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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22.2 (2001) 131-153



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Four Generations of Maya Marriages
What's Love Got To Do With It?

Ana María Juárez


This paper examines the connections between globalization, economic trends, and generational patterns of marriage among Caste War Maya women in Quintana Roo, Mexico, during the twentieth century. Caste War Mayas descend from Mayas who participated in the Caste Wars of Yucatán during the mid-nineteenth century. These wars, purportedly based on caste or race, involved indigenous Maya struggles for autonomy and independence from the Mexican state of Yucatán, the longest and most successful indigenous resistance movement in the Americas. 1 The eastern-most portion of the Yucatán peninsula was controlled by Caste War Mayas, guided in their cause by miraculous crosses and saints, until Mexican president Porfirio Diaz took control in 1901.

Tulum, where my research is based, had been one of two competing centers of power that had developed in opposition to the Yucatec and Mexican governments during the mid-nineteenth-century Caste Wars. Tulum was attacked in about 1888 by its rival Santa Cruz because Tulum had appointed a white man who had married into an elite Caste War Maya family to "govern" the Tancah and Tulum Maya ruins. 2 Subsequent political Caste War Maya struggles over leadership, trading alliances, and military strategies led to Tulum's decline and neglect throughout the first half of the twentieth century.Populated by just a handful of families in the early twentieth century, Tulum relied on horticultural production (milpa), hunting, and gum (chicle) collecting for its subsistence. By the mid-twentieth century, Tulum's residents also worked on neighboring coconut plantations and cattle ranches. By the 1960s and 1970s, Yucatec and Mexican immigrants began to outnumber Caste War Mayas as the Mexican government and private investors intensified the region's development. Meanwhile, the area between Tulum and Cancún was being developed into what is now Mexico's largest tourist region. [End Page 131]

Using ethnographic fieldwork methods, including participant observation, oral histories, and interviews, I began my research of Caste War Maya women of Tulum, Quintana Roo, in 1990. 3 At that time four generations of women lived in Tulum. The eldest generation of women, roughly in their seventies and older, were survivors of devastating smallpox epidemics. Both disease and the jumbled, contradictory state policies directed toward Caste War Mayas had disrupted their lives. Their mixed subsistence economy revolved around horticultural production, hunting, and modest trade. The women in the next oldest generation were born and/or were married after the Mexican government established ejidos (communal land grants) in the late 1930s. While continuing the economic practices of their elders, they were increasingly involved in day and migrant labor, and they established more habitual relationships with (mostly male) immigrant Yucatec, Mexican, and other workers and employers. The women in the third generation, the middle-aged generation, were young adults or teenagers in the early 1970s when the Cancún-Tulum road and tourist corridor radically transformed the pueblo, and they lived their lives within the early tourist culture and economy. Finally, the women of the fourth and youngest generation were either teenagers or young adults when I began my fieldwork. By then, Tulum was a key part of the region's tourist attractions.

For the eldest of the four generations, marriage had been primarily a pragmatic, economic arrangement between families. For the following three generations of women, marriage increasingly involved the joining of individual men and women based on personal choice and romantic love. In the first section of this article I describe early twentieth-century marital practices, arguing that arranged marriages of the eldest generation functioned to structure labor and to reproduce families and social organization within their mixed trade and subsistence economy. However, I also show that couples chose their spouses within the institution of arranged marriage, and that notions of love and sexual attraction were a basic part of the process. In the following sections of this...

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