Introduction

Critical research on tangible and intangible heritage has examined the ways in which state-sanctioned policies for the protection of common cultural resources can marginalize certain communities, a phenomenon that some authors refer to as “heritage distancing” (Macananny and Parks 2013). This “distancing” effect is not an inherent feature of heritage policies as such, but often emerges when such policies are framed through discourses that have deep roots in particular histories of social and economic inequality. Looking at the Yucatán peninsula of southeastern Mexico, I will trace the history of one of these local framing discourses from its origins in the liberal modernizing projects mid-nineteenth century through various re-articulations in later populist and multiculturally neoliberal political regimes. As I will show, multiple generations of regional cultural institutions have tended to celebrate specific elements of Maya cultural heritage as if these existed outside of the terrain of material subsistence. These discourses explicitly constitute the “legitimate” enjoyment of cultural legacies outside of the larger productive economy in which heritage objects become important symbolic or commercial goods. This has tended to limit the degree to which politicized discourses on cultural or ethnic identity can become intelligible as a means of critiquing the unequal distribution of material resources like physical access to tangible heritage objects.

Throughout this essay, I will focus on a dichotomy between two ways of experiencing and encountering markers of Maya culture. I will use the term “archaeological sublime” to refer to an aesthetic encounter with archaeological remains that nineteenth-century Yucatecan authors first posited as a contrast to more materialistic and subsistence-focused interaction with ruins. A parallel process developed as the same antiquaries sought a more reflectively philological relationship with the Yucatec Maya language. In both cases, a self-consciously aestheticizing engagement with familiar elements of the physical and linguistic landscape was contrasted to a utilitarian attitude that I will refer to as “hacienda domesticity.”

Through my analysis of these opposed-yet-interrelated modes of interacting with ruins and language, I hope to highlight the hierarchies of access that are built into the assumption that encounters with heritage objects are moments of aesthetic reflection that transcend immediate subsistence concerns. It is a truism of linguistic anthropology that the transformation of languages into an object of philological interest has often led to a denigration of the vernacular of the vast majority of speakers (Armstrong-Fumero 2009a; Schieffelin and Doucet 1995). In a similar vein, efforts to promote emotionally fulfilling moments of leisured contemplation of archaeological sites—whether for elite aesthetes or for larger publics—tends to marginalize the lived experiences of communities who have historically labored in and around those sites, and for whom “cultural” sites might also represent a source of material subsistence.

This dynamic is particularly evident in discourse on the archaeological sublime, which was first articulated between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century as a kind of experience that distinguished landed elites from their illiterate workers. The populist literary movements of the twentieth century reframed this experience as something that was potentially accessible to rural, Maya-speaking Yucatecans. However, as I will show, the intellectual heritage of the archaeological sublime is ultimately irreconcilable and hostile to the livelihood means that motivate many of these people’s quotidian engagements with pre-Hispanic ruins. A parallel process is evident in some attempts to democratize public discourse by creating new spaces for the use and promotion of the indigenous Maya language. Vestiges of the philological dimension of the archaeological sublime have the potential to marginalize the spoken vernacular of rural people, and thus undermine attempts to turn language policy into a means of promoting social democracy. Thus, though they represent apparently distinct terrains of tangible and intangible heritage, the politics of ruins and language are shaped by the historical influence of the same overarching discourse.

Here, it is useful to define the historical and sociocultural contours of regional literature on Yucatecan identity. The narratives that I refer to as the archaeological sublime are a cornerstone of a provincial literature on Yucatecan identity that was written by generations of intellectuals who shared what Claudio Lomnitz-Adler has referred to as “intimate culture.” That is, this literature was written and read by members of provincial society that shared the same rural landscapes, historical kinship ties, and quotidian practices (Lomnitz-Adler 1993). Because they participated in a largely parochial literary sphere, authors tended to recycle themes and narratives from a relatively small corpus of texts on lo yucateco. Accordingly, the articulation of themes like the archaeological sublime had a remarkable consistency in written expressions of regional identity across several generations. Many texts about antiquity and regional identity written by Yucatecan contributors to “Revolutionary” literatures on the first half of the twentieth century bear strong echoes of elitist regional traditions with roots in the 1840s. These traces can still be found in many expressions of regional identity that shape discourse on cultural heritage today.

A key feature of Yucatecan reflections on the archaeological sublime is that they articulate a kind subjectivity that is distinctly modern and Westernizing, but that has a flexible link to biological race. This creates some permeability between ethnic and social categories, contrary to what might be expected by many post-colonial historians that have placed biological race at the center of Latin American desires for modernity (Earl 2007; Lund 2012; Miller 2006; Brickhouse 2004). However, the potentially ambiguous racial status of the “enlightened” consumers of the archaeological sublime doesn’t alter the elitism that tends to characterize this form of experiencing the past. In many cases, vestiges of this classic idea of the archaeological sublime have tended to reframe the inclusive gestures of revolutionary era populism—as well as more recent discourses on multiculturalism—within models of liberal citizenship of far older and more exclusionary pedigree.

These discourses on regional identity also reflect a deep history of ethnic and cultural ambiguities that emerged from the realities of land and labor in the Yucatan peninsula. The hacienda was historically a space of social inequality and labor exploitation, but also one where elements of Yucatán’s distinct regional culture were diffused between people who were marked as “Indian” and others who self-identified as “white.” Where Mayanist authors working in highland Chiapas and Guatemala have focused on a binary between people who are socially classed as “Indian” and a dominant Hispanicized caste referred to as Ladino, Yucatan is well-known for having a more fluid spectrum of more-or-less indigenous and more-or-less Hispanic identities (Armstrong-Fumero 2009b; Castaneda 2004; Gabbert 2004; Hervik 1996). Some of the most prominent markers of Mayan and Yucatecan identity were diffused broadly across this ethnic spectrum. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Yucatec Maya language (Yukateko or maaya t’áan) was the primary language for many members of the landed elite who identified as “white” or “creole.” In a region that lacked marketable mineral resources, and where commercial farming focused on mixed cattle-maize raising until the mid-nineteenth century, “Indian” peasants and the “white” elites for whom they labored were both dependent on the products of pre-Hispanic agricultural technologies for their livelihood and basic cuisine. Thus, by the 1910s, revolutionary authors like Manuel Gamio could cite Yucatán as an example of “harmonic fusion” of indigenous and European culture that was unique in the Mexican republic (Gamio 1916: 17–20).

