The Federal Republic of Central America

In September, 1821 Central America became independent from Spain. The newly formed nation, ruled from Guatemala, dissolved quickly as the countries were not able to unify and were absorbed by Mexico. After Mexico has its own political problems, the Republic of Central America was formed in 1823.

It only lasted until 1840 after Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica separated and formed their own countries. Note that a large chunk of Nicaragua was part of Honduras at the time of this map. This area, the Mosquito (or Miskitu) Coast was part of a British protectorate, then was variously part of the two nations and now split between them. Here is a map of the area as an autonomous region.

The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan

A lienzo is a painting on cloth that was used by indigenous peoples in Central America to communicate knowledge.  The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan dating from the 1530's tells the story of how the Quauhquecholtecans of central Mexico allied with the Spanish conquistador Jorge de Alvarado to conquer Guatemala.  The painting forms a map showing the path of conquest with important rivers and towns represented as symbols.

The lienzo is kept in a museum in Puebla, Mexico. The Universidad Francisco Marroquin (UFM) in Guatemala City restored the painting in digital form and developed a web site to display the Lienzo interactively with a map, timeline, graphics and historical details. Clicking the Dynamic Web Map link will get you to the interactive experience. However, it will probably ask you to download Silverlight-Microsoft's new-ish web plugin that allows for smoother web browsing. This plugin is free, works in all major browsers and platforms (according to our Microsoft overlords) and should not affect anything else on your computer. It will take a few minutes for the process to run and another couple to load the page.

Here are some screen shots from the interactive map.

This shows the area around Retalhuleu, the first area the allies reached from Mexico. Notice the similarity of the dashed green line on the map above and the path of travel shown in the detail below.

 

Clicking on the red dots accesses information about the meaning of each area.

 

There are also pages that interpret the symbols, digital restoration information and lots of other good stuff on the web site.