On Being Maya and Getting By

Heritage Politics and Community Development in Yucatán

Sarah R. Taylor

• Publisher: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781607327721
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

On Being Maya and Getting By is an ethnographic study of the two Ek'Balams—a notable archaeological site and adjacent village—of the Yucatán Peninsula. When the archaeological site became a tourist destination, the village became the location of a community-based tourism development project funded by the Mexican government. Overt displays of heritage and a connection to Maya antiquity became important and profitable for the modern Maya villagers. Residents of Ek'Balam are now living in a complex ecosystem of natural and cultural resources where the notion and act of "being Maya" is deeply intertwined with economic development.The book explores how Ek'Balam villagers negotiate and maneuver through a web of social programs, tourists, volunteers, and expectations while living their daily lives. Focusing on the active processes in which residents choose to participate, author Sarah R. Taylor provides insights into how the ideological conflicts surrounding economic development play out in the negotiations between internal community politics and external social actors. The conflicts implicit to conceptions of "community" as a target for development are made explicit through the systematic questioning of what exactly it means to be a member of a local, indigenous, or sustainable community in the process of being developed. On Being Maya and Getting By is a rich description of how one community is actively negotiating with tourism and development and also a call for a more complex analysis of how rural villages are connected to greater urban, national, and global forces.

Chapter 1

The Arrival of Tourism

DOI: 10.5876/9781607327721.c001

In Mexico as in many countries, archaeological remains are the property of the nation and a source of patrimony (Vázquez Léon 2003). In Mexico particularly, this patrimony has been an important foundation for the creation and promotion of a national identity (García Canclini 1999). As part of the indigenismo movement, the pre-Colombian past in Mexico became an important key to promoting Mexico and Mexicans as hybrids of an indigenous past and a cosmopolitan future (García Canclini 1990; Saldívar 2011). The remnants of the past became the heritage of the nation (Breglia 2006; Castañeda 1996), which encompassed ancient archaeological sites and historic haciendas renovated for touristic consumption (Breglia 2009; Córdoba Azcárate, Garcia de Fuentes, and Córdoba Ordóñez 2014).

The promotion of archaeological sites through heritage tourism is a prominent strategy on the part of Mexican government agencies, namely the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the Secretaria de Turismo de Mexico (National Secretary of Tourism, SECTUR) (Hutson, Can Herrera, and Chi 2014; Magnoni, Ardren, and Hutson 2007). The designation of several archaeological zones in the Maya World as World Heritage Sites through the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) has increased the scope of these promotions. UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Maya World are, in order of inscription to the list, Tikal (1979), Copan (1980), Quirigua (1981), Palenque (1987), Chichén Itzá (1988), Joya de Cerén (1993), Uxmal (1996), and Calakmul (2002) (UNESCO 2017). Because nearly all of the forty-six sites on the Yucatán Peninsula, encompassing the Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo, are administered by INAH, the Mexican government is complicit in the policies made for the excavation and opening of sites to tourism. With the designation of sites on UNESCO’s list, archaeological remains became more than patrimony of Mexico. They became the heritage of all the world’s citizens.

Indigenous communities in Mexico and elsewhere are encouraged by state and federal governments to transform cultural and ecological resources into sites of tourist consumption (Ceballos-Lascurain 1987; Berger and Wood 2010; Van den Berghe 1995). In many ways, this is a form of tourism governance, though terms such as tourism politics, policy, policy-making and planning, and destination management are more commonly used in the literature (Bramwell and Lane 2011). Governance is more than just formal agencies of government involved in tasks. It includes non-state actors that are in the community, business, and voluntary sectors. Mexico’s indigenous population—defined as native speakers of one of Mexico’s sixty-five indigenous languages—constitutes 6.7 percent of the national population (INEGI 2009). The Mexican government identified indigenous tourism as an important vehicle for economic development in poor, marginalized communities that had the potential for developing their natural and cultural resources into tourist attractions (Villarreal 2014). This includes traditional cultural performances, diverse ecosystems, and archaeological zones.

