Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Yucatán since 1500

by Wolfgang Gabbert

In Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, it is commonly held that the population consists of two ethnic Maya Indians and descendants of Spanish conquerors. As a result, the history of the region is usually seen in terms of conflict between conquerors and conquered that too often ignores the complexity of interaction between these groups and the complex nature of identity within them. Yet despite this prevailing view, most speakers of the Yucatec Maya language reject being considered Indian and refuse to identify themselves as Maya. Wolfgang Gabbert maintains that this situation can be understood only by examining the sweeping procession of history in the region. In Becoming Maya, he has skillfully interwoven history and ethnography to trace 500 years of Yucatec history, covering colonial politics, the rise of plantations, nineteenth-century caste wars, and modern reforms—always with an eye toward the complexities of ethnic categorization. According to Gabbert, class has served as a self-defining category as much as ethnicity in the Yucatán, and although we think of caste wars as struggles between Mayas and Mexicans, he shows that each side possessed a sufficiently complex ethnic makeup to rule out such pat observations. Through this overview, Gabbert reveals that Maya ethnicity is upheld primarily by outsiders who simply assume that an ethnic Maya consciousness has always existed among the Maya-speaking people. Yet even language has been a misleading criterion, since many people not considered Indian are native speakers of Yucatec. By not taking ethnicity for granted, he demonstrates that the Maya-speaking population has never been a self-conscious community and that the criteria employed by others in categorizing Mayas has changed over time. Grounded in field studies and archival research and boasting an exhaustive bibliography, Becoming Maya is the first English-language study that examines the roles played by ethnicity and social inequality in Yucatán history. By revealing the highly nuanced complexities that underlie common stereotypes, it offers new insights not only into Mesoamerican peoples but also into the nature of interethnic relations in general.

252 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2004

Reviews

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meticulous history and ethnography of the Yucatan peninsula. Refutes existence of "Maya ethnicity" beyond its socially constructed categories of inequality: wealth, status, and power, as evinced in everyday life and interaction. The work traces 500 years of Yucatec Maya inequality through history of distinct periods: colonial, Caste War, Revolution, and to the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 (and slightly beyond where the ethnography took place). Language, clothing, "traditions," all demystified while the state grappled with the Indian's place within the modern republic. Surprisingly (to this reader at least) was the counterintuitive: that contemporary Yucatec ‘Mayan’ identity projects were often the work of upwardly mobile rural teachers (during consolidation of state's post revolutionary education system in rural areas, and in other public sectors. He argues that such projects offer young people "little with which they might identify or which could offer them an alternative way of being ‘modern’." There is no return, so to speak, to the milpa. Attuned readers and humans are aware that there is no "Maya utopia." We should avoid, I believe Gabbert is saying, the "essentializing" of Mexico's indigenous, focusing instead on the obstacles and everyday violence of social inequality and discrimination. Something I believe is improving in Mexico.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

fairly specialized, although the book does not assume any specialist knowledge on the part of the reader. i take gabbert's point about assumptions of ethnic identification, but i think his argument would be more convincing if he addressed the distinction between public and private identities (even if only briefly).