FERNANDO ARMSTRONG-FUMERO
Smith College
A heritage of ambiguity:
The historical substrate of vernacular multiculturalism in
Yucatan, Mexico
A B S T R A C T
Forms of official multiculturalism that many recent
scholars have characterized as a reflection of
postCold War social movements and emergent
forms of neoliberal governmentality can be
experienced locally in ways that reflect a greater
degree of continuity with older institutions and
styles of politics. In Yucatan, ambiguities in the
meaning of officially sanctioned categories such as
Maya and indigenous have persisted even as
local people and representatives of the state
collaborate in the consolidation of official cultural
institutions. The collective experience of several
generations of Maya speakers in negotiating this
ambiguous discursive space creates strong parallels
between contemporary multiculturalism and older
indigenist policies. [Maya, Mexico, Yucatan,
multiculturalism, indigenous policy, ambiguity]
n 2005, a group of Mexican citizensmost of them Yucatec Maya
I
speaking residents of rural communitiesinvaded the archaeo-
logical zone of Chichen Itza. There, they set up illegal posts from
which they were still selling handicrafts to tourists at the time of
this writing. Amidst constant reports of their imminent removal
by state and federal authorities, the representatives of this group have mo-
bilized the language of multiculturalism and ethnic rights to legitimate
their efforts to earn a livelihood from the ruins left by their ancient ances-
tors. This was a marked contrast to previous peasant and municipal move-
ments in this part of the state of Yucatan, in which the explicit invocation of
Mayan identity had played a minor role (see Breglia 2006; Castaneda 2003,
2004). This particular mobilization is also remarkable for the lack of public
attention that it has garnered, despite being located in one of the most in-
ternationally visible sites in Mexico. In the years since the initial occupation
of the archaeological zone, I have been struck by the frequency with which
various personsboth Maya-speaking members of neighboring commu-
nities and residents of nearby urban centershave cast doubt on the ven-
dors entitlement to profit from the archaeological remains. This is partic-
ularly striking given that the majority of those selling in the archaeological
zone do embody many of the features that contemporary multicultural dis-
course in Mexico ascribes to indigenous citizens.
The tensions between the mobilization of indigenous identity by mem-
bers of rural communities and the reigning climate of incredulity are more
than simply another example of the depoliticizing effects of a multicultur-
alism that has been appropriated and domesticated by the state. Much
contemporary scholarship has traced the trajectory of politicized indige-
nous identities from the emergence of new forms of postCold War ac-
tivism (Alvarez et al. 1998; Castaneda 1994; de la Pena 2002; Gow and
Rappaport 2002; Hale 1994; Nash 2001; Nelson 1999; Varese 1996; Yashar
2005) to their absorption into different practices of neoliberal governmen-
tality (Bartra 2002; Hale 2005; Warren and Jackson 2002). But, at least in the
case of rural Yucatec Maya speakers in the communities where I have con-
ducted research, some of the experiences that scholars have attributed to
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 300316, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01136.x
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
political trends in the past two decades seem less like the
emergence of radically new notions of ethnic citizenship
and more like a recent twist on ways of engaging the state
that emerged in tandem with the consolidation of a series
of corporatist institutions after the Mexican Revolution of
1910. Although the specific continuities that I discuss here
pertain to a local context, they represent a more broadly ap-
plicable counterexample to literatures in political anthro-
pology that have tended to focus on how neoliberalization
and the emergence of transnational indigenous movements
represent a point of rupture with older forms of governance
or subaltern politics. A historical ethnography of the quotid-
ian encounters through which rural Maya speakers experi-
ence these official cultural policies brings added complexity
to discussions of ethnic nationalisms that hinge on a polit-
ically laden dichotomy between traditional and emergent
identities.
Central to my arguments is the observation that en-
gagements between several generations of rural Maya
speakers and state institutions that ascribe racial or eth-
nic categories onto citizens are marked by the pervasive ex-
perience of a form of semantic slippage that I refer to as
nondisruptive ambiguity. Through this emphasis, I ad-
dress a kind of experience that can be difficult to recon-
cile with the themes of bureaucratic violence and tactical
subversion that have figuredat least, implicitlyin most
scholarly discussions of multiculturalism and indigenous
identity movements. Analyses of tensions between differ-
ent means of constituting or performing Mayanness have
a strong presence in Mayanist scholarship (Breglia 2006;
Castaneda 1996; Fischer 1999; Gabbert 2004; Hervik 1999;
Montejo 2005) and often dovetail with broader discussions
of the politicized essentialism of ethnic identity (Fischer
1999; Spivak 1987; Warren 1998), of instrumental adoptions
of indigenous status (Warren 2001; Yashar 2005), and of
the appropriation of multicultural discourse by neoliberal
states (Bartra 2002; Hale 2005). But something that rarely
has been documented is how the ubiquity of tensions be-
tween etic and emic paradigms for marking social cate-
gories has contributed to the rise of a body of vernacu-
lar narratives and political practices in which certain forms
of ambiguity do little to disrupt the consolidation of offi-
cial projects or to undermine local forms of marking social
categories.