Many factors have worked simultaneously since 2004 to make the village of Ek’Balam a destination. The agents engaged in the process include residents, funders, volunteers, missionaries, and tourists. These groups are traditionally divided into two categories in the literature on tourism: hosts and guests (Smith 1989). This model has been the foundation of most scholarly research on the tourism phenomenon, yet it constricts our ability to understand both sides of these tourism encounters. The host-guest dichotomy allows the guests a series of choices—such as what destination they visit, which type of tourism they engage in, and how much interaction they want to have with locals—while confining the host to a passive recipient of tourism and tourists. To gain a holistic understanding of this phenomenon, we must move beyond the “host-guest founding myth” (Aramberri 2001) to inform the much-needed creation of new theoretical paradigms for the study of tourism. We must base these paradigms on the assertion that the hosts are autonomous actors working within a politicized system rather than natives waiting to be duped (Stronza 2001).

Rather than hosts, I propose that residents of Ek’Balam are guides on this tour, as they have certainly been mine. Throughout the book, I present one family—the Ay Mena household—as a metaphor for understanding the countless ways residents pursue and experience tourism. We will first meet the Ay Mena family on a summer evening in 2004. In April of that year, residents opened the village’s community-based tourism (CBT) project—known locally as “the Cabañas”—and welcomed their first guests. This was a long time in the making, and among the participating households there was a high level of excitement and enthusiasm as they received their first few guests. At the same time, the project drew on many of the community’s resources. This fact was frustrating for the households not eligible to participate in the CBT project.

Throughout the book, we will visit the Ay Mena family seven times. Each visit provides a glimpse of a day in the life of this family at a specific point in time in relationship to the process of tourism development in the village. This is a fictive, composite family made up of the real actions and words of actual people in the community. It was difficult to determine how best to introduce these individuals to the reader. I decided that employing ethnographic allegory—or ethnographic realism as Oscar Lewis (1975) coined the phrase—would be the best way to both ensure their anonymity and provide a rich, thick description of the lived daily experiences residents have with tourists and tourism. This composite family of fictionalized individuals represents the real experiences of various residents.

Writing ethnography about a community of this size poses a variety of unique challenges. Because of the small population (approximately 350), the small number of households (approximately 75), and the even smaller number of large kin groups (7), simply assigning pseudonyms to members of a household would not adequately obscure their identities. Actual conversations and events that took place provided the basis for writing about the interactions within this composite family and among members of the family, other residents, and me. It is my hope that through the intimate portrait these vignettes provide, the reader will understand the nuanced ways residents engage with tourism, economic change, and the constant rotation of state and federal programs, missionaries, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and tourists while still living their daily ives.

Summer 2004

Roosters do not wait until daybreak to crow and instead are clocks that mark the passing hours. The sound of barking dogs, startled from their sleep, and roosters crowing rings out throughout the night. Sunrise brings new sounds: men whistle to their dogs to head to the milpa, turkeys rustle and gobble as they leave their perches to begin the day, and radios announce the morning with intermittent static as women tune in the local station. On Saturday mornings the radios blare especially loudly, as people enjoy the four-hour Mayan-language program. As the fires are revived, the sounds of sleeping children join the cacophony. Smoke seeps out of kitchens and into the air, slowly at first, then more quickly as the cooking fires get going. Women heat water for Nescafe or Chocomilk, after which they will heat up some of last night’s tortillas or, on some days, pull down the bag of assorted pan dulce (sweet bread).

On Tuesday and Saturday nights, a vendor from the bakery comes through Ek’Balam honking his horn and selling baked goods. A weekly purchase of pan dulce is stored out of reach of the animals in the hanging rack that, for a brief period of its existence, was the front guard of an oscillating fan. Everything has a use here, regardless of the manufacturer’s suggestion. Fan guards double as hanging racks for storage out of the reach of small children and animals and as grills to place over the fire. Their shape conveniently mimics the size and shape of a comal (griddle), balanced on the three rocks of the fire for cooking tortillas. In the small one-room homes that are prone to mild flooding, nothing can be stored on the ground, and there must indeed be a place for everything. The thatch roof provides many opportunities for storage, aided by long iron hooks that hang at various lengths and hold burlap sacks, pots, buckets, and cardboard boxes.

