This chapter continues through the early eleventh century our account of the political histories related in Chapter 8. In contrast to events chronicled for the Copán-centered network at this time, what we see in other parts of Honduras and El Salvador is the emergence of large capitals that dominated their respective domains. These processes are most evident in Honduras’s Lower Ulúa, Lower Cacaulapa, and Comayagua valleys where the regional capitals of Cerro Palenque, El Coyote, Tenampua, and Las Vegas were established. Whereas these developments had Indigenous roots, Pipiles, Nahua-speaking immigrants from Mexico, now founded Cihuatán, a large town located in El Salvador’s Cerrón Grande basin. How power relations within the realms governed from these capitals were structured varied considerably. Similarly, the roles of things, whether locally fashioned (such as copper at El Coyote) or imported (such as Plumbate and Fine Orange ceramics and Pachuca obsidian), in these political processes also differed.

This chapter traces the consequences of Copán’s dynastic collapse for the realms that had been colonies or allies of the lowland Maya capital. All of these domains underwent demographic declines and political fragmentation. The nature of the changes, however, differed depending in part on what relations an area’s inhabitants had enjoyed with Copán’s agents. A crucial event in this process was the secession of Quirigua from the colonial network in CE 738. This dramatic development precipitated changes in governance at Copán even as it offered novel opportunities for former allies to advance claims to power that had not been available to them when Copán’s rulers enjoyed greater regional predominance. Ultimately, however, processes of political centralization and hierarchy building were curtailed among all participants in this network by CE 1000.

This interval witnessed drastic changes in political formations throughout Southeast Mesoamerica. These shifts generally took the form of political decentralization as what had been regional capitals were largely abandoned and replaced by the more muted expressions of political preeminence that took shape in smaller, dispersed political centers. A major exception to this trend is found at the site of Copán. The arrival here of interlopers from the Maya lowlands, led by K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, transformed this settlement into the capital of a realm ruled according to principles previously foreign to the Southeast but which were well established among lowland Maya domains to the west. Much of the chapter is devoted to exploring how this singular event was possibly implicated in changes occurring elsewhere in Southeast Mesoamerica at this time. Copán’s rulers, outside their realm, did not determine the course of any area’s local history. Their mode of rule that combined political centralization with marked expressions of hierarchy, however, offered a model that their Southeastern neighbors could and did adapt to their own purposes.

Reflecting the turn in colonial literary scholarship towards performance in relation to sound studies, this chapter examines poetry as a form of poesis that emerged as an aural aesthetic category in colonial Mexico. Taking into consideration sociocultural factors, including language, class, and caste, and the evangelizing impetus of much religious music, this exploration of sounded lyric verse explains how these forms were not limited to church settings and places, nor to colonizing sources. The chapter considers poetry as a prestige form in music, the presentation of lyric in public musical settings, and the importance of aural aesthetics to convey poesis as a performative aesthetic category of cultural belonging. Musical poetic texts examined include the romance, villancico, church music, and other popular forms of autochthonous lyrical verse. Finally, the chapter considers the continuation of poetic aural performance through the nineteenth century.

This chapter proposes a new analysis of Mexican Romanticism, from José María Heredia to the Reforma generation. It considers how many of its canonical authors, such as Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and Ignacio Ramírez, write an important part of their production privileging the first-person plural, and thus, effectively make the collective subject central. This We should, in turn, be read in the light of their considerable political agency. This chapter argues that what defines the complex temporality particular to the Romantic poem is that both the I and the We simultaneously pose each other as presupposition. The I can only exist as a singularity that the We is unable to assimilate and thus excretes. Yet, at the same time, it is only through the outside gaze of the person who does not belong to it that a group may crystallize as a true collectivity.

This chapter uses a case comparison to show the behavioral consequences of uncertainty about relationality – how it prevents new collaborative relationships that people would value from forming in the first place.