Pipil People - Spanish Conquest

Spanish Conquest

In the early 16th century, the Spanish conquistadores ventured into Central America from Mexico, then known as the Spanish colony of New Spain. After subduing the highland Mayan city-states through battle and cooptation, the Spanish sought to extend their dominion to the lower Atlantic region of the Pipiles, then dominated by the powerful city-state of Cuscatlán. Pedro de Alvarado, a lieutenant of Hernán Cortés, led the first Spanish invasion in June 1524. He was accompanied by thousands of Mayan allies, who had long been rivals of Cuscatlán for control over their wealthy cacao-producing region. The Pipil armies met the Spanish forces in two major open battles but were massacred by the Spaniards' superior weaponry. (Legend has it that a Pipil war leader called Atlacatl led the Pipil forces, but this has proved to be an historian's error, as the name of the Pipil leader was never known.) The surviving Pipil forces retreated into the mountains, where they sustained a guerrilla war against the Spanish who had proceeded to occupy the city of Cuscatlán. Unable to defeat this resistance, and as Alvarado was nursing a painful leg wound from a Pipil arrow in the first battle, the Spanish forces returned after a few months to the Mayan cities in the highlands. Two subsequent Spanish expeditions were required to achieve the complete defeat of Cuscatlán: one in 1525 and another in 1528.

After the Spanish victory, the Pipils became vassals of the Spanish Crown and were no longer called Pipiles by the Spanish but simply indios or Indians. The term Pipil has therefore remained associated, in local Salvadoran rhetoric, with the pre-conquest indigenous culture. Today it is used by scholars to distinguish the Nahua population in El Salvador from other Nahuat-speaking groups (such as in Nicaragua). However, neither the self-identified indigenous population nor its political movement, which has resurged over recent decades, uses the term "pipil" to describe themselves, but instead uses the term "Nahuat" or simply "indigena".