Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico

6. “That Time of Change”: The Limits of Agriculture and the Rise of the Tourist Industry

113 6 “That Time of Change” The Limits of Agriculture and the Rise of the Tourist Industry The histories that I traced in Chapters 2 through 5 documented a series of parallels between local experiences of early twentieth-century institutions and those of post– Cold War multiculturalism. The legal protocols associated with the ejido, objects such as books and schoolhouses, narratives about national history, and the concept of culture all became part of a language for talking about the collective identity of rural communities and their relationship to the Mexican state. This deep-seated discourse is still present in different iterations of local identity politics, even as a series of economic and political transitions have altered the social makeup of the region and shifted some of the axes along which the dialectic between factionalism and solidarity plays out. In some cases, the development of new alternatives to “peasant” identity and agrarian organizations seems to be DOI: 10.5876/9781607322399:c06 “that time of change” 114 defining new political possibilities. As I noted in Chapter 1, many students of post– Cold War indigenous politics associate the rise of multiculturalism in Mexico with new forms of neoliberal citizenship that have developed amidst the decline of older peasant institutions. However, the case of Oriente in the second half of the twentieth century complicates this picture on a number of levels. Although maize agriculture faced a series of crises (see esp. Warman 1985), there is a less clear-cut correspondence between the decline of the ejido and the rise of ethnic politics. A tourist industry that brought unprecedented wealth to many communities in Oriente played an important role in turning Maya culture into a valuable commodity decades before multiculturalism came into vogue as a mainstream political currency. The persistence of older agrarian institutions in the midst of a tourism boom, like the ambiguity that has always marked notions of ethnicity in Yucatán, influenced the particular texture of multicultural discourse in Oriente. These factors have also conditioned a new iteration of the dialectic between solidarity and factionalism in identity politics. In the remaining chapters of this book, I will focus on how ambiguities regarding who exactly counts as an Indian or a Maya person in Yucatán have enabled the formation of a diverse and often contradictory series of multicultural identities. There is an especially important contrast between communities and families for whom engaging the Mexican state as “Mayas” is consistent with older agrarian institutions, and others for whom ethnicity figures in what I will refer to as “postpeasant” identities. The corporatist iteration of ethnic politics in predominantly agrarian communities and the postpeasant Mayan identities that are emerging in more urbanized kajo’ob involve different ways of reconciling narratives inherited from the early twentieth century with the realities of regional development in the past few decades. A closer look at the geography of modernization imagined by Robert Redfield and his Yucatecan collaborator Alfonso Villa Rojas in the 1930s, and at how the developments of the twentieth century were actually experienced by these communities, is a good point of entry into this question. Geographies of Yucatecan Modernity Chan Kom: A Maya Village by Redfield and Villa Rojas (1934) is a classic in two senses. First, it represents a defining argument about “folk” society in the canon of anthropological literature. Second, it provides a portrait of a place and time that became the definitive scholarly representation of rural Yucatecans as “Maya Indians.” Central to both of these legacies is the authors’ insistence on the “intermediate” nature of Chan Kom and other similar communities, which made them an ideal site from which to study the cultural processes associated with modernization. Though “that time of change” 115 Chan Kom was still peripheral to the urban world of Mérida, its residents’ interaction with institutions such as the PSY, the agrarian reform, and rural schools had transformed them into “Indians” who were quite different from the descendants of Caste War rebels in Quintana Roo: The Quintana Roo Indians are still politically independent: their organization is local and tribal; and schools have only a recent and precarious foothold among them. The Indians of the Chan Kom area, however, are integral parts of the State of Yucatan. This is the outermost region in which governmental and educational controls function effectively. The interests of the villagers here are not wholly turned in upon themselves, but directed northward towards the towns...