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Siete momentos
en la vida maya:
Performance, Tourism, and Mayan Identity on the Yucatán Peninsula
by Tamara Underiner
Abstract
en español
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As late as the summer of 2004, travelers on the
Mérida-Cancun highway about 21 kilometers southeast of the
Yucatecan capital, on their way to and from the resorts or the archaeological
sites at Chichén Itza, would see a large billboard announcing:
Teatro Indígena:
472 Actores
Ticopó -->
Yucatán
 The
billboard featured three women dressed in huipiles – the gorgeous
embroidered white cotton dresses worn by older Mayan women in both
city and countryside, and by younger ones on formal occasions –
and a little boy dressed in his own formal attire of guyabera and
white cotton pants. The four look off the highway toward the site
of the performance; one is dancing, one is clapping, while the other
two are engaged by what they are seeing off the stage of the billboard,
but presumably on the stage of the teatro it advertised. They are
ambiguous figures: are they the performers? Or the targeted audience
members for it? Because they are dressed rather formally (read:
"traditionally"), to many passers-by—especially
tourists primed by the pervasive sight of huipiles for sale in the
zócalo, or on the bodies of young women dancing with bottles
on their heads in the plaza and in the dinner-theatre in Chichén
Itzá's restaurant—the figures on the billboard belong
to the general tourist scenario that situates all locals as performers
of a sort. They are part of what travelers come to "look at,"
in both theatricalized representations and, even better, in everyday
life. And after all, the logo on the billboard proclaims the event's
sponsorship by the Yucatán State Department of Tourism, and
its accompanying website for its tourist guide, Yucatán Today,
promises "an inside glimpse into the lives of the Mayan people."
(1)
On the other hand, the figures don't return the gaze of the traveler
in an inviting way; they are not positioned as objects of that gaze
(2).
Instead, they entice through a different rhetoric: they see something
the traveler doesn't, and the billboard invites the traveler to
come, share the view. Thus, "we" and "you,"
"self" and "other," in this image and in the
event itself, become curiously conflated.
Keeping this destabilization of subject positions
in mind, I wish to explore the performance event heralded by the
billboard as one example of how tourism can arrange (and rearrange)
relationships between the self and other; between the local and
international; among theatre, ritual, and fiesta; between authenticity
and invention. When I speak of "tourism" in this way,
English grammar assigns it an agential role, but I see it more as
an important grounding condition in which many of these relationships
are increasingly articulated, especially in areas like the Yucatán
peninsula where tourism provides an important economic base. Equally
important and perhaps also emblematic of other geopolitical contexts,
tourism in Yucatán occurs within a larger national context
in which the relationship between nation-building and ethnic pluralism
is still working itself out, often violently. Here, pressures toward
nationalizing a Mexican identity based on the homogenizing myth
of the mestizo, the great rhetorical hero-product of the Mexican
Revolution, are still operative, if largely ineffective (as illustrated
by the ongoing Zapatista conflict). In other words, to achieve its
Revolutionary (and now, neo-liberal economic) ends, Mexico needs
the Indians, as such, to disappear. At the same time, however, Mexico
needs its Indians to be visible in certain sanctioned ways, not
only to attract tourist money, but also to comfort itself with this
apparent accommodation to the plurality demanded by so many. Thus,
indigenous visibility is very much circumscribed by two prevalent
discourses: that of rebellion on the one hand, and of the more "innocent"
ostentations of the tourist trade on the other. Especially in the
Yucatán Peninsula, where support for the Zapatistas is weaker
than it is in other, poorer parts of Mexico, many have opted for
the latter kind of visibility as being better than the former—and
certainly better than nothing.
Siete momentos en la vida maya was an attempt
to increase the cultural visibility of contemporary Mayans via a
tourist show that was, on the surface, the kind of folkloric performance
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett rightly links to centuries of ethnographic
displays that, throughout time, have participated in the "reciprocity
of disappearance and exhibition." (3)
In her survey of the many forms ethnographic display may take—ranging
from objects to people, in contexts as diverse as museums, fairs,
galleries, folk festivals, national theatres, and so on—she
notes the uncomfortable frequency with which such displays occurred
precisely when the ethnographic "objects" were on the
verge of consignment to oblivion by the dominant culture who was
the targeted audience for the display. If this was more common in
earlier centuries, even in ours there are dangers enough—even
and especially when, as is true of Siete momentos, the performance
is offered as an aesthetic experience and not an un-spiced slice
of village life: "Similarly, by aestheticizing 'folklore'—no
matter what is gained by the all-inclusive definition of folklore
as the arts of everyday life—we are in danger of depoliticizing
what we present by valorizing an aesthetics of marginalization."
(4)
However, I hope to show that the contemporary social complexity
of touristic enterprises—given that "traditional"
people increasingly occupy both stage and spectator positions, and
in a growing number of cases exercise more creative and financial
control over both process and product—the reciprocal relationship
between disappearance and display may work itself out differently.
The agents involved in negotiations that result
in cultural performances for tourists are multiple; they include
performers, producers, spectators, sponsors at the local, state,
national and sometimes international level, and researchers like
myself—who, along with the figures on the billboard and the
others in the list, embody several roles at once, not least of which
are traveler and tourist as well. The relative power that each holds
is also difficult fully to trace: within the single example of a
particular staging like this "teatro indígena,"
with its 472 actors and hundreds of spectators, there is no one-way
or even two-way flow of power in the representational or performative
economy. Defining who maintained the "cultural control"
of this performance, to borrow from Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's work,
is complicated by the fact that cultural identifications tend to
shift among all the players here and decision-making never rested
in any one pair of hands. The results, depending on one's own subject
position and which element of the event one wishes to focus on,
register at once a performance of cultural autonomy, an appropriation
of non-indigenous elements by the indigenous performers, and the
potential folkloricization of some indigenous elements. Further,
the event's touristic frame of reference could be interpreted as
a material imposition of elements external to the "traditional"
lifeways of the performers (the tourists themselves), but so long
since naturalized by the tourist trade there as to become a part
of local culture (5).
Nor is there a transcendent position outside of
this economy from which to write about it here. On the contrary,
my perspective is an embedded one, due to growing professional and
personal relationships with its producers and some of the performers.
In my earlier work, I have focused more on the performances as instances
of communal theatrical expression than on the touristic field in
which many of them operated (6).
In the course of my study of such theatre, I have become increasingly
interested in the ways touristic spectacle works not only as a species
of theatre, but also as a register of tourism's increasing role
in the production of ethnic identities for all the players involved.
The goal of this examination is not, as tourist researcher Robert
E. Wood warns against, to pronounce a normative judgment on whether
this example was "good or bad," or whether its "benefits
outweigh[ed] its costs." (7)
Instead, I hope to show how the touristic context for this one event
worked to circumscribe its own aesthetic and representational possibilities,
such that it could not sustain itself as such, but nevertheless
provided a significant site for the re-valoration of local culture
and new opportunities for self-expression within those communities.
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