The Spanish Conquest?

The Spanish conquest is a highly mythologized historical moment of profound consequence. For some, it represents the launching of a global Catholic empire—perhaps with lamentable violence, but ultimately as part of an inevitable, proud march of Euro-Christian progress. For indigenous populations, the meaning of Spanish conquest is decidedly more somber: the invasion of their lands, the criminalization of their customs, the loss of sovereignty, and, indeed, the closest they have ever come to total extermination. In between these two poles of interpretation, scholars have sought not only new sources and information beyond published Spanish works but also new perspectives from less famous actors. Central America features prominently in this recent scholarship, which has ended up questioning all three parts of the phrase “the Spanish conquest.” Indigenous Central America’s sixteenth-century experience of military invasion and colonization—made worse by a brief but intense period of legalized indigenous slavery—was brutal, and more complex than the mythology usually admits. It was not a single sweeping event, it was not militarily won only by Spaniards or even Europeans, and ultimately, it was incomplete.

Regaining Ground

This chapter describes the geographies of indigenous populations and their territories in Central America, past and present. A brief discussion of previous archaeological research provides a context for the region’s pre-Columbian populations and settlement distributions prior to an examination of the territorial and demographic collapse precipitated by European conquest. The chapter chronicles a twenty-first-century resurgence of indigenous populations and their territorial rights in Central America, including the emergence of geopolitical units that we call indigenous territorial jurisdictions (ITJs), the likes of which represent new strategies for accommodating indigenous land ownership and governance within the context of modern states. Archival and census research, in situ field experience, and geographic information system (GIS)-based land use and cadastral mapping inform the understanding of indigenous peoples’ past and contemporary demographic trends, settlement patterns, and territorial challenges.

Land and Climate in Central American History

The purpose of this chapter is to develop an overall view of the relations between human societies and the natural world in Central America from the beginning of human settlement to our time. The main findings reveal how the Isthmus’s biophysical features deeply conditioned human material and cultural development by playing a decisive though inconspicuous role in shaping the human societies that once inhabited the region and do so in present times. As to the socioenvironmental transformations generated by human action on the ecosystems, it is argued that the Isthmus’s environmental history was marked by brakes and jerks due to its structural character of extractive and productive activities that witnessed important modernization processes. Furthermore, the modernizing imprint of more recently developed activities significantly affected ecological change and landscape transformation. It is believed that regional history can be thought of as a long, complex socioecological transition, whose corollary is the significant dilapidation of the greatest wealth this geographical space has boasted since the beginning of human settlement: its biological and cultural diversity.

Political Economy of Central America from 1840 to 2019

Central American history is a tale of two economies: one founded on food security and community; the other on amassing private fortunes. Peasant prosperity depends on access to land, forests, and local markets; business prosperity depends on land, labor, capital, and global markets. State institutions mediate between acquisitive business elites and peasant communities, which defend territory. From 1840 to 1900, elites fought between themselves and peasant communities as they built national governments and a coffee export economy. From 1900 to 1929, the United States formed strategic alliances supporting militaries and big business, including US fruit companies. Global Depression and World War II shocked the system. US Cold War strategies fed militaries and business at the expense of peasant economies, provoking peasant uprisings (1970s) and US intervention (1979–1989). Peace Accords (1990s) reduced militaries, but private security forces increased (1990s–2019), especially in the Northern Triangle, where business expansion produced caravans of migrants fleeing violence.

Marginalization, Assimilation, and Resurgence: Indigenous People in Central America since Independence

While the end of colonial rule brought formal equality it did not end discrimination and marginalization of the indigenous population in independent Central America. Many suffered land loss and proletarianization in the emerging agricultural export economy. However, indigenous people were not mere victims of exploitation, displacement, and ladinization but played an often active role in Central American politics. Participation in the market economy and access to education fostered stratification within the indigenous population. The emergence of well-off and educated Indians and changes in international politics promoting multiculturalism contributed to the emergence of indigenous movements in recent decades. While some progress has been made concerning the recognition of cultural difference and autonomy, land rights are still a much disputed issue.

Honduras

A fact of Honduran history after the 1840s is the structural weakness of the state as an organized political agent capable of administering a nationally defined territory, managing its constitutionally prescribed monopoly over security, and effectively addressing the most minimal aspects of the population’s economic and social welfare. Various factors explain this. A key problem has been Honduran elites’ lack of cohesion and enlightened commitment to their long-term interests among themselves and beyond their borders. Resorting to lethal violence to secure advantaged and corrupt access to state resources has been the result and norm, even to the detriment of elite unity and hegemony. This has often placed the state and country at the mercy of economic and military forces, local and international, that elites cannot control, and with which they have negotiated for short-term benefit and even personal survival, most often to the detriment of national interests, and Hondurans’ rudimentary well-being.

Religion, Politics, and the State

The historiography of religion and politics in Central America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delves into three key historical periods: (1) the era of nation-building and anticlericalism during the nineteenth century; (2) the age of liberal dictatorship and the resurgence of Catholicism during the first part of the twentieth century; and (3) the rise of progressive Catholicism and concurrent expansion of Protestantism during the Cold War. Writing on the subject has emphasized the relationship between religion and politics and the interaction between clerics and lay people. Scholars have moved beyond a purely functionalist approach to the study of religion. They have uncovered the two-sided nature of church–state relations, one marked by conflict and cooperation, the connection between religion and politics, the link between Central American Catholicism, and the global Catholic Church, and the history of lay agency within religious institutions.

Belize

Belize’s history and politics reflect the country’s anomalous position between the Anglophone Caribbean and Hispanic Central America. Older historical narratives emphasized its exceptionalism as the region’s sole British colony, associating national identity with its creole (English-speaking) residents. Official discourses belied the country’s actual ethnic complexity, and patterns of wealth and land distribution that mirrored the inequities of the neighboring countries. Recent historiography has emphasized its arduous path to independence, which was complicated by colonial intransigence to self-governance and a long-standing Guatemalan territorial claim. Belize’s contemporary challenges stem from its political affinities with the Commonwealth and geographic location in Central America. Like most of the Caribbean, its agricultural economy has been wracked by market liberalization, caused by the loss of EU trade preferences. Migration from other Central American countries and between Belize and the United States has reshaped the country’s demography, heightening inequities rooted in the colonial era.

Central America since the 1990s: Crime, Violence, and the Pursuit of Democracy

Central America’s transitions to democracy and the end of civil wars in the 1990s brought the promise of peace, yet the region’s new democracies have struggled with epidemic levels of violence since the early 2000s. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are among the deadliest countries in the world. Even peaceful Costa Rica was plagued by drug trafficking and organized crime. While the political violence of the 1980s has largely been replaced by criminal violence, political violence remains a problem in some countries. Nicaragua, which escaped the homicide epidemics of its neighbors, experienced a wave of political violence in 2018 and 2019. I explore the causes of violence and insecurity in the region, attempts by regional governments to combat crime, and the impact of crime on citizens’ attitudes toward democracy.

Literature, Society, and Politics

The historiography of Central American literature from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on the relationships between literature, (literary) history, and the political field, especially within the context of projects centered on national construction, is essential. The approach here analyzes the different periods—or moments of change or transition—regarding the relations between politics, society, and culture from the perspective of historical change, concentrating on “microperiods” characterized by a paradigm shift with respect to the relationships between literature, history, politics and society: the nineteenth century (the post-independence moment); the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; the 1930s–1960s; the 1960s–1990s; and the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. A set of proposals aims at filling the gaps, developing the desiderata, and coping with the challenges in literary historiography in and about Central America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.