Spanish churchmen took very seriously their obligation to Christianize the Indians. Some of them were appalled by the harsh treatment meted out to the Indians by many encomenderos and they demanded reform. These required that Indians were to be put into villages where they would live under supervision.

They respected Native territories, their ways, and treated them as the human beings they were. The Natives, in turn, treated the French as trusted friends. More intermarriages took place between French settlers and Native Americans than with any other European group.

Although the Spanish and their Indian allies killed thousands of Aztecs, an outbreak of smallpox killed more. Disease was much more deadly than warfare because Native Americans had no immunity to illnesses, such as smallpox. Historians believe that 80 to 95 percent of the native population died from European diseases.

How did the Natives come to characterize the Spanish? The Natives came to believe that the Spanish “had not their Mission from Heaven” because the Spanish so cruelly treated the Indians. The Indians saw them as evil.

Spanish leaders formed alliances with some of the Indian tribes and provided them with tools, crops, livestock, and arms. The new materials available to these tribes gave them superior weaponry over their enemies. As Indians acquired horses, they became more mobile.

Regarding the Indians, the Dutch generally followed a policy of live and let live: they did not force assimilation or religious conversion on the Indians. Both in Europe and in North America, the Dutch had little interest in forcing conformity on religious, political, and racial minorities.

Due to this colonization process many families and native tribes broke down as a result of the migratory changes to which they had to be subjected and also because of the deaths due to poor living conditions and diseases.

Spain may have increased the number of enslaved Africans it brought to the Caribbean after 1518 because the Native people it had previously enslaved there were dying from European disease and colonial violence.

Soon after the Spanish colonization of Cuba in 1519, a small army led by Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) conquered Mexico from the Aztecs. Many within the Aztec Empire came to believe that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl the god who would return to overthrow the god Tezcatlipoca, who demanded human sacrifice.

The mainland of New Spain was organized as the Mexican Empire. This ephemeral Catholic monarchy was overthrown and a federal republic declared in 1823 and codified in the Constitution of 1824….Mexican War of Independence.

Aztec, self name Culhua-Mexica, Nahuatl-speaking people who in the 15th and early 16th centuries ruled a large empire in what is now central and southern Mexico. The Aztecs are so called from Aztlán (“White Land”), an allusion to their origins, probably in northern Mexico.

The Aztecs, who probably originated as a nomadic tribe in northern Mexico, arrived in Mesoamerica around the beginning of the 13th century.

The Maya have lived in Central America for many centuries. They are one of the many Precolumbian native peoples of Mesoamerica. In the past and today they occupy Guatemala, adjacent portions of Chiapas and Tabasco, the whole of the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, and the western edges of Honduras and Salvador.

The original inhabitants of the area that is now Mexico include: