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Gonzalo Guerrero, as the better-informed Mexican schoolchild will tell you, was the father of the first mestizo.
What they might not add is that Ixmo, the first-born daughter of this Spaniard himself born around 1470 in Palos de la Frontera (Huelva) ended up being sacrificed at Chichen Iztá in order that the Mayan deities might go a bit easier on the locusts *
Reports of Guerrero's early career show little signs of the coming apostasy. He participated as an arcabucero in the conquest of Granada in 1492 and then left for Naples. With his fortune still unmade, he subsequently decided to cross the Atlantic, ending up at the Darien colony in what is now Panama.
On August 15th 1511 he boarded a ship bound for Santo Domingo. One reason the Maya had singularly failed to branch out further into the Caribbean is that the seas between the Yucatán and Jamaica are more than occasionally treacherous with strong north-south currents. And so it was that a sudden storm in this very space put an end to Guerrero's voyage and he ended up on a raft with twenty other survivors, eighteen men and two women, including the captain Valdivia, regidor to Núñez de Balboa.
Only eight were still alive when the raft washed up on the Riviera Maya. Unfortunately the welcoming party consisted of the notoriously non-pacific Cocom tribe who immediately halved that number by sacrificing four of them - Valdivia included - and then deposited the remainder in a cage and proceeded to fatten them up with a view to repeating the ceremony in the near future.
Somehow the quartet escaped and made their way to Xaman-Há aka Playa del Carmen, then run by Taxmar, cacique of the Tutul Xiúes.
The chief gave them to a sacerdote and general so-and-so called Teohom. Two were duly worked to death, leaving just Guerrero and a Catholic priest called Gerónimo de Aguilar.
Taxmar felt sorry for the pair and had them removed from Teohom's residence. Guerrero repaid the chief's compassion by making himself handy as a military advisor - Taxmar duly defeated the Coco Bongo Cocomes using an ancient Macedonian-style phalanx and then gifted his new prize asset to to Na Chan Can, headman of the Cheles** in Ichpaatún (north of the bay of Chetumal).
Guerrero was assigned to the tribe's leading warrior Balam and achieved a near equality of status after saving his mentor from a caimán and then leading the Cheles to many victories of the flowery sort. Needless to say, he was starting to go native with only his untended beard still a bit of a give-away on his now thoroughly tattooed and pierced person. He married Na Chan Can's daughter Zazil-Há and started Mexico's first mestizo family.
Meanwhile, Gerónimo de Aguilar was less prone to aculturation; being a celibate man of the cloth he chose not take a Mayan wife.
In 1519 Cortés landed on Cuzamil (Cozumel) and heard rumours about two Mayan-speaking compatriots over on the mainland. According to a member of his expedition, Bernal Díaz de Castillo - future mayor of La Antigua Guatemala and ancestor of the brewers of Cerveza Gallo - the conquistador imagined that the pair would both jump at the chance of rescue after eight years of living rough and would no doubt also immediately sign up as translators.
Gerónimo de Aguilar did, but his former shipmate decided not to give up his life as a Mayan warlord, helping his adopted people repulse various Spanish expeditions to the peninsula. The well-organised resistance met by Francisco de Montejo at Champotón in May 1527 is also suggestive of tactical nous that Guerrero instilled in the townships of the Yucatán.
In 1536 Gonzalo Guerrero's days as traitorous thorn in the side of the Spanish empire came to an end beside the river Ulúa in Honduras. He had come to the aid of the cacique of Ticamaya, then under attack from an offshoot of Pedro de Alvarado's invasion force led by Lorenzo de Godoy. Wounded at first by an arrow that pierced his navel, el renegado was finished off, rather ironically, by an arquebus.
* That's her at the back of the group in the statue, tugging rather plaintively on her mother's skirt.
They might also fail to mention of course that he was almost certainly the first European hippy to visit Playa del Carmen.
** My cat Osli has a chronic case of cheles!
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