Incidents of Travel in Yucatan:

Welcome to the Incidents of Travel in Yucatan blog!  Let me tell you a bit about our project and my own reasons for making this journey to Mexico.

Our group is travelling in the footsteps (or as close as we can come) of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood.  Stephens was a U.S. citizen who travelled on a “special confidential mission” from the American President to central Mexico.  He invited his friend, Catherwood, an Englishman, to join him on this journey.  Catherwood, an experienced traveller, had spent ten years studying and drawing Mediterranean antiquities.  Together, the two travelled Central America, drew and documented Mayan ruins, and described the local communities that they passed through.  We hear of the stones they saw and the people they met, especially the ones they hired to carry their baggage, prepare their meals, and provide a place to swing a hammock.  We hear of the faint and narrow path they travelled, the mules, the mud, the rough scrub, the heat, and the sting of garrapatas (mosquitoes?).

This week, we are travelling similar territory, but a very different world, and in a very different manner.  I come to the project as a classicist, an archaeologist and a historian.   I, too, have spent many years studying ancient Mediterranean antiquities.   But unlike Stephens and Catherwood, on this journey I’m a tourist, not a traveller.  By comparing of our incidents of travel in the Yucatan with those of Stephens and Catherwood I hope to come to a better understanding of global tourism.

One question that interests me is what is the history of this place?  Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan shows us the nineteenth-century Yucatan through American eyes.  The ruins we are going to tour and Stephen’s narrative are tangled in a greater story of colonialism and its aftermath. Stephens claims a certain ownership of the ruins (indeed, he purchases one of them):

The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America.  Like other articles of trade, they are regulated by the quantity in market, and the demand; but not being staple articles, like cotton and indigo, they were held at fancy prices, and at that time were dull of sale.  I paid fifty dollars for Copan.  There was never any difficulty about the price.  I offered that sum, for which Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool; if I had offered more, he would probably have considered me something worse.  (Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, p.128)

Who owns the past?  How have Mayan remains been researched, bought, sold, reconstructed, collected, displayed, narrated, and toured?  And what does this history reveal about the relationship between America and Yucatan? What does the journey of Stephens and Catherwood together with our own Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan teach us about the tangled history of this part of the world and our own?

Poor Mexico:  so far from God, so close to the United States.
–Porfirio Diaz

I’ve  been wanting to go to the Yucatan since 1999, when people from around the world gathered there (for the fabulous fireworks at Tulum? One of the many predicted Raptures? I didn’t much care then, and no longer remember now).

And finally we’re en route!

What  am  I looking for?  First,traces of the nineteenth century British historians and travelers who, like the Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson in 1777 or the Scottish traveler Frances Erskine Inglis in 1843, came to Mexico to experience a  supposedly primitive New World past–which, paradoxically, they contrasted against a supposedly civilized Old World present.  I am also interested in travellers who came to Mexico with a very different ideological agenda:  as North Americans, they hoped to increase international awareness of ancient civilizations they could claim as their own, with the goal of establishing a  cultural legacy that would enable the New World to lay claim to a civilization as advanced as that of the Old.

On a more personal and contemporary level, to, I hope to understand more clearly what it is about Mayan culture specifically, and Mexican culture more generally, that continues to fascinate inhabitants of their neighbors to the North.  What do we in the USA feel that we–as inhabitants of a fast food, strip mall culture whose towns often seem indistinguishable–have lost?  Why do we think that Mexico can restore our ideal of specificity or identity?

The American explorer John Lloyd Stephenshad his answer: the Mayan monuments would provide ocular proof for a global audience that “all the aboriginal Americans of all known epochs belong to the same great and distinctive race. . . .These crumbling bones declare, as with a voice from the grave, that we cannot go back to any ancient nation of the Old World for the builders of these cities; they are not the works of people who have passed away, and whose history has been lost, but of the same great race. . .which still clings around their ruins.”

I’m looking forward to discovering our own answers.

I have wanted to know more about the Maya and the interaction of their lives with the larger world, especially as the world moves to visit them as tourists.  I am looking forward to better understanding the role that religion and healing play in this dynamic interaction, as many tourists today seek out the Mayan archaeological sites as special areas of sacred power.  As we watched Quetzil Casteneda’s movie several weeks ago, we appreciated the multiple interpretations attached to special locations from Mayan history, especially by tourists and especially New Age religious pracitioners:

I want to understand how tourism affects contemporary Mayan society and how Mayans participate in this phenomena today.  But equally important to understanding contemporary cultures in the Yucatan is how these sites are portrayed for their visitors.  I can’t wait!

Matt Mariola writing, pre-departure.

I have two primary intellectual/experiential interests in traveling to the Yucatan Peninsula, and I think it will be useful to trace my thoughts on them now, before the trip, so I can compare expectations to actuality.

The first is gaining an understanding of the presence of ecotourism in the region, the forms that it takes, and what this might tell us about the possibilities for sustainable development in an area like the Yucatan – blessed with the flora and fauna and water features that draw eco-tourists while also blessed (or cursed?) with the sun and sand that draw many, many more leisure tourists.  Certainly the area boasts its eco-tourism bona fides, most notably the huge Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve on the eastern coast of the peninsula, which is nothing less than a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And we will be getting our taste of eco-tourism firsthand when we take a tour of the reserve on Monday from a tour company that belongs to the International Ecotourism Society.

The coast of Sian Ka'an Bioreserve seen from the air

But if you take all this at face value it runs the risk of glossing over a lot of interesting questions.  Does the “eco” in eco-tourism merely amount to showing tourists an ecologically healthy site, and nothing more?  Does “eco” imply a lack of people, indigenous or otherwise, living at the site?  Does it translate to a solar panel on the roof, a recycling bin, a fuel efficient van – or does it account for the full cycle of production, consumption, and waste?  Do the companies offer plastic water bottles?  Where is the food produced that they serve?  Do they minimize the production of waste?  And who are the eco-tourists themselves?  Are they a subset of the sun-and-sand tourists who flock to Cancun, or are they distinct?  Are they exclusively elite members of the North American and European middle classes?  Are they all white?  How do they reconcile their interest in being ecologically conscioius with the fact that they had to fly in a plane to get here in the first place?  . . . . .  For that matter, how do I?

I will try to answer as many of these questions as I can towards the end of the trip, so stay tuned.

My second main interest is agricultural, in keeping with the bulk of my research and teaching interests.   I know very little about the state or structure of farming in Mexico, and even less about the Yucatan specifically.  Most accounts I have read indicate that this region is dominated by a type of smallholder farming in which farmers cultivate small plots of land inherited over generations through kinship ties — growing corn, beans, squash, chiles, and a handful of other crops in a very biodiverse arrangement that is nearly the opposite of the large-scale monoculture farming we are so used to in the Midwest.  It is known as the milpa system of farming, and by all accounts it is a very resilient and sustainable form of farming, owing to its small scale, high levels of biodiversity (both between and within species), and long fallow periods in between cultivation periods.  But as with any small-scale and sustainable system of farming, the immediate questions that come to mind are, what forces allow it to stay in place instead of being replaced by large-scale “modern” farming, and how long can it last in the face of the inevitable forces in favor of a more industrialized, capitalistic form of agriculture?

A milpa field from rural Mexico

Unlike with eco-tourism, which I think we will get some immediate sense of while here, I don’t know how much exposure I will have to farming culture, but I will probe wherever I can.

Welcome to the blog for the Hales Fund Travel Study group headed to the Yucatán!