I heard about this somewhere.Has anyone else?Sounds different.
there are probably (this is just a guess) people in Mexico that teach kung fu.
no,no, supposedly there was a style called mexican kung fu. While on the internet I was on SEARCH and accidently came acrossed it.I just thought it was weird .
Why do countries always claim things that are not theres. Sorta like American Karate/Kempo…etc, now Mexican Kungfu. Those languages dont even go together…:rolleyes: .
Why do countrues always claim things that are not theirs. Sorta like American Karate/Kempo…etc, now Mexican Kungfu. Those languages dont even go together…:rolleyes: .
that HAD to be set up on purpose
shiatsu, karate, kanji, apple pie. Tae Kwan do (they can keep it)
Japanese rock gardens, “American Ninja”
Defendo. Pancrase, american kickboxing
I wouldn’t call it kung fu, since that’s a chinese name, but http://yaomachtia.com is the website of a guy who claims to have reconstructed an Aztec fighting system.
Now, I have no doubt that the Aztecs were great warriors (you don’t get an empire that size without some skilled soldiers) and his ‘eagle club’ weapon looks like the weapon held by warriors in some of the pictographs I’ve seen. On the other hand the fact that his website hasn’t been updated in more than a year, is full of language errors, and doesn’t even have a link to a spanish version don’t exactly fill me with confidence about authenticity. Which, I hasten to add, has little to do with his fighting ability. Wally Jay seems to think highly of him, and if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Jay is very well regarded by the jujitsu community.
hahahaha logic well done, that was indeed “Mexican Kung Fu”. I asked my mexican cousins about him, they said he was big back in the '80s.
There’s no such thing as “mexican kung fu”. Machete-fu, maybe, and good old-fashioned dirty street fighting, but there is no martial arts system specific to Mexico. None of the great warrior cultures of Mexico (the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Toltecs, the Olmecs) had a specific and stylized martial arts system. They did have some pretty mean rituals and bloodthirsty sports though… like Mayan football, where the losing team forfeited their lives…
“None of the great warrior cultures of Mexico (the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Toltecs, the Olmecs) had a specific and stylized martial arts system.”
I’m very dubious about this assertion. Very few cultures have been as systematically erased as the great empires of central america. Because of the superiority of Spanish martial technology (horses, guns, steel blades and armor) the natives of Mexico were overrun in record time, and any oral martial culture that may have existed was quickly made obsolete and perhaps forgotten entirely. Soon after, because of the fanatacism of Catholic Missionaries, fantastic amounts of written records were destroyed (I think something like under 20 volumes of codices survive out of tens of thousands in their libraries) and who knows how many martial arts manuals may have existed within them?
Almost all that remains are the stone carvings in the architecture, and unsurprisingly they deal almost exclusively with religion and the stories of the great kings entombed therein. As far as I know, most of the written languages of Central and South America are only partially if at all understood by anthropologists and other academics.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that with a massive army of ‘eagle club’ baring warriors there was formal training in the techniques of hand to hand combat. Nor would it surprise me to learn that those who competed in the mayan football games had intensive study of that brutal ritual sport.
One other minor issue with your post; according to one scholar who has lectured me on the subject, the WINNERS of the maya football games were selected to die. It was quite the honor!:eek:
Hmmmmm. That’s not how I heard it in school down in Mexico (I spent 10 years of my childhood there).
Although you are correct that most of the written records (such as they were, not all the cultures were big on written) were destroyed, original language, history, and traditions survive strongly to this day in the indigent peoples. If there was a defined, specific, and stylistic system of martial combat it would have been passed down this way. There is not.
I heard thye losers in Mayan pelota got offed, not the winners. I’ll go pull up my textbooks and look it up 
Well, I’m not any kind of expert. This is just sort of jack-of-all-trades hobbyist type of knowledge I’m sharing. A lot of it comes from a graduate student in Theatrical History here at UT who gave a lecture to a class I was in about indigenous theater traditions in pre-colombian Mexico.
Just to hype up my own sources and downplay your own, I’ll mention that grade school-level textbooks are usually written by the winners and that UT has about the best Latin American studies department anywhere; I believe the lady who gave the lecture I mentioned before was doing an interdiciplinary thang with the LAS guys.
None of which is to say I remember it all with perfect accuracy, or that even if I did, she had it all correct.
Excellent point about lots of indigenous culture surviving in folk and oral traditions, btw. I think that martial arts type traditions may be an exception to that for the reasons I mentioned in my previous post. (whew! back on topic at last!)
I’m eager to hear what you find in your old textbooks. Thanks for taking the trouble to look.
Ok, I looked around for the answer - just about everything leans twoards the “losers die” theorem. I did find this:
The Ball Court (Juego de Pelota)
The game itself involved two teams, each able to hit the ball only with elbows, wrists or hips, and the object was to knock the ball through one of the stone hoops on the walls of the court.