This “fusion” created a series of important ambiguities. Was maaya t’áan exclusively the language of “Indians,” or was it a heritage of “white” Yucatecans as well? Are popular foods like cochinita pibil, chaya soup or venison tzic Mayan, or just generally Yucatecan? A similar ambiguity imbues ancient ruins in the regional landscape. By the time of the first boom in Yucatecan archaeology, roughly between 1820 and the end of the 1840s, there was no clear consensus on whether these were built by ancestors of living indigenous people, or if they were the product of a now-vanished race.Footnote 1 Like the landscape of physical subsistence and the languages through which “Indians” and “whites” organized their production, ruins could be treated as part of the larger assemblage of objects and customs that formed the shared heritage of an ethnically diverse (or ambiguous) Yucatecan society. Thus, the modernist identities based on the archaeological sublime were not based on which groups or individuals had deeper “blood” ties to the builders of the ruins, but on who could transcend the more mundane realities of production to appreciate the ruins as aesthetic objects in the present.

This decoupling of elements of Mayan identity from “racial” indigeneity makes the case of Yucatan into an important counterpoint to much of the existing literature on the place of indigeneity in the history of Mexican and other post-Colonial nationalisms. Because these specific languages, landscapes, and subsistence practices do have deep roots in the praxis of the peninsula’s Hispanic-identified elites, folkloric and archaeological themes in regional literature on lo yucateco can’t be reduced to “imperialist nostalgia” (Rosaldo 1989: 68–89) or “ventriloquism” (Anderson 2006: 206) that co-opts the indigenous past for an alien cultural project. At the same time, this discourse is far from democratizing, insofar as it turns aesthetic reflection into a weapon for denigrating the lifestyles and material aspirations of poorer Yucatecans who are, more often than not, racially marked as “indigenous.” As I will show, the moment of aesthetic appreciation continues to play this pernicious role even after generations of critiques that displaced more explicit discourses of indigenous racial inferiority.

The 1840s: The Urgency of Aestheticizing Mayan Heritage

The archaeological sublime, and the magazines in which it was first articulated, are inextricable bound to a moment in history that many Yucatecan authors characterize as a tragic near-encounter with true modernity. Most of the earlier materials that I will discuss in this and the next two sections are drawn from what were referred to as the “Scientific and Literary” Magazines El Museo Yucateco and El Registro Yucateco. These magazines were published over a period spanning less than a decade, between 1841 and 1848, during which the Yucatan peninsula existed as an essentially autonomous political entity. The peninsula had avoided much of the carnage that marked the first decades of Mexico’s independence from Spain, as well as direct participation in the disastrous Mexican/Anglo-American war of 1846–1848. With an emergent production of sugar and other cash crops, the once-sleepy agrarian province enjoyed a period of relative economic prosperity (El Museo Yucateco 1841). During this same period, the writing of foreign antiquaries like John Lloyd Stephens gave the peninsula a degree of global prominence and offered regional elites a tantalizing glimpse of peership with the “enlightened” nations of Europe (Carrillo y Ancona 1863: 573–576). This optimism was quashed after the massive 1847 peasant revolt popularly known as the Caste War. By 1848, Yucatan was forced to reintegrate into the Mexican republic under far less favorable terms that would have been available a decade earlier.

Writing during the brief period of optimism, contributors to the Museo Yucateco and the Registro Yucateco hoped to foment a modern, romantic sensibility that would allow their compatriots to claim intellectual peership with the “Enlightened” (Sp. Ilustrados) citizens of Europe. For some contributors, like Justo Sierra O’Reilly (see below), the Cuban Spanish poet Jose María Heredia provided a model for how to simultaneously inhabit this enlightened persona and celebrate the unique territorial heritage of their native continent (Anonymous 1841: 456–457). In her analysis of Heredia’s signature poem, Oda al Niágara, Kristen Silva Guertz uses the term “American sublime” to refer to a desire for a distinctly American experience of that Burkean moment of wonder and terror that the poet experienced during his visit to the famous waterfalls on the US/Canada border (Silva Gruesz 2001). Though the word “sublime” (Sp. sublime) is rarely used by Yucatecan authors of that period, their encounters with Maya ruins are often framed as the kind of transformative experience that Heredia attributed to the sight of Niagra. The passage with which Heredia opened his famous poem can be literally translated as:

Give me stillness, my lyre, give it to me,

For I feel inspiration burn in my awakened and agitated soul…

A number of Yucatecan authors make explicit references to the lyre of Heredia’s classicizing bard (see below). Others, like Juan Jose Hernandez wrote in more pithily psychological terms of a similar anxious awakening. Relating his 1840 encounter with Chichén Itzá, he noted that

As a sort of lethargy came over me, I turned my gaze around me and found that I was alone. A religious terror assaulted my spirit, and this sensation, which I had never felt so strong or so alive, obliged me to abandon that place with the knowledge of not being able to tour it for now (Hernandez 1841: 270).

In Hernandez’s account, the truth of the ruins exists in a terrain that is clearly divorced from the familiar realities of both the knowable historical past and contemporary material ambitions. He recalled being possessed with a “sacred furor” to decode the hieroglyphs on different buildings, like the oracle that interpreted the cryptic ramblings of the Pythia of Delphi. He laments the work of the colonial bishop Diego de Landa, who burned thousands of hieroglyphic codices in the sixteenth century, deprived him of the necessary cypher. More recent forces are also conspiring against the archaeological past. Hernandez notes that several structures have been reduced to an appalling state of ruin by local landowners who have mined them for preformed building material.

