the first thing i noticed about this article is not the mystery of Teotihuacan but how they keep insisting in translating these folx' names

that used to be a thing a while back in Mayan studies and at some point some Mayan dude was like "they're just names bro, stop" https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1380204451269648389

its especially interesting to observer WHO'S names get translated

Sihyaj K'ahk' and Chak Tok Ich'aak become Fire is Born and Jaguar Paw respectively, Spearthrower Owl's name doesn't even get mentioned un-translated..

elsewhere you hear about Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse

as if Sitting Bull folx were walking around speaking English when they referenced him, instead of saying Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake

or as if Crazy Horse wasn't Tȟašúŋke Witkó

name translation is especially common for Native American names, part of a long history of portraying them..

..as primitive and simple. "Oh those people, they can't even have real names, like me, Peter Smithson!"

as if Peter Smithson doesn't mean "stone son of a metalworker"

and you'll notice this tendency crop up in literature a bunch too. if a story wants to portray a society as primitive, or worse yet, as *regressed* (eg post-apocalypse society of children only), you get names like "Dog" and "Monkey" and various animal names or other stuff

the choice to use plain English animal names taps into that same conceptual nexus -- Meaning Names In English = Primitive

its all over the place. watch for it, especially when real people are involved, not just fictional characters

also keep in mind, some native american folx use translated names for themselves, and thats their business. there's complexity there due to the effects of colonization and centuries of othering

oh yeah another thing, just as an addendum

a lot of folx think that the Mayans are gone?? it plays nicely into the whole new age fetishization of Mayans if they're a Lost Civilization etc

theres millions of Mayans, they never vanished. the only thing that happened was..

..Mayan cities became unsustainable, and smaller more sustainable villages became the dominant living situation

Mayans didn't go anywhere, their big architectural projects just stopped. if you go to south east Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, you find people speaking Mayan languages..

..eating the modern descendants of classic Mayan foods, wearing fashion that's the modern descendants of classic Mayan styles

theyre not some Lost Civilization, they're **right there**, you can literally go learn Yucatec Maya and have a conversation with a Mayan lady if you want

hell, you might even know some Mayan folx, the folx running the bodega you love might be Mayan, the folx making pupusas down the road might be (or they might be some other ethnicity who knows)

oh yeah, and if you're a leftist, you should know that Mayans constitute some of the key reference points we have for what a post-capitalist anti-authoritarian society can look like in modern times

EZLN (the Zapatistas) are an indigenous movement, but """indigenous""" is just a blanket term. which indigenous groups? well a major founding component of EZLN were Mayans in Chiapas

Mayans are not only not some ancient lost civilization, they're still here, doing revolutionary anti-capitalist anti-colonialist politics and demonstrating that the goals that leftists have are actually achievable

"Fire is Born" and "Jaguar Paw" and other stuff like that, unless it comes from those people themselves, just contributes to the continued alien-ization of people who exist here and now and have names like these and speak these languages and exist as Mayans

they're not fairy tail princes and kings from LoSt KiNgDoMs, they're literally our neighbors and friends, they're comrades in balaclavas fighting the same struggles we are, they're here, now