Looking at the carvings on the lower walls of the court, you can see that this was not a casual sport. There are clear depictions of one team member with blood spurting from his headless neck, whilst another holds the head aloft. Some people think the captain of the losing side was executed by the winner; others suggest that the winners earned an honorable sacrifice. No-one knows for sure. It is said that the game was used either as a method of settling disputes, or as an offering to the gods, perhaps in times of drought. Only the best were selected to play, and to be sacrificed in this way was a great honor.
Games in the Ball Court were used to settle disputes or as an offering to the gods. Many believe the losers were put to death.
The Maya were not a death cult. No one wants to die at their physical peak - I can’t see anyone playing their best to win so they can die, but I can totally see wanting not to lose if the losers are to be killed
My vote goes to common sense - losers die.
Wow, that was fast! My old lecture notes aren’t so easy to find, alas.
Interesting that both points of view get some play in the quote you give. A lot of study of ancient cultures is like this; it can’t be known for certain, so people disagree on a lot of minor issues.
And yeah, I’m sure it didn’t seem minor to the guy who got his noggin lopped.
“Interesting that both points of view get some play in the quote you give”
Yah, I did that on purpose, exactly because we don’t know for a fact. It was, however, the only reference I could find to the less popular point of view.
Back on topic: there are indigenous dances in some of the more isolated (read: inbred) tribes in Mexico that depict conflict or combat between two males. This might possibly be a legacy of martial training, although practically every culture has some kind of ritual “combat” dancing.
The thing that most points to there having been no ‘mexican kungfu’ per se, is that despite Spanish conquest and subsequent persecution (and believe me, the Spaniards were absolutely ruthless bast@rds, American slaveowners were girlscouts by comparison), so much deep culture survived practically intact. If there was an empty-hand system, the campesinos would have retained it in some form.
Heck, I’d love to hear about real “mexican kungfu”! It would give me something say besides “why yes, I DO come from a long and illustrious line of oppressors!” or “I cut chu, mon!” 
Well I don’t know much about anything and this is my first post but I was just at Chichen Itza (sp?) and the guy there said that new reasurch points twards the winner being sacraficed. I wouldn’t be saprised if they had a martial arts system, they seemed like very smart people. and there are actually a lot of similarites between the mayans and asian people. The guy on the tour said that both cultures are born with the same birth mark that goes away as they get older. I’m not sure if that is true or not. Some people believe that the mayans were from asian and even though it would have been a long time ago, maybe some of the same principles were passed down? hmmmm, perhaps not. Anyway there culture was very amazing, in the arena were they played the games if you claped you heard 7 fast echoes, and there are seven levels to the pyramid there. it was something like 200 ft. long and if you stood on either end in a special spot you could aperantly hear a pin drop. there are all kinds of interesting things there. I’m not sure what it could mean, maybe it was just because I was in th jungles surounded by all kinds of life but I felt some very interesting qi there. well just food for thought.
Welcome, Qi Dup! It’s been a while since I visited any Mexican Pyramids, but they are most impressive, and the Aztec/Maya achievements in stonework, astronomy, and other fields are frankly breathtaking.
Jasbourne -
"If there was an empty-hand system, the campesinos would have retained it in some form. "
Well, maybe. I’m gonna go way out on some skinny limbs for the next paragraph or so, so take it as you will. For one thing, I haven’t neccessarily posited an empty hand form. The eagle club is a bit like a sword, and the juego de pelota we’ve discussed was (if memory serves, the later it gets, the shakier my memory is) was played with a lacrosse-type net on a stick. We all know how stickfighting and bladefighting are extremely important to many if not most MA traditions. We’ve also all head the stories of how capoiera - and newer to me the 'jailhouse rock - styles were hidden by oppressed populations for fear of giving away secret weapons. If you are outclassed by technology as I discussed before, you might well go underground with your bare-handed styles to preserve them, and they might persist hidden from outsiders even up to today. The stronger the oppression, the greater the impulse to keep such secret knowledge hidden, I’d say.
Heck, I’d love to hear about real “mexican kungfu”! It would give me something say besides “why yes, I DO come from a long and illustrious line of oppressors!” or “I cut chu, mon!”
Heck, haven’t you heard of Mexican Judo? “Judo know if I gotta knife, judo know if I gotta gun, judo know how many of my vatos I got hangin’ around here…”
Flower Wars
After the aztecs kicked everyone else’s asses, there was not enough bloodshed to support the level of sacrifices demanded by Huitzlipotchtli–numbers of sacrifices for Montezuma’s coronation were estimated at between 100 and 500 thousand. Since both warfare and sacrifice were required to control population growth limited by the general lack of arable land, the Aztecs came up with a unique solution.
Every year conquered tribes were required to send young men to fight in Flower Wars. These were generally non-lethal mock combat, with an important difference. The goal was to capture opponents. If you got captured, you got sacrificed.
To my understanding, one of the primary methods of capturing people involved the thumbnail. Aztec warriors continuously hit their thumbnails until they grew out thick, strong and clawlike. They would grapply opponents, and essentially ram the thumbnail into their foes throats, just below the adam’s apple, and between the collar bones. In the case of capturing, they would simply apply non lethal force.
no,no,no…It’s Mexican Judo
Judo know if I have a knife.Judo know if I have a gun.
Badger