The urgency of preserving the ruins is not simply a question of preserving the past for the past’s sake. Hernandez notes that an intervention by the Yucatecan government could prevent further destruction of the precious ruins, and “prove wrong the degrading concept that other nations have of us, given the accounts of foreigners who have visited the ruins that we neither know nor appreciate” (Hernandez 1841: 273–274). The “degrading perception” to which he refers above is twofold. European authors ranging from Cornelius de Pawe to the Comte de Buffon had claimed that the Americas were not climatically fit for the development of civilized life (see Cañizares Esguerra 2002, Keen 1971, Navarro 1948). The obvious sophistication of pre-Hispanic civilization provided evidence with which Latin American authors could refute those arguments. Hernandez and his contemporaries also faced a new wave of “calumnies” at the hands of European travelers like Federic de Waldek, who often published unflattering accounts of life in contemporary Yucatan alongside their description of ruins.Footnote 2 Many of these authors seemed to equate the apparent lack of interest that native elites showed toward the preservation of ruins to their more general failure as stewards of their territory—an attitude that one Mexican historian (Ortega y Medina 1953) referred to as “archaeological Monroism.” From Hernandez’s perspective, his government’s investment in the preservation of the ruins answered both slights, preserving evidence of autochthonous American civilization and serving as proof that living Yucatecans also appreciated ruins that were coveted by “illustrated” foreigners.

The appreciation of ruins involved a change in attitudes toward landscape elements that had previously been viewed as a material resource. Things like pre-Hispanic ruins and the living Maya language were familiarly mundane to Yucatecan elites, but they were exotic curiosities to the foreign travelers whose intellect and manners the former sought to emulate. For authors like Hernandez, assuming the voice of “enlightened” or “philosophical” (see below) travelers involved appropriating this foreign gaze for their own engagements with Maya culture. By extension, it also entailed distancing these ruined structures from the quotidian productive practices that created a series of very intimate, albeit hierarchical, bonds between landed elites to indigenous peasants.

This distancing has important historical consequences. Today, archaeological remains and the Yucatec Maya language are the most visible and elements of “Maya culture” in the living landscape of the Yucatan Peninsula, and indigenous and non-indigenous residents alike often invoke both in articulating an array of different ethnic and regional identities. Authors like Juan José Hernandez played a crucial role in transforming these from elements of everyday life to explicit markers of “sacred” pasts and collective heritage. However, in the next section, I will turn to the theme of hacienda domesticity to discuss just how intimately both language and ruins were tied to a far more mundane world of subsistence concerns that always threatened to overwhelm the “philosophical” person’s quest for transcendence.

Hacienda Domesticity

In many respects, the Yucatecan elite’s relationship to the Maya language encapsulates many of the ambiguities that they brought to their encounter with travelers from “enlightened” nations, and to the aspirations for cultural modernity articulated in the literary and scientific magazines. Writing in 1813, the curate Bartolome Granados y Baeza observed that many of Spanish descendants in the municipality of Valladolid spoke Maya as their primary language, “…because they are weaned on it, because the nursemaids are Indians, or other inferior people, who speak no other language” (Granados y Baeza 1845/1813: 298).

This attribution of elites’ knowledge of Maya to contact with “inferior people” in domestic contexts is a pervasive gesture in Yucatecan writing about the language. Just as Granados attributed the elite’s knowledge of Maya to their nursemaids, Mauricio Zavala would open the introduction to his 1898 Maya dictionary by acknowledging the role of the “simple and maternal Maya nursemaids” in making the language common among the region’s elite (Zavala 1898: i). Likewise, the twentieth-century poet Antonio Mediz Bolio would ascribe his own fluency in the language to his childhood friendships with workers on his family estate (Mediz Bolio 1987). The persistence of this narrative over time is probably an accurate reflection of domestic arrangements in elite Yucatecan households, in which the labor of individuals classed as “Indian” figured in all levels of the economic and biological survival of elite families.

This proximity to indigenous culture might have been a source of anxiety to elite Yucatecans, but it was also proudly performed as something that embodied their dominance over extended hacienda households. John Lloyd Stephens provided an especially rich account of such an event in his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. In 1841, he attended a ball referred to as the “Baile de las Mestizas,” an event that “might be called a fancy ball, in which the señoritas of the village appeared as las Mestizas, or in the costume of Mestiza women” (Stephens 1843: 63). At a more informal event the following day, Stephens, became the victim of a carnivalesque reversal when he was subjected to a “loud harangue” in Maya by local pig butcher who had been chosen by the sponsors of the ball to play the role of the official in charge of the fiesta. Though we can only guess what the butcher was saying, his “harangue” is consistent with a long tradition of vernacular humor in which the misapprehension or incomprehension of phrases in Maya by foreigners becomes a source of great amusement (Armstrong-Fumero 2009a). Stephens fired back by addressing the butcher in English and ancient Greek. As the laugh “turned against him,” the butcher “dropped the title Ingles, put his arms around my neck, called me “amigo,” and made a covenant not to speak in any language but Castilian.”

The fact that this exchange was staged and enjoyed from a distance by the elite families of Ticul hints at the comfortable, if somewhat ambiguous, place that elite Yucatecans occupied between indigenous customs and their presumed peership with visitors from more “illustrated” nations. Probably far more fluent in Maya than in the exotic languages spoken by worldly travelers, they could enjoy the jokes that the butcher launched at Stephens’ expense. But as people who identified strongly as “White” and as Hispanic, they played this game through a proxy, and the butcher’s own bewilderment at English and ancient Greek entailed no loss of face on the part of his social betters. Staged for a socially diverse but parochial audience, this little drama celebrates the multiple connections of the local elite, while keeping both the exotic Stephens and the lowly butcher at arm’s length.

