Background

Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula has a proud Maya heritage. Spanish conquistadors arriving in the 16th century found a bustling, heavily populated region dotted by powerful trading centers such as Tulum. Since their subordination by Spanish conquistadors, the local Maya population has maintained often a strained relationship with those of European descent. In the mid-19th century, this tension erupted in the Caste War, a conflict largely between Maya peoples and middle and upper class mestizos in the states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo.

More recently, Maya peoples in Yucatán have been disenfranchised in similar ways to that experienced by other Maya descendants in the region. During the colonial period, many Maya people were forcibly removed from the land they worked as subsistence farmers for the establishment of haciendas producing products such as henequen. With no economic alternatives, many were left with no choice but to become laborers on their former land, forced into a complex relationship of dependency on the hacienda system. Later, following the dissolution of many haciendas, communal land systems (ejidos) were set up such that rural communities could return to subsistence farming practices. However, now entrenched in the regional economic system, many were unwilling or unable to return to a lifestyle in which wages could not be procured. Although the economy of the Yucatan peninsula has grown exponentially in the last generation, particularly along the coast of Quintana Roo and around the metropolitan city of Mérida in the state of Yucatán, job opportunities in rural areas remain scarce. Many Yucatecan Maya have immigrated to large Mexican cities or to the United States in search of wages leaving some communities almost completely devoid of men between the ages of 16 and 60.

Although Yucatec Maya is spoken by a large percentage of Maya peoples in the Yucatán Peninsula, there is a hesitance to portray oneself as “Maya.” Many refer to themselves as campesinos, identifying with their economic position rather than their ethnic identity. Further, although Maya cultural heritage at sites such as Chichén Itzá and Uxmal is a huge draw for global tourism, rural people rarely recognize that the unexcavated earthen mounds on their ejidal land are the same as those so meticulously restored at archaeological parks. Here, looting is not as prominent as simple destruction of archaeological remains through development and urbanization. In rural regions too, it is common to see garden walls made of cut-block stones removed from nearby unprotected archaeological sites. In the Yucatan peninsula, then, the value of the remains of the past competes with the value of modern development.