History

But that's just the thing, that co-optation of local traditions I mentioned? It happened in Yucatán as well! That sort of thing happened everywhere in the portuguese and spanish empires where state power was too far for the comfort of local landlords. This being the early modern state, we are talking about almost across the whole territory. This makes a lot of sense because many of those same landlords were themselves former native elites.

The spanish themselves, in this instance, had a choice to make and they made it.

Christianity became the dominant religion in a lot of other regions by very different means, such as persuading kings to convert or outright co-opting local traditions, for example.

Poland for example. However i hate this shit and regardless of mountains of suffering it resulted in later, adopting catholicism by Duke Mieszko the First in 966 was a political jackpot that solved so many problems for him and it took over half of century till pagan reaction resulted in great uprising in 1025 and even then it was pretty easily defeated in few years (another speculative reason why all that seems to went so easy is that Mieszko and probably his half-legendary father were really merciless rulers that united the tribes by massacring local elites till no one protesting it survived, it also explains lack of tribal separatism in the early history of Poland).