Writing in the years immediately after this incident, Yucatecan intellectuals hoped to steer their compatriots out of this comfortable space of paternalistic domesticity by resolving an inherent tension in their cultural identity. The domestic world of elite Yucatecans was, in the end, a provincial and relatively impoverished corner of America. However, the demands of patriotism and regional identity meant that “native” landscapes and histories could not be cast aside in favor of mimicking European and Anglo-American models. The tension between Stephens and the hog butcher could only be resolved if regional elites could view their immediate environment in new and more “philosophical” ways.

This new attitude is evident in writing on the Yucatec Maya language. When compared to the few commentaries on Maya written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Yucatecans intellectuals who interacted with Stephens and his fellow travelers encouraged their countrymen to explore subtleties of the language that they might otherwise have ignored. Writing in 1813, Granados y Baeza had observed that “The Maya language, even as it is very scarce in terms for intellectual and spiritual things, is most abundant for those things that are material and mechanical” (Granados y Baeza 1845/1813: 298). This characterization seems consistent with the experience of Hispanic elites who used the language when requesting specific services or labor from agrarian and domestic workers. It also implied that the Maya language was useful for orchestrating manual labor, but of little use for more spiritual or aesthetic reflections.

Decades later, Juan Pio Perez sought more nuanced insights into Maya in the study of colonial-era texts. Perez interacted extensively with John Lloyd Stephens, who published his reconstruction of the Maya calendar in his popular book. Addressing his compatriots in his personal notes, Perez argued that harm had been done to the Maya language by sloppy usages such as the “servile translation of biblical hyperbole” by religious leaders, and called for a more intellectually rigorous engagement that would reveal metaphors that were proper to Maya’s distinctive grammatical “genius” (quoted in Carrillo Ancona 1950: 164). In essence, Perez suggested that valuable insights could be uncovered by pushing through the utilitarian surface of Maya to discover its intellectual and historical essence.

Still, it is worth noting that this more “authentic” version of the Maya language was not to be found in the quotidian speech of haciendas and peasant communities. As several authors have noted, Perez was part of a philological and grammarian tradition that tended to constitute a hypercorrect register of the Maya language that was appreciated by literate elites, but that was quite distinct from the spoken vernacular of the vast majority of illiterate and monolingual rural people (Armstrong-Fumero 2009a; Berkeley 1998). As I will discuss more later, these hypercorrect versions of the Maya language continue to play an important role in the cultural sphere of the Yucatan peninsula, particularly in debates regarding how best to include it in contemporary media and promote its vigorous use by indigenous youth. In the 1840s, they emerged as part of an elitist sphere within which the aesthetic appreciation of indigenous culture placed an intellectual wedge between a regional elite and the rural masses.

There are very striking parallels between this re-evaluation of the Maya language and intellectuals’ critique of their compatriots’ relationship to pre-Hispanic ruins. For generations of landowners, archaeological sites were less interesting as historical vestiges than as sources of building material for the enhancement of their estates. The late 1830s were a period of relative prosperity and economic expansion in the Yucatan peninsula, when many liberals saw the material improvement in haciendas as contributing to the “rational” development of an agricultural territory that had been dominated by the shifting maize cultivation of indigenous people (Guemez Piñeda 1997). Thousands of pre-Hispanic structures that dotted the landscape provided a convenient source of pre-shaped stone for the more ambitious structures associated with these rural estates. As one contributor to the Museo Yucateco lamented, many sites had been so thoroughly ransacked for building material that “In a few years, no stone will remain over another, for the vandalous propensities of our countrymen.”Footnote 3

The destruction of archaeological sites was part and parcel to the domestic relationships of hacienda domesticity: hacendados had the power to dismantle and recycle ruins, and did so with techniques that were borrowed from the Maya speakers whose labor made their privileged lives possible. The anonymous author of an essay titled “An Excursion to Uxmal” was frank in his assessment of this traditional relationship to pre-Hispanic remains:

What did you want? The thing could not have been otherwise, if we consider the type of education that we received [back] then, which was not enough to understand what connection there could exist between four old and ruined houses and the study of our ancient history, nor how much this study could disperse the shadows that surround it.Footnote 4

When compared to Hernandez’s description of Chichén Itzá and other essays that I will discuss below, the passage quoted above is written in relatively conversational and folksy style. This shift in register includes a reference to ruins of Uxmal with the simple phrase, “four old and ruined houses” (Sp. cuatro casas viejas y arruinadas). Reference to ruins as “old houses” echoes many of the site names that were canonized by texts like Stephens’ Incidents of Travel, such as Labna (Ruined House) and X-lab-pak (Little Ruined Wall). All of these names were derived from the Maya-language toponyms that were current at the time, and reflect the still-common tendency of Yucatecan agriculturalists to name sites by matter-of-fact observations of topographical and ecological features (Armstrong-Fumero 2013). In this sense, the pithy reference to “four old and ruined houses” in “An Excursion to Uxmal” reads like a Spanish-language calque of the Maya terminology for ruins, and evokes the interaction between Yucatecan elites and the workers whom they sent into the bush to mine them for building material. A certain nostalgia for this intimate, if hierarchical, relationship to the landscape and its inhabitants would continue to pervade literary representations of the folklife of the peninsula. But after the 1840s, it would evolve alongside a contesting discourse on how to turn these ruins into a source of immaterial benefits and enlightened subjectivity.