These ambiguities have played out in fairly consis-
tent ways in the experience of several generations of ru-
ral Maya speakers. The diversity of meanings that can be
applied to terms such as Maya in rural Yucatan todayor
that marked the use of terms like indigenous person or peas-
ant in the same communities 50 years ago1 often seems
to confound bureaucratic and scientific practices that em-
ploy fixed categories to make citizens and territories leg-
ible (Scott 1998) to the state. However, the slippages and
incomprehensions that occur at sites of contact between
 American Ethnologist
members of local communities and representatives of the
state do not necessarily constitute a subversive space for
the reassertion of locally meaningful ethnonyms or a self-
consciously tactical means of manipulating official cate-
gories (de Certeau 1984). Instead, these ambiguities are a di-
mension of doing the politics of social categories that has
a long history in the region precisely because they permit
the consolidation of state institutions amidst continuities in
local means of marking and performing identity. They are,
in this sense, nondisruptive ambiguities that allow a great
deal of flexibility in how representatives of the state or rural
citizens understand the meanings of politically charged key
words without necessarily undermining the consolidation
of state-sanctioned discourses or disrupting the continuity
of native social categories.
Its particular history of multicultural discourse makes
Yucatan an ideal location for understanding the kinds of
continuity and ambiguity that can form an integral part
of local engagements with the politics of ethnic iden-
tity. Compared with better-studied cases in the Mexican
states of Chiapas and Oaxaca (Collier and Quaratiello 2005;
Lopez Barcenas 2005; Lopez y Rivas 1995; Nash 2001;
Rubin 1997; Stephens 2002) or in other national con-
texts such as Guatemala, Bolivia, and Ecuador (Albo 2002;
Black 1999; Fischer and Brown 1996; Korovkin 2001; Martin
2003; Sawyer 2004; Warren 2001; Warren 1998), Yucatan
is remarkable for a relative lack of grassroots mobiliza-
tions based explicitly on indigenous ethnic identity (see
Castaneda 2003; Castillo Cocom 2005). This is particularly
striking when one considers the states large population
of indigenous-language speakers (as much as 52 percent
of the states entire population over five years of age; see
Ramirez Carrillo 2002) and its prominent historical role in
the development of Mayanist archaeology and anthropol-
ogy.2 Just as the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was imported
to the peninsula from more central parts of the republic
in 1915,3 contemporary Yucatan often seems like the re-
cipient of multicultural discourse that emerged from nego-
tiations between the Mexican state and grassroots groups
in activist hot spots elsewhere in the republic. Ambi-
guity about the exact nature of newer concepts of eth-
nic citizenship, and the difference between these identi-
ties and more traditional social categories that developed
alongside early 20th-century agrarian and educational in-
stitutions, seems consistent with the history of a region
where struggles over the definition of ethnic citizenship
played a relatively minor role in the political and socioeco-
nomic transitions that marked the last decades of the 20th
century.
This historical context, both in terms of the perva-
sive experience of nondisruptive ambiguity and the lack
of explicitly oppositional indigenous movements, provides
some insights into the reasons the artisans of Chichen Itza
felt that they qualified for participation in the officially
301
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
sanctioned politics of ethnic rights, even as broad support
failed to materialize either locally or globally. This latest
invasion of Chichen Itza differed from previous attempts
by locals to occupy and sell handicrafts inside the archae-
ological zone (Castaneda 1996) and from other grassroots
mobilizations in the surrounding communities (Castaneda
2003) in that it took place after the widely publicized rat-
ification in 2001 of a national antidiscrimination law that
protected some cultural rights for indigenous groups.4 The
leaders and legal representatives of the organizations that
formed among the artisans made careful use of this dis-
course in their publications, even drawing explicit connec-
tions between their own agenda and that of the highly suc-
cessful neo-Zapatista movement in Chiapas. This quest for
legitimacy culminated in late 2005 with a visit by Zapatista
leader Subcomandante Marcos to the archaeological zone.5
In the end, however, this positive publicity could barely
counteract a press campaign that many locals attributed to
the owners of a local hotel chain, which dismissed the in-
vaders as persons from other regions of Mexico or Yucatan,
or as opportunistic vendors of mass-produced handicrafts
rather than the products of their own artisan labor. The Zap-
atista connection seems to have floundered, and as of 2007
I had heard of no additional media events or formal visits
between the artisans at Chichen Itza and the charismatic
rebels from the jungles of Chiapas.
