Researcing the Mayan connection

My Assignment was to write an I-search report, discovering something of myself:

I had my characters express the wonder of change in my novel Turn the Hearts of the Children
( 2000) Every few generations an influx of new cultures or races of people entered into the family line, changing the characteristic look, habits and even the foods of the people. It is that continual thread running through the entries that intrigues me Twenty-five years ago y genealogical research brought me to a dead end at the origin of the early New Mexico families. According to the data I gathered, the parents of the earliest colonists of New Mexico were Christobal Baca dnd his wife Ana Ortiz were both born in Mexico City. The parents of many of these early pioneers of the southwest came over the sea from Spain with the earliest colonizers of Mexico City. I found the names of the cities in which they were born, but until now I have not had the inclination to research beyond the information I gathered in the seventies.

I arranged for a trip to study Mexico with my youngest daughter this summer. We’ll study Spanish Language along with the culture and history of Mexico. I checked out five of the suggested books on the history of Mexico, and I am especially intrigued by the pre-Colombian history of the native peoples, the Mayan, Aztec and Inca and civilizations of Teotehuacan that flourished long before Columbus and Cortez. They were nearly annihilated by the coming of the Spaniards with their inquisition. These questions are what is pushing me on into earlier centuries, earlier generations. I want to know who I am . What is this gene that lies within me and within my children that I know nothing of.

This seed of curiosity goes back at least as far as my high school senior research paper. I researched and reported on the parallels between pre-Columbian archeology and the Book of Mormon account of a people who settle in the middle Americas centuries before the coming of Jesus, and the affect it had on their civilization and legends. In my study I discovered many legends of the white bearded god who promised to return, of a land of promise, of covenants and prophecies. There were other legends of two races of people, a white and darker race who fought one another to destruction because of stolen birthrights. But at the time I did not think of it as my people, my history of my ancestry, just interesting parallels between anthropology and religion.

During my most recent revision of Turn the Hearts of the Children, the idea that these ancient civilizations and peoples are woven into my very genetic make up inflamed my desire to understand this strand of my DNA. I read the conquest of Mexico by Hearnan Cortez , a bearded Spaniard bearing a cross. Then understood the mystery when I learned of the legend behind it. According to Kendell (198) the Mayans believed in a world that was neither static nor permanent. They had a tradition that the would face many cataclysmic changes. The ruins of the tote and Teotehuacan stood as evidence which enriched their pessimistic and fatalistic belief that every 52 years the earth would face a cataclysmic disaster. But along with the pessimism was an entrenched optimism that no matter how bad the disaster, and how intense the changes, whatever followed would be at least familiar enough the everyday life routines of people would not be changed beyond recognition. New tribes and civilizations would not be changed beyond recognition. New tribes and civilizations would establish ties to the more ancient ones. The Aztecs traced their own lineage to the Toltecs, who traced theirs to Teotihuacanos.

When the Aztec leader Montecuhzoma got word of the Spaniards sailing in the harbors, his main fear was that the Toltec god would return and replace the tribe with the ancient religion and traditions. He feared the promised return of the white bearded god of Quetzalcocotal, of whom it was prophesied would return, bringing new ideology, politician and economic systems that would “subjugate the tribes of Mexico, obliterate every aspect of their world view, and shatter their sobriety more thoroughly than any previous catastrophe. (Kendall p. 77)

I stood in the UNLV Natural History Museum admiring the Hopi and other plains Indian displays, then stepped to the glass encased Mayan ceremonial masks, carved in wood. They represented many of the ceremonies and religious rites of this ancient people. I read about intermixing of even more ancient civilizations, layer upon layer, blending and adapting, as I had read in the Mexico history books. Admiring the Mayan potter display, in my mind I stepped off into another world, long after the end of the Mayan Classic period, in which a young woman sat putting her heart and soul into making of the perfect vessel to set before her gods in the temple. She was eventually captured by the Spaniards and bore mixed children, the first generation of the Mestizo race.

Even without a name, I knew her. I knew her face and her genes were the tie to my past, the tie to the mixture that came to be the Mexicans of Mexico and New Mexico. Her spirit tied me to the ancient past, weaving the strand that forever secured that part of me, which I may never completely know. This is much a part of me and my children as are the welsh, German and Puritan ancestors of my father’s past.[1]

I intuitively knew this woman was a princess because the Spaniards only selected the nobility class to breed with. There were strata and classes within each society and nobility bred only with nobility. The offspring of this mixed nobility were raised separately, taught Catholicism and acquired the Spanish language, while being raised by their Mayan mothers who instilled in them ancient beliefs, customs, and rituals through their art in the form of baskets, pottery and weaving. The rites and ceremonies of the Mayan were woven into the new Christian religion brought to them by the Spanish friars.

Though baptized and taught the catechism, centuries of beliefs and rituals could not be erased, not by the holocaust brought on by the Spaniards, not with the rivers of blood that ran through the streets from the slaughters of millions of natives, or through the unintentional bacterial warfare that took the lives of hundreds of thousands more. It was the survival of the fittest and the strongest genes of a hybrid population with the collective memories of previous generations that survived and thrived to repopulate the Mexicos and move on into what centuries later became the southwestern United states.
[1]T.J.O’Brien, Fair Gods and Feathered Serpents: A search for ancient America’s Bearded White God. Horizon Publishers 1997