This “philosophical” attitude entailed cultivating a series of behaviors and attitudes that were self-consciously eccentric in the provincial milieu of Yucatan, which valorized the patriarchal authority and pragmatic administration of the diligent hacendado.Footnote 5 One such eccentric was Estanislao Carrillo, the curate of the town of Ticul. Carrillo guided both Yucatecan and foreign visitors through the ruins, and furnished Stephens with manuscripts that would inform the historical portions of his books. Marginalized politically because of his affiliation to the Franciscan order, Carrillo contented himself with a frugal existence dedicated to his ministry and intellectual pursuits, and what Stephens referred to as the “habit of coming to Uxmal alone to wander among the ruins.”Footnote 6 In an 1846 obituary, Vicente Calero observed that the gentle curate used the ruins as a “refuge” from “the painful experience gathered up in contemporary deeds.”Footnote 7 This melancholic attitude was emulated by other “philosophical” travelers. As another Yucatecan visitor to Uxmal noted, ruins appeared “segregated from the transit of the world and far from the coexistence of man, [and thus] inspire feelings of the most profound respect, the sacred fire of inspiration.”Footnote 8

The distance to which these authors refer is more metaphorical than physical. In fact, the famed ruins of both Chichén Itzá and Uxmal were both attached to working haciendas in the 1840s. Escape from “contemporary deeds” or the “transit of the world” seemed to be more of an issue of cultivating an attitude that was detached from both the immediacy of contemporary politics and the demands of managing a landed estate. The “profound respect” for ruins that this attitude inspired entailed a willingness and ability to suspend productive activities that might damage the stones. This core assumption about how to appreciate heritage tends to pathologize the ways in which less leisured members of Yucatecan society must interact with antiquities. After 1847, this pathologization would be strongly tinged with anxieties about the governability of the rural masses.

The Caste War as Crisis of the Sublime

Given that the Yucatecan authors of the 1840s shared many of the sensibilities of the more cosmopolitan European Romantics, their reflections on ruins often turned to mourning, melancholy and the macabre. Echoing Heredia’s lyre-strumming bard in a more tragic mode, one visitor to Uxmal observed:

Any poet, on contemplating them, would tie the funeral cypress to his brow, pluck his ebony lyre and intone a sad elegy to the destruction of empires, and the memory of the ancient glories of Yucatan.Footnote 9

This sense of tragic loss would become even more pervasive after 1847, when the outbreak of the Caste War brought a bloody end to the relative peace of the peninsula’s post-independence decades, and shattered the region’s fragile agrarian economy. For many of the authors who held more optimism about the peninsula’s emergent modernization, this conflict also represented the failure of the enlightened forms of republican governance that had been gradually and incompletely instituted over the preceding decades. The rise and fall of civilization embodied by ruins in the landscape would become an especially powerful metaphor for this sense of collective tragedy.

The post-Case War writing of Justo Sierra O’Reilly exemplifies this crisis. A prolific essayist and novelist, Sierra O’Reilly was a key figure in the publication of the Museo, Registro and other endeavors that defined the literary world of 1840s Yucatan. The tragic events of 1847 would also bring him, somewhat ironically, to fulfill his lifelong dream to relive Heredia’s famed encounter with Niagra falls.

As the politically connected son-in-law of Yucatán’s sitting governor, Sierra travelled to Washington D.C. in 1847 to protest the then-independent state of Yucatan’s neutrality in the United States’ war with Santa Ana’s Mexico. There, he received news of the outbreak of the Caste War and was ordered to offer Yucatan’s annexation to the USA in return for military assistance. This offer was roundly rejected, in part due to a press campaign that presented Sierra and his compatriots as a degenerate race who were “an imperceptible shade whiter” than the Indians who threatened their destruction (Chuchiak 2000).

At some point after the collapse of his diplomatic effort, Sierra O’Reilly embarked on the tour of the northeast that brought him to Niagra. There, he saw:

…the miserable remains of the Tuscaroras and Oneidas, barely tolerated upon the land that was of their ancestors. They loaf around the edges of Niagra, selling knick knacks and looking on in stupid indifference or drunk upon “fire water” which is passed between them. This was not the best impression that I received that day, as it recalled the horrible scenes that occurred in my own homeland. Perhaps because of this, I did not feel the sympathy for those unfortunate creatures that they might deserve…Dominated and reduced to nothing by the “pale faces,” the remains of these ancient and powerful tribes show themselves to the traveler like a historical curiosity, like a philosophical lesson.Footnote 10

It’s tempting to read Sierra’s somewhat cryptic acknowledgement of the sympathy that the Tuscaroras and Oneidas “deserved” as anxiety regarding the apparent decline and degradation of his own “race,” with its probable admixture with indigenous blood. But given the context of this quote, it is just as likely that he was disturbed by a parallel between what he saw as the “stupid indifference” of North American indigenes before the spectacle of Niagra and the attitude of the “barbarian” Maya who had shattered the cultural and economic progress that he and other “philosophical men” had worked so hard to achieve. Just a few years before, Hernandez and other Yucatecan intellectuals had accused hacendados of a similar “indifference” to the past. Maybe Sierra O’Reilly felt that they had made some headway before the disastrous events of 1847.

In a long series of essays that he published between 1848 and 1850,Footnote 11 Sierra O’Reilly would write a history of Yucatán that posited a now-vanished race as the builders of the ancient ruins of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá. The ancestors of the Maya Indians who populated the peninsula at the time of the Spanish conquest were members of a distinct race that had revolted against and eventually exterminated the ruin builders. The Caste War was a case of history repeating itself, with the same “barbarous” race revolting against their former masters.

In writings on the Mexican–American War, Sierra O’Reilly mused that the Hispanic race had endured a long period of moral and physical decline in the Americas, which had left it vulnerable to internal threat of “barbarous” Indians and the external threat of Anglo-Saxon invaders (Sierra O’Reilly 2002). This existential crisis of Hispanic civilization demanded serious questioning of some of the core assumptions of political modernity. Sierra O’Reilly argued that the progressive constitutions, based on Enlightenment principles from Europe, had misguidedly granted equal citizenship rights to Indians, who came to resent the imposition of any kind of control over their “idle” and “barbarous” livelihood (Sierra O’Reilly 1994).

