title: Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts from Nineteenth-Century Yucatan
author: Terry Rugeley
description: <DIV><B>Terry L. Rugeley </B>is Professor Emeritus of Mexican and Latin American History at the University of Oklahoma. He has produced numerous scholarly monographs, translations, and edited collections on the history and culture of southeast Mesoamerica.</DIV>
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  # **III**
  
  They came to the turn-off for a town called Tenochitlan, some forty miles from
  Maya City. Calhoun swung off the highway to go through it. Whoever had chosen
  the name Maya for this planet had been interested in the legends of Yucatan,
  back on Earth. There were many instances of such hobbies in a Med Ship's list
  of ports of call. Calhoun touched ground regularly on planets named for
  counties and towns when men first roamed the stars and nostalgically
  christened their discoveries with names suggested by homesickness. There was a
  Tralee, and a Dorset, and an Eire. Colonists not infrequently took their
  world's given name as a pattern and chose related names for seas and
  peninsulas and mountain-chains. Calhoun had even visited a world called Texia
  where the landing-grid rose near a town called Corral and the principal meat-
  packing settlement was named Roundup.
  
  Whatever the name Tenochitlan 