More than anything else, it was the willing participa-
tion of the vendors in a modern tourist economy, and the
apparent success with which it had allowed some of them to
make a transition into the middle class, that inspired doubt
among their critics. The irony here is that the majority of the
persons selling illegally in the archaeological zone are na-
tives of rural communities that neighbor the ruins. Most are
from families with Mayan surnames, and many speak the
Yucatec Maya language better than they do Spanishthey
are, in effect, people who most scholars from Mexico City
or the United States would classify as indigenous. The ex-
clusion of certain communities or economic practices from
the category of authentic Maya culture has been widely
discussed in the anthropological literature (Castaneda 1996;
Gabbert 2004; Warren 1998). But what was especially telling
in this case were the differences that could be perceived in
how people in the regions cities and in the communities
that neighbored the ruins interpreted the invasion and
its aftermath. These disjunctures reflect the ways in which
occupying different spaces in the regional landscape can
make certain social and ethnic markers more or less per-
ceptible, a phenomenon that has been one of the major
forces behind the nondisruptive ambiguities that I discuss
at length below and that has shaped the ultimate course fol-
lowed by this particular engagement with the politics of of-
ficial multiculturalism.
People in Merida and other urban centers in Yucatan
who would have found little mention in the regional
302
newspapers of the many poorer vendors who also occupied
the archaeological zoneexperienced the latest invasion
of Chichen Itza as an unintelligible middle-class Maya
paradox. For many Mexicans who do not self-identify
as indigenous, multiculturalism is a means of reforming
government institutions that sought to assimilate Indian
peasants into a racially homogeneous, modern national
society (see Bartra 1987; Bonfil-Batalla 1987; Dawson 1994;
Gamio 1916; Lomnitz 2001; Miller 2004; Warman 1967).
Although the celebration of the diversity of a pluricultural
Mexico has made significant inroads into vernacular
speech, some popular assumptions of who should be
considered an indigenous person remain conservative.
For most urban Mexicans, bearers of indigenous culture
are still imagined as members of a rural underclass who
practice traditional agriculture. Indigenous language and
culture might have been granted new kinds of validity
in the newly pluricultural and pluriethnic nation, but
Mexican history has few parallels to the African American
elite that W. E. B. Du Bois (2003) imagined as a talented
tenth in his famous 1903 essay. In contrast to the binary
model of racial difference in the United States, educated
and wealthy indigenous people in Mexico have historically
been assumed to have assimilated into the culturally
and racially hybrid national society and simply stopped
being Indian. By extension, real Maya are members
of a fundamentally homogeneous group of rural people
marked as much by poverty and precapitalist subsistence
as by the use of indigenous language (see Guttmann 2002:
143157).
When I spoke to Maya speakers from the rural commu-
nities that neighbor the archaeological zone, I found that
many were generally sympathetic with the desire to reclaim
a piece of local territory that had become a regional cash
cow and parts of which had once been land traditionally
used by local communities for agriculture. Others raised
eyebrows at the newly purchased cars and slick clothes of
some of the more prosperous vendors. Recalling a political
culture in which indigenist (Sp. indigenista) policies had
traditionally been geared toward bettering the economic
conditions of the rural underclass, they spoke of a need
to distinguish legitimate artisans (Sp. artesanos legtimos)
from members of the local middle class who cynically ex-
ploited Mayan identity.
Even so, the collective experiences and historical mem-
ories of Maya speakers in the communities that border
Chichen Itza made the condition of the illegitimate ar-
tisans6 into somewhat less of an ideological scandal there
than in the city. In fact, locals critiques of the more prosper-
ous artisanry vendors tended to be tinged with more than
a little bemused irony and self-parody. Insofar as speak-
ing the Maya language is currently one of the principal
features that defines someone as a member of the Maya
ethnic group, they knew that most of the invaders could
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
make at least a linguistic claim to multicultural authenticity.