It is important to put these musings on “race” within the distinctly early nineteenth-century context in which they were articulated. The historian John Chuchiak has argued that authors like Sierra O’Reilly hardened in their opinions about indigenous inferiority after the Caste War, anticipating the “scientific” racism of the later nineteenth century (Chuchiak 2000). Sierra O’Reilly’s critique of the political inclusion of indigenous people is quite unequivocal, as are his references to “race” as an operative component in the history of peoples and nations. However, his use of “race” continues to be a typically romantic concatenation of heredity and spirit that is only tangentially linked to later forms of biological determinism (Stocking 1968: 65). It is significant that he attributes the downfall of Yucatan and Mexico to a decline in the Hispanic race rather than to the inherent unfitness of the indigenous.

It is also telling that, in Sierra O’Reilly’s musings on the rise and fall of peoples, the ability to transcend brute material realities and appreciate of sublime spectacles like Niagra is a sort of litmus test for the civilizational attainment. If we read his writing alongside that of his contemporaries in the earlier 1840s, the decadence of the Hispanic race in the Americas is not due so much to a fundamental biological flaw as it is to their inability to reach the same level of cultural attainment as their European brethren. In this regard, “white” Yucatecans’ proximity to “Indians” represented a risk even without direct miscegenation. Even when they weren’t involved in violent revolt, the region’s rural population embodied a return to the unreflexively materialism of hacienda domesticity that would retard spiritual progress. This sense of risk would mark the development of the archaeological sublime into a formal bureaucratic practice of heritage management at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Technical Professionalization of Archaeology

As early as 1841, an article in the Museo Yucateco called for “enlightened men” (Sp. hombres ilustrados) to collaborate in the creation of a regional museum.Footnote 12 Reflecting on the failure of the private museum organized by the brothers Camacho in Campeche, the author argued that the only ways that such an institution could succeed was with the patronage and support of the state. But a state-sponsored museum only came into being twenty years later under the short-lived Second Empire ruled by Maximillian of Hapsburg. Directed by the priest Cresencio Carrillo y Ancona, himself an accomplished antiquary and philologist, the Yucatecan Museum survived Maximillian’s downfall to become one of the most influential regional cultural institutions through the late nineteenth century.

With the museum’s formal mandate came a change in how the archaeological sublime was promoted among Yucatan’s population: it was now an experience that could be regulated by a state-sponsored institution that was legally empowered to control access to archaeological remains. Building this centralized repository entailed a concurrent suppression of independent local heritage institutions, something that was consistent with a broader late nineteenth-century trend toward centralizing political and cultural life in the capital of Mérida (Wells and Joseph 1992; Joseph 1988). In 1883, for example, Carrillo y Ancona’s successor as head of the Museo Yucateco, thwarted attempts to found a similar institution in the town of Izamal by arguing that diverting official resources to its administration would detract resources from the Merida-based museum that was meant to be the central repository of the state’s heritage.Footnote 13 This centralization of heritage stewardship was not always smooth. A conflict with local elites and agricultural workers in the town of Maní, from which Peon attempted to transport a carved monolith to the museum, resulted in a riot that made the director beat a hasty retreat.Footnote 14 But overall, the Museo Yucateco established a firm reputation as the primary steward of the peninsula’s archaeological and cultural heritage.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the theme of indigenous “ignorance” that was first articulated in a critique of hacienda domesticity was infused into the legally sanctioned practices of institutions like the museum. Carrillo y Ancona’s writing on the antiquities of Yucatan and their relationship to contemporary Maya culture is particularly telling. He was himself a fairly dark-skinned native speaker of Maya, and some of his American interlocutors refer to him as being a “Mayan Indian” (Desmond 1988). But in his own writing, the erudite priest identified as a person of Western culture. He documented some indigenous folklore regarding ruins, stories that attributed the ruins to an ancient race of giants or magical beings, and that treated these sites as haunted places to be avoided at night. They ignored both their ancestral connection to the ruins, and the venerable heritage of the language that they spoke. Twenty years earlier, authors like Justo Sierra O’Reilly doubted that the ruins had been built by ancestors of Yucatan’s Indians. Carrillo y Ancona posits an unequivocal ancestral connection, but notes that the darkness of superstition moots this. One can almost hear the exasperated sigh with which he writes: “Such is their rudeness, such is their ignorance.” (Carrillo y Ancona 1863). This narrative about rural Yucatecans’ “ignorance” of their heritage would become at truism of Mayanist anthropology. Robert Redfield, the Anglo-American co-author of the 1933 classic Chan Kom observed:

“It is the archaeologist, not the Indian, who sees the grandson living in the broken shell of the grandfather’s mansion; certainly, the Indian attributes to the situation no quality of pathos. The ruins are not, for him, a heritage.” (Redfield 1932: 299–309)

Almost a century after Sierra O’Reilly’s visit to Niagra, Redfield still dwelt on “the Indian’s” inability to feel pathos in the face of the sublime.

Where Yucatecan authors in the 1840s aimed their strongest critique at hacienda owners who exploited ruins as sources of building materials, the later nineteenth century saw the finger of blame turned more firmly onto the swidden cultivation and wild resource exploitation practiced by independent Maya-speaking agriculturalists. Already in the late 1830s, Estanislao Carrillo had observed that the rural belief in malevolent dwarf spirits known as aluxo’ob led peasants to smash clay figurines that they turned up when working in the bush (Carrillo 1846a). This conflation of peasant subsistence practices with the destruction of artifacts was echoed by Carrillo y Ancona and his contemporaries, and would become a common point of reference in the narratives of native and foreign archaeologists. Edward Thompson, who purchased the Hacienda Chichén Itza in the late nineteenth century and conducted excavations there for various sponsors in the USA, wrote often to his benefactors with comments about “the destructive work of shotgun and machete.”Footnote 15 In the decades that followed, increasingly stringent regulations would establish archaeological sites as an eminent domain of the federal government, and place an enforceable legal barrier between machetes and pyramids. This would extend onto land to which communities and individual agriculturalists held formal title, generating a series of conflicts over land use that are still prominent today.