On a lazy Saturday with the Ay Mena family in the summer of 2004, the whole house is in high spirits. I took the day off from my usual routine of walking around the village to talk to people and arrange interviews. Two months have passed, and we have all become accustomed to each other. Vanessa, the youngest child at six years old, asked me this morning if I could spend the day visiting with her instead of with other residents around town, so I happily complied and only left the house and yard a few times. The six children are animated and fooling around, playing between their two languages and only letting me in on the Maya when they are satisfied that I have searched my tiny vocabulary and cannot find the word. Doña Gomercinda and don Lucas keep up an occasional dialogue between themselves while still listening to everything we are saying. Residents use the prefixes “doña” and “don” to refer to all married women and men, respectively. These are honorific terms in reference to elderly people in some other parts of the country; however, they remain in common use in rural areas in Yucatán for married people of any age. Doña Gomercinda, my ever-present translator and source of all knowledge, interjects with explanations in Spanish when she sees that I cannot understand the rapid fire of Maya in short syllables and the raised voices reserved for antagonizing a sibling. Yucatec Maya is the residents’ first language. When children go to school, they learn Spanish; however, Maya is still the predominant language for communication at home.

Eugenio, the eldest child at sixteen, is home from the neighboring city of Temozón for the weekend and is spending a rare evening in the house. He attends high school in Temozón and lives with his aunt, doña Florencia, only returning to the village on weekends. If he stays on this path, he will be the first young person from Ek’Balam to complete his education through high school. If a student wants to continue beyond the sixth grade, he or she must leave Ek’Balam for the neighboring towns of Santa Rita, Actuncóh, or Temozón. For study beyond the ninth grade, Temozón is the closest option. While these towns are not particularly far in terms of distance, the expense of clothes, transportation, and food away from home is prohibitive. Eugenio’s continued education relies on his family’s ability to make sacrifices to meet those expenses.

Dinner this evening consists of a family favorite, ensalada with salted pork. Temozón is locally famous for its smoked meats, sausages, and salted pork; and a trip through there is generally not complete without purchasing at least a half kilo of smoked, salted pork. Once home, the strips of smoked meat are diced and combined with cabbage, red onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and fresh lime juice to make a refreshing dinner on this hot summer night. Part of the children’s animation is caused by Eugenio’s presence and a great dinner, while the other part is excitement because the long school year is finally over. This means that slingshots, corn sack–shrouded forts, hopscotch, and a mountain of dirty clothes for doña Gomercinda to wash will fill the hot and sticky days.

Salvador, the second son, is twelve years old, excited to be heading into fifth grade in the fall. For him, the fact that school is out means more time to devote to his work at Hotel Eden, a hotel and restaurant in the village. Joan, the North American proprietor, keeps him and a handful of other young boys busy with gardening tasks and odd jobs. Hotel Eden opened in 2001 and received mixed responses from residents. While Joan is a controversial figure among some groups in the village, the Ay Mena family has a close relationship with her. Doña Goma works there as well, washing towels and linens three times a week. For his twelfth birthday last month, Salvador saved up his earnings and Joan matched what he had so he could buy a new bicycle. Salvador plans to go on to secondary and high school.

Rosa, the eldest daughter at thirteen, took the opposite route and left school after finishing sixth grade. She is content to have time to help her mother around the house, perfect her weaving techniques, and work from time to time in the kitchen of the community-based tourism development project. While Eugenio and Salvador are exceptions to the norm with regard to their pursuit of schooling, Rosa’s decision to leave school after sixth grade is more typical of girls in the village.

The two younger boys, Federico and Ignacio (Nacho for short), are the family hams and keep everyone entertained, be it intentional or otherwise. They go everywhere together but are very different from one another. Each has attributes that are almost the opposite of the other. Federico is already suave at just eleven and an eager entertainer, while Nacho is practical, gruff, and a typical nine-year-old boy. When you see them walking together, arms thrown casually over each other’s shoulder, they complement each other to such an extent that they sometimes seem like one boy.

The youngest is Vanessa, the smallest child with the biggest personality. I think often about how much I will enjoy seeing her as a young woman. At six years old, she is confident and often contrary, as she quite seriously tells you that it is cold if you comment on how hot the afternoon is. Unlike some other girls her age, Vanessa is bold when it comes to interacting with tourists. When she saw that I was making appointments with individuals to conduct interviews, she began insisting on appointments to play with me.

