Diego de Landa - Legacy

Legacy

A controversial figure in the history of the Christianization of Central America Diego de Landa is at once reviled for his cruelty and for his destruction of invaluable historic materials about Maya culture and valued for his personal contributions to the study of the same.

Landa’s Relación De Las Cosas De Yucatán is about as complete a treatment of Mayan religion as we are likely to ever have. While controversy surrounds Landa’s use of force in the conversion process, few scholars would debate the general accuracy of his recordings. Allen Wells calls his work an “ethnographic masterpiece”, while William J. Folan, Laraine A. Fletcher and Ellen R. Kintz have written that Landa‘s account of Maya social organization and towns before conquest is a “gem.” Landa’s writings are our main contemporary source for Mayan history, without which our collective knowledge of Mayan ethnology would be devastatingly small. While Landa might have exaggerated some claims to justify his actions to his accusers, his intimate contact with natives and all around accuracy in other fields heavily implies his version of events has at least some truth in it.

Ironically, historian John F Chuchiak IV has suggested that the result of Landa's fervor to exterminate the traditional Maya religion in fact had the opposite effect and is partially the reason why Maya religion is still alive today in the Yucatán. He argues that Landa's excesses caused the secular authorities to remove the Franciscans' right to take disciplinary measures against idolaters while still leaving the Maya under the care of the Franciscans' cathechization. Chuchiak suggests that the revocation of the Franciscans' "rights" to administer punishments to idolaters was an important factor in the survival of Maya religion to this day.