Generations of rural Maya speakers from all levels of the so-
cioeconomic hierarchy had participated in government in-
stitutions that used language, surname, and phenotype to
slot people who might inhabit a range of locally relevant so-
cial categories into homogeneous Indian or peasant sta-
tuses. People also take for granted that the social category
that one assumes before neighbors and the one assumed
before outsiders to the community can be very different,
just as certain markers of class or ethnicity take on very dif-
ferent meanings in village and city. Thus, although some lo-
cals may have questioned the real economic need of many
of the invaders, the vendors positioning within the am-
biguous terrain of officially sanctioned indigeneity was not,
in and of itself, a radically new way of doing politics. Nor
was it necessarily inconsistent with traditional ways of ex-
periencing social identity.
In the following sections, I demonstrate how the
disjunctures that marked this most recent invasion of
Chichen Itza are consistent with a much longer history of
social and political interactions in which nondisruptive am-
biguity has permitted rural citizens to think of cultural poli-
tics in terms of their own distinct social nomenclature while
it has actively contributed to the continuity of official insti-
tutions and discourses. I begin by outlining a series of ways
of performing and interpreting different markers of social
status in rural, Maya-speaking communities. This is a body
of local knowledge and practice that I refer to as a vernac-
ular anthropology. In the succeeding sections, I contrast
this vernacular anthropology to some of the core assump-
tions that have characterized official knowledge of eth-
nicity in modern Mexico. I argue that a sequence of often-
ambiguous dialogues between vernacular and academic or
official anthropologies constitutes a store of collective ex-
periences that continue to play a fundamental role in local
engagements with the state-sanctioned multiculturalism in
the present day.
Most of the specific examples that I draw on here show
people doing the opposite of what the illegitimate artisans
at Chichen Itza attempted to do, that is, using censuses and
other forms of generating official data as a means to claim
non-Indian identities that would offer them some advan-
tages in a regional society marked by sharp ethnic hierar-
chies. However, I argue that some of the same ambiguous
dialogues with bureaucratic and anthropological practices
are also at the core of the process by which persons are of-
ficially coded as indigenous. Viewed within a longer histor-
ical context, these ambiguities offer new ways of thinking
about how emergent fields of formal political participation
can be experienced as instances of older and more localized
bodies of practice, casting a new light on debates regarding
the nature of essentialism in contemporary indigenous
movements.
 American Ethnologist
Everyday experiences of class and ethnic
categories in rural Maya communities
Descriptive and critical studies written by several gener-
ations of anthropologists (Castaneda 2004; Gabbert 2004;
Hervik 1999; Re Cruz 1996; Redfield 1941, 1962; Redfield and
Villa Rojas 1934; Thompson 1974) have documented how
rural Maya speakers refer to different categories of people in
regional society. Here, I place special emphasis on the term
de pueblo (Sp. from a town). Although this particular cate-
gory has received little attention in anthropological writing
on Yucatan, I have found it to be one of the most common
ethnic and class labels used in the region. It is also the term
that best captures the ways in which the performance of dif-
ferent social identities emerges in what are often highly anx-
ious engagements between people from rural communities
and city dwellers, representatives of different state agencies,
or anthropologists. But before entering into a discussion of
the de pueblo label, I outline some of the other social or
ethnic categories that have been salient in my own research
and that of other anthropologists.
A common observation in ethnographic studies of Yu-
catan is that rural Yucatecans themselves rarely use the
term Maya to refer to anything but the Yucatec Maya lan-
guage (Gabbert 2004; Hervik 1999). In my own experience,
this term is most commonly used as a means of self-labeling
by persons under 40 years of age who have lived their for-
mative years amidst the development of both a booming
tourist industry and the incorporation of official multicul-
tural discourse into public school curricula. The terms In-
dian (Sp. indio) and indigenous person (Sp. indgena) also
have a local relevance quite distinct from meanings they
might connote to anthropologists from Mexico City or the
United States. The term indio is almost universally pejora-
tive in Yucatan, alluding as much to ignorance, poverty, and
willful backwardness as to the use of ethnic dress or lan-
guage (see also Hervik 1999; Thompson 1974). Although less
explicitly derogatory, the term ndigena also seems to be un-
derstood by most rural Yucatecans as a reference to poverty,
lack of education, and backwardness.
Rather than being dictated in strictly genealogical, eth-
nic, or biological terms, social categories in the vernacu-
lar anthropologies of rural Yucatan are usually based on a
combination of dress, language, occupation, and surname.
