Who are Middle American Natives?

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Although most of Mexico is geographically considered part of North America and although there have been cultural contacts between Mexican groups and the Pueblo of the SW United States, the cultural development of most of Mexico belongs, in fact, to that of Middle America. In the southern portion of the valley of Mexico and in the jungle region of Yucatán, ancient Mexico reached its highest cultural achievements. The Maya had links with the Chorotega of Nicaragua and Honduras, and these in turn had contacts with the Chibcha of Colombia, thus establishing a Central American cultural chain between the civilizations of Mexico and those of the Andean region. Highly developed civilizations flourished in Mexico after the domestication of corn and the rise of agricultural communities; the Olmec , the Maya, and the cultures of the central plateau, Teotihuacán, Toltec , Mixtec , Zapotec and Aztec , developed architecture, agriculture, the use of stone—and sometimes of metal—to a high, often remarkable, degree. The Quiché and the Cakchiquel flourished in Guatemala; besides these and the Chorotega, the southern tip of Central America did not produce as highly developed civilizations as the rest of Middle America. Today many of the Native Americans of Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras, such as the San Blas, the Mosquito (see Mosquito Coast ), and the Lenca of Honduras, bear the imprint of Carib ancestry or influence. The Mexican Native Americans after the Spanish conquest in the 16th cent. retained their ancestral mode of life in some regions, but they were mostly a subjugated group until the 20th cent.