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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation
HONDURAN AMERICANS
OVERVIEW
Honduras is a Central American country bordered on the northwest by Guatemala, on the southwest by El Salvador, and on the southeast by Nicaragua. It has a population of 5.8 million and an area of 43,277 square miles, about the size of Virginia. The population is composed of 89 percent mestizo (people of mixed ancestry, often Indian and Spanish), seven percent pure Indian, two percent black, and one percent Caucasian.
HISTORY
It is not known when the geographical area that is now Honduras was originally settled by humans. However, archaeologists have recently found evidence of complex society that is at least 3,000 years old. Over the millennia, city-states gradually developed in the vast geographical area that includes large parts of present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, and western El Salvador and Honduras. These city states had many common cultural characteristics, including a common spoken and written language. People of this region called themselves Maya.
One of the centers of Mayan civilization during its Classic period, between 250 and 900 A.D., was Copán, a metropolis on the Copán river in what is now western Honduras. Copán boasts the largest collection of mural hieroglyphics in theAmericas. In recent decades, anthropologists and archaeologists have been able to decipher large parts of the hieroglyphic code. What they formerly assumed to be a collection of astronomical and religious treatises has turned out to be a comprehensive history of Copán.
The Great Hieroglyphic Stairway, on one side of a pyramid in central Copán, is a collection of about 6,000 glyphs, where one glyph is equivalent to a word, idea, or sentence. They tell the story of the 16 god-kings of Copán's Classic period, of their births, ascensions, conquests, defeats, and deaths; and of the significant political, social, and astronomical events during their reign.
The Maya, through these writings, portrayed themselves as a warlike people, with a rigid class system and a very high level of civilization, involving complex religion, science, art, and architecture. For reasons not well understood, the major centers of Maya civilization, Copán, Teotihuacan in Mexico, Utatlan in Guatemala, and many others, lost their populations and became ghost towns in the twelfth century. Christopher Columbus, in 1502, found Honduras to be a land of peoples who lived mostly in small villages and hunted and farmed for their food.
THE COLONIAL ERA
In 1524, Conquistador (conqueror) of the Mexican Aztecs Hernan Cortés sent Cristóbal de Olid to conquer and rule Honduras in the name of the Spanish Crown. When Olid arrived in the region, he decided to rule it for himself and declared independence from Spain. Cortés sent an army to take it back, but Olid was assassinated by rivals before the army arrived. In the meantime, Cortés decided to go to Honduras himself, with another army. When he arrived, he consolidated Spanish power over Honduras and returned to Mexico. Shortly thereafter, Spain appointed Diego López de Salcedo as the first royal governor of Honduras.
The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries saw relatively little change in this land. In the eighteenth century, gold and other mineral deposits were found in the central mountains and near the Caribbean coast, and the Spanish colonists employed nearby Indians in the mines. As mining expanded, larger numbers of Indians had to be found to work in them, and forced labor, severe working conditions, and forced migration led to the deaths of large numbers of Indians. Indian revolts then led to massacres of many other Indians at the hands of the armies of the Spanish colonists. Mistreatment of and violence against the Indians remains to this day a problem in Honduras.
In the eighteenth century, most colonists settled in the highlands near the Pacific coast, in cities including Tegucigalpa and Comayagua. The Caribbean coast was and is inhabited by the Mosquito and black Carib Indians (and more recently by banana plantation workers, managers, and owners). An island chain off Honduras's Caribbean coast, the Bay Islands, was also settled by the black Caribs, who are part Indian and part descendants of African runaway or emancipated slaves.
THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF HONDURAS
In 1823, the Central American provinces of Mexico broke away to form the United Provinces of Central America. Then, after years of interstate tension, squabbling, rewriting of the constitution, and moving of the capital, the Central American states decided to form independent, sovereign nations. Honduras declared independence on October 26, 1838, and adopted a constitution as the Republic of Honduras in January of 1839. The constitution of 1839 provided a single legislative body, a president elected by a majority of the registered male population, and a supreme court whose justices are appointed by the president; thus, it was a constitution in part inspired by the U.S. model.
Wars, military skirmishes, coups, and political intrigues across regional borders have been common in Central America since initial settlement. The Conservative and Liberal parties had been active for some time even before the founding of the Republic. When the candidate of one party was winning a campaign in one country, the presidents of the Central American countries who were members of the other party frequently took political and sometimes military action to prevent his election.
Throughout its history as an independent republic, Honduras has had to cope with an understandably hostile Indian population, a colonist population that was frequently at odds with other cultures within Honduras, meddling neighbors, and a massive U.S. economic, political, and military influence over the country. These are some of the reasons Honduras has one of the world's...
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