شعب المايا
There is a legend created by missionaries within decades after the military conquest of the Aztec capital that long before the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico the Christian religion had been preached among the Aztecs and other Central Mexicans. This myth is sometimes projected onto the Maya based on popular misunderstanding and thinking that all Mesoamerican peoples are the same. In other words, in popular understandings precolumbian Mexicans are confused and conflated with the Maya peoples who lived in different parts of contemporary Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. No Maya people, particularly not in Yucatán Peninsula, had a myth that Quetzalcoatl Quetzacoatl was going to "return" nor was there ever any "confusion" by Maya peoples that any Spaniard was a "god" such as purported by the famous colonial myth that Cortes was interpreted as Quetzalcoatl by Aztecs.