Indigenous subsistence practices were not the only traditional cultural form that was marginalized by the gradual professionalization of archaeology and heritage practice. During the first decades of the twentieth century, archaeologists and linguists were increasingly professionalized and saw themselves as distinct from the “men of letters” who continued to write more traditional literature on regional themes. In some cases, this was a question of an international scholarly community drawing a genre distinction between academic research and artistic writing. For example, the linguist Ralph Roys distinguished his own rigorously annotated translation of the Maya-language Book of Chilam Balam from an earlier attempt by the Yucatecan Antonio Mediz Bolio by referring to the latter as “freely rendered into Spanish poetical prose” (Roys 1933: 8).

In other cases, it was a messier divorce between men of letters and archaeologists. Another Yucatecan poet, Luis Rosado Vega, directed the museum during the governorship of Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–1924). He enraged both the Mexico City-based Inspector of Antiquities and the directors of the Carnegie Institute Chichén Itzá project in 1923 when he took the initiative to remove monuments from the site to display in Merida.Footnote 16 After his departure from the post, he was dogged for years by accusations of sloppy management and outright theft.Footnote 17 By the twentieth century, the management of the archaeological sublime had become too technical and legalistic to accommodate the traditional prerogatives of a romantic poet.

Cahil Kay’s Revolutionary (and Reactionary) Marriage

Authors like Antonio Mediz Bolio and Luis Rosado Vega may have been increasingly distanced from the technical work of archaeology and linguistics, but this did little to slow their literary output. Today, both are remembered as beloved figures of regional literature and contributed to a large corpus of narrative and visual representation through which many Yucatecans—both Maya and Spanish speaking—translate the dry and abstract details of archaeology into expressions of regional identity. This regionalist tradition is also a particularly complex ideological space. Rosado Vega and Mediz Bolio have deep family roots in the hacienda-owning class. As “revolutionary” authors, they presented themselves as participating in the work of valorizing the authentic cultural heritage of the Maya-speaking masses. But they did so with sentimental allusions and narrative devices that evoke the literary tradition of the 1840s, both reiterating the elitist contours of the archaeological sublime and revalorizing hacienda domesticity through an idealization of traditional rural life. This can be seen in genres that range from popular theater to dances that emerged from a tradition related to the baile de las mestizas witnessed by Stephens in the 1840 (Pinkus Rendon 2004).

While conducting archival work in 2005, I found the libretto of a play called Cahil Kay: A Revolutionary Play, which was performed for a popular audience at Merida’s Casa del Pueblo in February of 1935.Footnote 18 The play doesn’t seem to have been performed more than a few times, and I have not found other published versions. But as an ephemeral artistic work, it both provides an example of the minor genres through which many ordinary Yucatecans encountered literature on regional themes, and highlights some of the ideological complexities that emerge at the intersections of romantic literature, Revolutionary populism, and the archaeological sublime.

The play opens on the hacienda of a Don Aneslmo del Castillo, where a young Maya girl named Cahil Kay is the playmate of the hacendado’s son Nicolás. They are separated when Nicolas is sent away to study. Over the years, Don Aneslmo makes numerous abusive sexual advances at Cahil Kay. She flees into the bush, and ultimately finds herself in the ruins of Chichén Itzá. There, she falls asleep and dreams of an encounter with the ancient lords of her “race” (Sp. raza), who guide her through a series of rituals that the playwright drew from Diego de Landa’s sixteenth-century description of indigenous puberty rites. Cahil Kay awakes from her slumber, resolved to seek some form of redemption for the Mayan race. We next meet her years later, teaching at a government school on Anselmo de Castillo’s hacienda, hiding her identity even as she is threatened by her old master. It is around this time that Nicolas reappears to take his place as hacendado, and falls in love with the young teacher. At their wedding, she reveals that she is his childhood friend. The play closes with the heroine declaring to the gathered hacienda workers:

My brethren, as your teacher, I said that you had the right to be free, and now, as your patrona, I say “You are free.”

Like the “philosophical men” of the 1840s, Cahil Kay must escape the workaday world of the hacienda to become an enlightened subject by experiencing the archaeological sublime. By 1935, the theatrical representation of a lonely traveler communing with ruins embodied an experience that was quite distinct from the technical labor of archaeology. But for vernacular audiences whose ideas of lo Yucateco were shaped by the literary inheritance of the 1840s, this narrative blended the region’s archaeological heritage with emergent forms of populism into a recognizable narrative about the “enlightening” effect of ruins.

Days after the play was performed, Cahil Kay was panned by the influential Yucatecan Marxist Antonio Betancourt Perez.Footnote 19 Betancourt argued that the narrative of racial redemption glossed over the class conflict that was at the real heart of the Revolution. For him, the young teacher’s marriage into a hacienda-owning family betrays the play’s classist and reactionary overtones, glossing over the potential for an indigenous bourgeoisie to be every bit as oppressive as their Hispanic peers. It’s hard to argue against Betancourt’s observation that Cahil Kay’s marriage translates the “redemption” of the indigenous masses into terms that are more compatible with deep-seated elitist traditions. But I would note that this domestication of indigenous struggle is as evident in the young teacher’s dream at Chichén Itzá as it is in her wedding. Cahil Kay’s “revolutionary” transcendence comes from an encounter with the archaeological sublime, a moment of enlightenment that bears echoes of Juan José Hernandez’s rapture and Estanislao Carrillo’s lonely walks. She is transformed into an eccentric Maya who can transcend her humble position and uplift her kin. More importantly, she encounters the ruins as a space of reflection, not a space of labor. References to “race” notwithstanding, her encounter with the archaeological sublime is predicated on an attitude that is more akin to the bourgeois enlightenment proposed in the 1840s than to the utilitarian practices through which some Maya agriculturalists continue to draw a livelihood from lands that contain ruins.

