ABSTRACT
The State of Chiapas does not seem at first sight to belong to the area commonly identified as Central America, for since 1824 it has formed part of the Mexican Republic. Rather it constitutes, together with Tabasco, Campeche and Quintana Roo, the region where Mexico borders on Central America. Hence the name ‘southern border’ which Mexican politicians and academics have been using for the area for the past decade. It is, obviously, a characterization created from the centre of the country. The inhabitants of the four states that border on Belize and Guatemala have never felt themselves to be ‘frontiersmen’ in the sense of being alien or opposed to the Central American complex. Rather they have identified themselves by the term ‘Mexican south-west’, used generally before the introduction of the new term. The feeling is easily understandable on account of the increasingly greater integration of these four states into the national process since independence. For analogous reasons, the indigenous peoples of the Cuchumatanes region, for instance, also prefer to consider themselves inhabitants of Guatemala’s northeast rather than inhabitants of its northern border.
