A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún (review)

Millions of tourists flock to the Yucatan peninsula to bask in the warm sun with an option of exploring indigenous cultures, either artificially constructed by hotels and amusement parks or amongst the many archaeological ruins in the region. Servicing that industry are tens of thousands of Mayan workers who have abandoned traditional lifestyles to enter the wage economy of the tourist resorts.

A Return to Servitude presents an ethnography of Maya migration at several scales of analysis. At the individual level, the reader learns of gendered accounts of the migration and labor experience, and how remittances change household and community consumption in the sending community of "Kuchmil," a fictitious name given to a village somewhere west of Tulum, and near the Quintana Roo and Yucatán state boundary. At the regional level, we learn about multiple narratives of what modernity means to the Mayan workers according to their assimilation into 'modern' Mexican lifestyles as well as those only glimpsed at when gazing upon tourists. At the international level, we begin to understand how indigenous communities interact with transnational capitalism and how these communities accommodate themselves to the many forces pulling at their traditional lifestyles.

This engaging book, part of the press's First Peoples: New directions in Indigenous Studies series, builds on fieldwork, studying and living within the Yucatan peninsula and the town of Kuchmil. The meta-narrative of the book will be familiar to Latinamericanists: the milpa and the traditional disappear and long work assignments away from home become mitigated by the sending of remittances and the change of material (dress, diet, consumer durables) and non-material (language).

Bianet Castellanos' Mexican and Catholic background, bolstered by learning Mayan and schooled in ethnographic field techniques, gives us an often amusing but always informative window into following her subjects along their many journeys. Asking the extent to which indigenous communities can continue to call themselves indigenous even when they no longer live in their original lands is relevant to indigenous studies around the world. In this book, however, the author uses several ghosts (fantasmas) as cultural metaphors to track the legacies that give meaning to indigenous Mexicans. In Latin America, comparable fantasmas would include military wars imposed by military regimes, drug and gang violence, and militarized border regions, among others. Bianet Castellanos builds on the work of social theorist Avery Gordon in studying the phantasmic effects of war, oppression, slavery and neoliberal policies that haunt the Mayan and Mexican nation.

The stories told, alas, are indictments of neoliberal policies; the author makes it all too plain at the outset that globalization is the villain. Nevertheless, she moves beyond blame to highlight astute ways that Mayans adapt as chambermaids, truck drivers, and service workers. For example, most workers will send remittances back home, and when they do not, alcoholism is usually the culprit. Meager wages in a highly commodified field make living difficult; migrants constantly conduct assessments of what things cost, what they'll earn, and how much be left over. When hurricanes battered the peninsula in 2005, rebuilding the phantom city (Cancún) consumed most media attention, but the loss of wages for migrants, and the unanticipated costs for those workers to rebuild their modest homes, impacted these workers deeply. One important takeaway of the book for me was this:

Tourist centers like Cancún were intended to modernize and industrialize the countryside, to transform indigenous peasants into modern, urban service workers. However, the bulk of tourist jobs, which are low wage and based on seasonal short-term contracts, do not provide greater economic security than agricultural work, especially in a city based on a dollar economy. Environmental changes and the fickle taste of tourists make this type of service work unpredictable and as prone to crisis as farmwork...