The kitchen house can hardly contain all of the family’s energy, and the boys move in and out as they eat, joke, and then go into the main house to watch whatever is on the small black-and-white television. The smoke from the cooking fire drifts lazily out through the separated poles of the curved walls and up through the thatch roof and into the night air. The only constants during the meal are the patting sound of Rosa and doña Gomercinda making perfectly round tortillas. They sit at a small table next to the fire and turn out tortillas just as fast as the boys can eat them. Don Lucas sits at the larger table eating and conversing in his unique way of part Maya, part Spanish, all the while glancing at doña Gomercinda to fill in the spaces between words.

Don Lucas was born in the village of X’Kumil and moved to Ek’Balam with his family as a young man when the entire community relocated. His was one of the first families to make the move in 1969, and seven of his eight siblings still live in the village. He is a tall man, with a long, regal profile. His skin is very brown, and his thick black hair is just showing the first signs of gray near his temples. I spend much time observing don Lucas and find that he spends just as much time observing me. He notes every blister, bite, and scratch; and he fusses at doña Gomercinda when she does not notice or if she does not tell him when I am ill and not eating much. Don Lucas is an ejidatario—an individual with land rights in a given land grant community—and is one of the associates of the community-based tourism project. He enjoys most of the work he does for the project and trusts in the prospect of his participation being a good choice economically. The only part he does not enjoy is when guests arrive during his shift as night watchman.

Every twenty days, it is his turn to spend twenty-four hours at the Cabañas. He does some gardening and takes care of any pending tasks. He is also in charge of checking in any guests who arrive. Don Lucas, like the other twenty-three associates, does not speak English. His Spanish, as with twelve of the other associates, is broken at best. When guests do arrive, he has a difficult time communicating with them and attending to their needs. This interaction is uncomfortable and even embarrassing for him and translates as poor customer service from the guests’ perspective. Still, he maintains that this project will improve and says he wants to keep participating so that once business does improve, his children will be able to work there. Like all the other families involved with the community-based tourism project, the Ay Mena household looks forward with great enthusiasm to the potential it holds. “They say it will be like a new Chichén Itzá, with gringos coming from all over the world to see the ruins,” Lucas explains. This is a statement repeated regularly around the village. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for the onslaught of tourists, for better or worse.

Once everyone has finished their food, Eugenio leaves with his brothers not far behind. They will follow him on their bikes as far as he will permit, after which they will join the rest of the young boys playing soccer and riding their bikes around the plaza in the center of town. Doña Gomercinda, done making tortillas and satisfied that everyone has had enough to eat, joins us at the large green plastic table. She and Rosa are always the last to eat, though don Lucas lingers at the table or in the hammock until they finish. I sit with them on this night, enjoying the conversation we have settled into now that the younger children have left.

Doña Goma is entertaining us with a story about a family who came through that afternoon on the village tour. Joan started offering tours of the village to her guests last winter, and Goma’s house is one of the main stops. According to her, this particular family has the biggest gringo baby she has ever seen. Residents use the slang term gringo (gringa in its feminine form) almost interchangeably with foreigner. In other parts of Mexico, this has a negative connotation, but in Ek’Balam they are simply classificatory terms. Goma often remarks on how big the children of gringo tourists are. The first question she asks in most encounters is how old the children are. Now that summer vacation is here, there are always children running in many directions. She often calls a local child over to compare the sizes of the two children. Her general conclusion as to why the gringos’ children are so much larger is that the gringos are wealthy enough to take better care of their children. Her first reaction when a family comes on the tour is to touch the children and tell them to sit beside her if they seem uncertain. This is what she would do with any child, and it seems the logical response to making a timid child comfortable. She has learned, however, that often the parents seem uncomfortable with her doing this. They want to keep their children as far away as possible from the cooking fire, and they are not accustomed to strangers touching their children.

Doña Goma recognizes their discomfort and equates this with her feelings about photography. Tourists often take photos of children in the village, which was sometimes seen as evidence that they wanted to steal them. Many women deduced that they may give the photos to prospective adoptive parents. Joan has tried to quell some fears about photographs, but there is still a level of discomfort. For doña Goma, the fear is subsiding, in part because she has more interactions with tourists than do many other women in Ek’Balam. Between her work at Joan’s and the village tour that stops at her house, she interacts with tourists on a regular basis. Some days she considers telling Joan that she can no longer host the tours. Often, she devotes hours to getting ready in ...