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 trading centers. Since their subordination by Spanish conquistadors, the local Maya population has maintained a relationship with those of European descent that often is highly conflictive. During the mid-19th century, this tension erupted in a major insurgency that often is called the Caste War, and was a conflict largely between Maya peoples and middle and upper class mestizos in the states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Campeche.

More recently, Maya peoples in Yucatán have been disenfranchised in ways that are similar to those experienced by other Maya descendents in the greater Maya region. During the late colonial and early independent period, many were forcibly removed from the land they worked as subsistence farmers for the establishment of haciendas producing products such as henequen With few economic alternatives, many became laborers on their former lands, forced into a complex relationship of dependency on the hacienda system. Following the Mexican Revolution in 1910, many haciendas were dissolved and communal land systems (ejidos) established so that Maya people 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 “Maya Riviera” 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 Tulum 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 destruction of archaeological remains through development and urbanization. In rural regions, 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 economic survival in a globalized world.