That useful and interesting publication, African Arts, regularly sends out a questionnaire to its readers asking them for details of financial details, range of interests, and criticisms of editorial policy. The picture of the average reader which emerges, a prosperous art collector, or prospering would-be collector, seems to reflect the advertisements rather than the articles. Were New Blackfriars to launch such a questionnaire, one would be little surprised to find that the average reader is an under-wealthy book addict who through the articles enjoys her/his fantasies of endless and fascinating reading in well-stocked and up-to-date libraries. For such people a worthwhile, or, at least interesting, questionnaire could be constructed to test their control of semantic variations by seeing how they defined various “in” words. One problem, of course, is that “in” words must shift in meaning if they are to stay “in” indefinitely. One “in” word is “hegemony” which received from Gramsci a neat specification as the situation in which a group dominates society by means other than force, fraud, or consent. Unfortunately, the word has also become a resource for translating Chinese foreign policy statements in which “hegemony” refers to the domination of the super-powers over their allies. I want in this article to use “hegemony” in discussing Spanish colonial, and Ladino post-colonial domination of the Maya Indians of Yucatan Chiapas, and Guatemala, and the way in which Maya resistance developed new forms of authority, based on the “assumption” of some of the symbols used by their conquerors.