Photo Story
You Call it Corn, We Call it Ixi’im
ID # 1262
There are places in the world where people often go to take time off, enjoy the sun, and drink drinks with funny names out of coconut shells. There’s nothing wrong with just being a vacationer every now-and-again, but it can be very easy to forget that when we go on vacation, we’re going to a real place with real people and real lives, and that places don’t exist solely for us to go and kick our feet up. In this picture file about the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, a place where the US and Western Europe have been kicking their feet up for half a century, we will take a quick look at what makes the Yucatan a very real place with very real diversity and complexity of culture and people, and not just tropical forest awaiting more 5-star hotels.
The Yucatan Peninsula in south-eastern Mexico is a truly beautiful place, and this is the view that most vacationers and tourists are coming for: white sands, palmettos, and water so blue that it’s hard to believe it’s real the first time you see it. This particular photo is taken from Isla Mujeres in the Caribbean off the coast of Cancun, which you can see on the horizon.
Most tourists who come just for the beaches and dancehalls of Cancun might never know how close they are to places like this, which are beautiful and captivating landscapes in their own right. In this picture, Jacinto stands in his community milpa, a slash-and-burn style community farmland in the middle of the forest. The plants growing in the ground are carefully planted assemblages of corn, beans, and squash, which when grown together, enriches the soil.
People who vacation in Cancun might also never think about the fact that ‘Cancun’ is a Mayan name, as are most rural town names in the Yucatan. One such town is Tihosuco, where this statue of Cecilio Chi stands in the town square. Chi was one of the leaders of the Caste War rebellion, an uprising of Mayan villagers in the late 19th and 20th century (some will tell you it’s still ongoing). The rebellion was so strong that at one point the UK actually recognized the Mayan nation-state of Chan Santa Cruz as legitimate. Chi is a hero to many modern-day Mayans of the area, and not too well liked by the Mexican or Yucatan governments.
Removed from the Mayan countryside, The Catedral de San Ildefonso, the oldest cathedral in the continental Americas, sticks out over the trees of the historic city center of Merida, the capital of the state of Yucatan. The billowing clouds behind it are bringing the afternoon rain, which comes like clockwork on a daily basis in the summertime, providing a relief from the hot sun and soaking gringos like myself who don’t heed the weather warnings. This church, like many others in the area, was built largely by Mayans who were forced by the Spanish to tear down their own temples and rebuild them into catholic cathedrals. If you know where to look, you can even see some of the decorative Mayan carvings hiding in plain sight on the walls.
Churches like the Catedral de San Ildefonso were built from the stones of buildings that may have looked something like this. The “House of the Dolls” at the archaeological site of Dzibilchaltun (don’t fret if you can’t pronounce that) is about 30 minutes outside of Merida, and the Yucatan is dotted with numerous well-excavated Mayan sites similar to this one. Keep in mind that when buildings like this were in use, they were covered in plaster and painted all kinds of bright colors – this whole structure might have at one point been a bright red from top to bottom.
As it was in the days of the Classic Maya, the love of bright colors is on display all over the Yucatan, and there’s almost as many paint stores around as there are coffee shops. This is the tiny church in the town of Dzibilchaltun, just down the road from the archaeological ruin site. The church is maybe 15 feet wide, and might fit 30 people on a good day, but it’s still well taken care of and the paint kept fresh.
In the black shirt is Marcelina, a young woman from Tihosuco who is studying to be a Mayan language professor at the Universidad Nacional de Oriente in Valladolid. Her mother on the left is wearing the traditional dress of Mayan women called an iipil. Everyone in this picture – Marcelina, her mother, and her 5-year-old son Harold – is a native speaker of Maya. Chula the parrot probably speaks Maya also. Although there are over 700,000 Maya speakers living in the Yucatan today, the lack of inter-generational transmission and the discrimination Maya speakers face in the greater Yucateco and Mexican public are constant reasons to work hard for the continued viability of the language.
The picture above was shot in a house like this one. This is a ‘xaajil naaj’, a traditional Yucatec Mayan thatched roof house. It’s very common for families living in Mayan communities to have one of these traditional houses standing right next to a concrete house and live in both, like you can see in this picture of a home in the town of Kimbila. The design of this kind of house keeps it extremely well ventilated and cooled on hot days (which is just about every day).
Because it’s so hot, festivals and holiday celebrations are often a nighttime affair. Once a year on the island of Isla Mujeres, residents celebrate the ‘Festival del Tiburon Ballena’ – The Whale Shark Festival. It’s a celebration of the sea life which the island’s economy is very much based on, especially the Whale Shark, which people come from all over the world to swim with. Islanders who work in the Whale Shark tourism industry struggle to meet the demand for ‘Swim with the Whale Shark’ tours, while not harming the environment or scaring the Whale Sharks away from the island for good.
Whether you’re saving the sharks or saving your language, some form of prayer is probably involved. Although there are groups of Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and even red-bearded, suspender-wearing Mennonites in the Yucatan, the majority of people are Catholic, as is the case in much of Mexico. Pope John Paul II visited the area in 1993, and no one is likely to forget, given that his image is proudly displayed in front of most churches, like this beautiful one in Izamal. And for the record, pretty much the entire town of Izamal is painted that color of yellow. Again, paint stores rarely go out of business.
Further Resources:
Culture Kit:
Articles:
You Call it Corn, We call it lxi’im
Trust Me, The World’s Not Ending…
Videos: