The Republic of New Mayapán grew out of the remnants of the Republic of Yucatán. When the latter was assimilated into the state of Mexico in the 1840s, it was under the condition that its autonomy would be respected and the rights it granted to its citizens, such as freedom of religion and the writ of Amparo. However, Mexico would quickly undermine those efforts, ruling that most of those rights were unconstitutional. This led to massive uproar across the region, especially in the impoverished class of native Mayans who were enjoying the freedom to practice their religion. This, combined with heavy taxation and encroachment on communal lands, led to a revolution of the Mayans in addition to the region’s extant resistance against Mexican control.

The revolution made headway quickly, but became split between the desires of its two leaders, Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi. The former wanted to leverage their threat to negotiate a Mayan state, while the latter simply wanted to drive out or kill all colonizers with no quarter, in retaliation for a similar slaughter ordered by ex-governor Santiago Mendez. Attempts by Jacinto to stop the revolution early through a treaty with the Mexican government were undercut by the sudden death of Miguel Barbachano y Tarrazo, the liberal governor of Yucatán, leaving only the more conservative Mendez, who refused to make peace unless the Mayan resistance full capitulated to his demands. Subsequently, Jacinto focused on making deals with the governments of specific cities, ensuring that their white citizens would have time to evacuate before Cecilio’s troops came in and earning the future republic some political capital. By 1853, Mendez had fled the region and the two revolutionaries would become the first presidents of The Republic of New Mayapán. The death of Barbachano y Tarrazo, whose corpse was found deep in the jungle in 1982, was never explained, though folk history hold that the Mayan deity Maximón got him drunk and lured him into the forest with the promise of a beautiful woman.

The resulting republic was begrudgingly accepted on the world stage. While it was snubbed by most of Europe and the Americas due to being formed in a violent uprising of the tanned underclasses, it made allies with a number of other post-colonial and/or anti-imperial states, particularly Haiti to the east and The Federal Republic of Central America to the south. It had also opened up tentative political ties with the United States post-Civil War after extraditing a few wizards attempting to flee to conservative allies in Mexico. Financially, the state was and is largely supported by agriculture, particularly the cultivation of agave, but Mexican tariffs at the time of its founding stymied attempts to export it. While Jacinto and his diplomacy-based philosophies had gained influence in the nascent government in the latter half of the 1800s, there was still a strong anti-European and isolationist element in the republic’s culture. Foreigners were allowed to visit for the purposes of trade, but immigration by any non-indigenous people was seen as suspect and Europeans were often not allowed to enter the republic’s interior without a minder from the government.

The 20th century saw the country gradually opening up, taking part in events like the Olympics, attempting to join the League of Nations, and opening up limited race-blind immigration. The discovery of the Chicxulub crater off of the nation’s coast (and the subsequent reevaluation of The Protean Experiments’ mentions of the region) led to the opening of the New Mayapán National Institute for Research in 1974, President Kan’s attempt to reforge the nation’s reputation as one of science and intelligence. At the time of writing, it’s considered to be one of the best schools for anthropology and paleontology research in the world.