Mopán and Kekchí Maya flee from forced…

Mopán and Kekchí Maya flee from forced labor in Guatemala in the 1880s and 1890s, and come to British Honduras.

They settle in several villages in southern British Honduras, mainly around San Antonio in Toledo District.

The Maya can use crown lands set aside as reservations, but they lack communal rights.

Under the policy of indirect rule, a system of elected alcaldes (mayors), adopted from Spanish local government, link these Maya to the colonial administration.

However, the remote area of British Honduras in which they settle, combined with their largely subsistence way of life, results in the Mopán and Kekchí Maya maintaining more of their traditional way of life and becoming less assimilated into the colony than the Maya of the north.

The Mopán and Kekchí Maya maintain their languages and a strong sense of identity, but in the north, the distinction between Maya and Spanish is increasingly blurred, as a Mestizo culture emerges.

In different ways and to different degrees, then, the Maya who return to British Honduras in the nineteenth century become incorporated into the colony as poor and dispossessed ethnic minorities.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the ethnic pattern that will remain largely intact throughout the twentieth century is in place: Protestants largely of African descent, who speak either English or Creole and live in Belize Town; the Roman Catholic Maya and Mestizos, who speak Spanish and live chiefly in the north and west; and the Roman Catholic Garifuna who speak English, Spanish, or Garifuna and settle on the southern coast.