The Transnational Construction of Mayanness

Reading Modern Mesoamerica through US Archives

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Ben Fallaw, Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Ben Fallaw

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781646424269, 9781646424252
• eBook ISBN: 9781646424276
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Transnational Construction of Mayanness explores how US academics, travelers, officials, and capitalists contributed to the construction of the Maya as an area of academic knowledge and affected the lives of the Maya peoples who were the subject of generations of anthropological research from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Expanding discussions of the neocolonial relationship between the US and its southern neighbors and emphasizing little-studied texts virtually inaccessible to those in Mexico and Central America, this is the first and only set of comparative studies to bring in US-based documentary collections as an enriching source of evidence.
 
Contributors tap documentary, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological sources from North America to expand established categories of fieldwork and archival research conducted within the national spaces of Mexico and Central America. A particularly rich and diverse set of case studies interrogate the historical processes that remove sources from their place of production in the "field" to the US, challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the geography of data sources that are available for research, and reveal a range of historical relationships that enabled US actors to shape the historical experience of Maya-speaking peoples.
 
The Transnational Construction of Mayanness offers rich insight into transnational relations and suggests new avenues of research that incorporate an expanded corpus of materials that embody the deep-seated relationship between Maya-speaking peoples and various gringo interlocutors. The work is an important bridge between Mayanist anthropology and historiography and broader literatures in American, Atlantic, and Indigenous studies.
 
Contributors: David Carey, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Lydia Crafts, John Gust, Julio Cesar Hoil Gutierréz, Jennifer Mathews, Matthew Watson
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Yucatecan High Society and Stephen Salisbury III: The Origins of Social Ties between Elites from Yucatán and Massachusetts
• 3. Bad Spanish and Worse Maya: On the Performance of Gringohood during the “Carnegie Age”
• 4. American Idols: Bartolomé García Correa, US Americans, and the Transnational Construction of Mayanism, 1925–1935
• 5. Funding Values in Highland Chiapas: How Harvard Anthropology Naturalized the Mexican State
• 6. Distilling the Past through the Present: Discussions with Contemporary US Rum Makers for Understanding Nineteenth-Century Rum Making in the Yucatán Peninsula
• 7. Indígenas and International Influences of Modern Medicine in Twentieth-Century Guatemala
• 8. A Cartography of Tourist Imaginaries
• 9. The Production and Archiving of a Design-Driven Mayanness in Hacienda Tourism, Yucatán
• Index
• About the Authors