From Liberal Enlightenment to Neoliberal Multiculturalism

Writing about the pastoral traditions of English literature, Raymond Williams coined the term “residual culture” to characterize elements of a literary and artistic imaginary that had first emerged within one moment in social history, but survived as a living element re-contextualized in new or emergent realities (Williams 1977: 121–127). If Cahil Kay’s marriage represents the re-functionalization of the mid-nineteenth-century residues in the populist 1930s, something similar occurs through the re-emergence of these classic discourses on Yucatecan identity in the neoliberal present. In many cases, traces of the archaeological sublime seem to frame a vastly different neoliberal moment—when tourism has supplanted agriculture as a form of prosperity, and where a nominal multiculturalism has posited new forms of ethnic social democracy—in hierarchical terms inherited from the un-prefixed liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century.

The preservation and promotion of indigenous languages has emerged as one of the most fertile terrains for minority identity politics in contemporary Mexico. A 2003 amendment to the Mexican constitution has made the use and promotion of indigenous languages into an inalienable human right, and the provision of educational materials, media, and official documents in Maya an obligation of the state. Nevertheless, the circulation of Maya-language school texts in Yucatan has fallen far short of official promises (Pfeiler and Zamisova 2006). Compounding the problem is the fact that the actual Maya that appears in written texts and electronic media is often marked by a hypercorrect grammar, revived archaic words, and neologisms that are all unfamiliar to many rural native speakers. Many monolingual Maya speakers find themselves alienated from texts that see as a “better” and inaccessible version of the only language that they speak fluently (see Armstrong-Fumero 2009a). Often with the best intentions, teachers, activists and media groups reproduce the distancing the rural vernacular from a concept of “good” Maya that arose through the philological expressions of the archaeological sublime.

Residues of the archaeological sublime in the policies through which the Mexican state and tourism developers seeks to preserve archaeological sites have an even more direct impact on rural livelihoods. As I observed earlier, the state’s application of eminent domain over archaeological sites on privately and collectively held lands turns this into a potential threat for many subsistence agriculturalists. But rural Maya people do not need to be striking pyramids with guns and machetes in order to be signaled as disrupting the proper appreciation of the archaeological sublime. Since the 1970s, generations of people who live near Chichén Itzá have made a living by selling archaeologically themed souvenirs directly to tourists. One of the most persistent conflicts involves various groups who have, at different times and with varying rates of success, occupied space in the archaeological zone to sell souvenirs directly to tourists. As of this writing, the most recent occupation is still holding its ground, though they face formidable opposition from a combination of local hotel owners, federal institute in charge of archaeological sites, and a state-level organization that manages touristic and “cultural” infrastructure. Accordingly, they have been represented in an unsympathetic regional press as “inauthentic” Maya who sell objects of non-local manufacture, damage the fragile landscape of the site, and disrupt the archaeological spectacle carefully orchestrated at great cost by the state and its corporate partners (Armstrong-Fumero 2013, Castaneda 1996). If the knick-knack selling Tuscaroras and Oneidas that Sierra O’Reilly witnessed at Niagra made for a less-than-ideal “impression,” the press would have one believe that the handicraft vendors of Chichén are hell bent on disrupting any experience of the archaeological sublime.

Somewhat ironically, a modern-day hacienda articulates an image of social redemption that is more easily reconciled with both the exigencies of state-sanctioned heritage practice and the influential capitalist interests that control much of the cultural infrastructure of the Yucatan peninsula. The Hotel Hacienda Chichén Itza is built from and around the structure of a nineteenth-century hacienda that was purchased at the beginning of the twentieth century by Edward Thompson. It ultimately passed into the hands of the Yucatecan Barbachano family, who have developed it alongside several other luxury hotels abutting the archaeological zone. In the past decade, they have branded the hotel Hacienda as an eco-resort built around the “traditional” Mayan relationship to nature. Their voluminous advertising literature contrasts this approach to the grave ecological harm being done by members of local communities who set up stalls in the archaeological zone, and, not inconsequentially, compete with the hotel’s own retail spots. These “destructive” practices of local communities are contrasted to the “success stories” of Maya-speaking salaried staff members who are profiled on the hotel’s website. The profile of Marcela Noh Hau, a worker at the Hotels spa, notes that:

An independent Mayan Healer and mother, a great role-model to other motivated females in her town; caring, committed, and serene, Marcela has a gentle character and a great “holistic healing” gift she continues taking responsible choices to improve her lifestyle and that of her small daughter.Footnote 20

An example of individualistic initiative, professional development and personal responsibility, Noh Hau seems to embody a Mayan identity purpose built for a neoliberal world.Footnote 21 In this regard, her profile on the hotel Hacienda’s website plays a similar role to Cahil Kay, whose triumphant encounter with the archaeological sublime reconciled Revolutionary populism with both the productive space of the hacienda and an un-prefixed liberal subjectivity with the mid-nineteenth-century roots. The archaeological sublime was itself already an attempt to reconcile the pre-Caste War elite’s deep entanglement with the stuff of Maya culture and emergent, Europeanizing modernity.

As a form of residual culture, the archaeological sublime poses a formidable challenge to international discourses on cultural heritage, whether this be tangible–like archaeological sites–or intangible–like language rights. In either case, local populations will make sense of international standards produced by organizations like UNESCO or the International Labor Organization, or the proposals of foreign activists, through the lens of identity discourses that might be deeply rooted in longer histories of social inequality. Other models exist for language promotion, or for allowing local descendant communities to play a larger role in the stewardship of archaeological sites. But these are a tough sell in a place like Yucatán, largely because there are long-held cultural precedents in which the celebration of those elements of Maya culture could only take place through a moment of leisured aesthetic reflection that happened at a distance from the subsistence of rural people. One of the challenges that faces those who would hope to democratize heritage and culture is doing so in a way that resists falling into these established modes.