In the Yucatec language, this categorization is expressed
as a distinction between maasewaloob (sing. maasewal),
persons who practice peasant agriculture, speak Maya, and
wear traditional clothes, and a broad category of those des-
ignated tsuuloob or xunamoob (these are masculine and
feminine plural forms, respectively; see also Redfield and
Villa Rojas 1934). The term tsuul or xunam is applied to
foreigners of European descent, to Spanish-speaking peo-
ple with urban manners, to people with Spanish surnames,
303
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
and to persons of maasewal extraction who have made a
transition into a middle class of rural capitalists who do not
rely on subsistence agriculture. The Spanish-language term
mestizo, which, in Yucatan, does not refer to a person of
mixed indigenous and European heritage, is roughly anal-
ogous to the Maya term maasewal. Today, it refers primar-
ily to the use of traditional clothes. Because of this, the
category is essentially gendered female, as the only men
who continue to wear traditional clothes today are octoge-
narians living in very isolated agricultural hamlets. Women
who wear Western clothes are referred to as catrinas (and,
formerly, men who did so were catrines; see, especially,
Thompson 1974).
These broad social categories tend to be further com-
plicated by a set of more fine-grained, and often quite am-
biguous, terms that refer to such issues as language choice
and phenotype. The term mayero is a label for persons who
use the Maya language extensively in their everyday lives
and encompasses persons who might be referred to as a
tsuul or xunam as well as those identified as maasewal or
mestizamestizo. Guiro is a pejorative term that could be
translated roughly as hick. Although not explicitly racial-
izing, the term mirrors many of the stereotypes of the term
indio. A range of terms also denotes phenotype, among
them, chaparro (Sp. shorty), moreno (Sp. dark skinned),
mulix (Ma. kinky haired), boox (Ma. dark skinned), guero
(Sp. light skinned), and chel (Ma. light skinned). Although
these phenotype terms carry strong racial overtones, they
do not in and of themselves constitute definitive racial
markers, as black and white do in the United States. So,
for example, being guera or chel would not preclude a
womans characterization as a maasewal or mestiza.
Whereas these terms denote language use, clothing
choice, education, class, and phenotype, reference to a
persons being de pueblo evokes a more general set of as-
sumptions about personal origin and mobility between the
hierarchized poles of village and city. Although this term is
commonly used throughout Mexico to refer to people born
and raised outside of major urban centers, it has some par-
ticularly salient implications for ethnicity and local iden-
tity in Yucatan. Recent scholarship has emphasized the de-
gree to which the strong identification of individuals with
specific communities (Ma. kajoob) and microregions runs
counter to assumptions of a homogeneous ethnic identity
that encompasses all Yucatec-speaking people (see Gabbert
2004; Restall 1997). In this sense, being de pueblo tends
to imply that an individual has deep roots in a traditional
kaj community, versus the more explicitly modern form of
membership that characterizes cities. The de pueblo cate-
gory can encompass a range of social classes and categories,
including persons who could be identified as indios, ind-
genas, maasewaloob, catrines, or tsuuloobxunamoob. ers, peasants who travel to sell their produce or buy farm-
The fine-grained class distinctions that occur within
the broad de pueblo category tend to be far less percepti-
304
ble to people from the city, for whom rural people are often
coded as homogeneously Indian. This assumption, which
plays a central role in the discourse of ruralurban hierar-
chies and racism in Yucatan, has also figured in anthropo-
logical discourse that has historically sought to constitute
typically Mayan objects of analysis. The disjunctures be-
tween this homogenizing discourse and the proliferation of
categories that inhabit the vernacular anthropology of ru-
ral Yucatecans have been among the principal factors that
motivate nondisruptive ambiguity in the practices that in-
stantiate official cultural institutions.
The anxieties and genuine bewilderment that can mark
the experience of these ambiguous dialogues became evi-
dent to me during my first few seasons of fieldwork. Many
of my informants and friends in the town of Piste come from
middle-class families with Mayan surnames who proudly
identify with the ancient builders of Chichen Itza and
whose adult members speak Yucatec Maya. But when I re-
ferred to members of these families as indigenous people
(ndigenas), many would bristle or look at me with amused
condescension. Why this innocentif fairly ignorantfaux
pas elicited the reactions that it did was not evident to me
until I realized that the word indigenous did not refer to
culture for most local people and that being thus labeled
by an educated foreigner might be particularly anxiety pro-
voking for those who identify as middle class. Greater fi-
nancial resourceslike the desire to attain greater social
prestigeprompt middle-class people de pueblo to estab-
lish bonds with urban areas that involve activities rang-
ing from shopping for clothes that are unavailable in rural
communities to sending their children to more prestigious
schools in the city. However, this very movement outside of
their home community exposes them to forms of urban dis-
crimination that tend to characterize people from the pueb-
los as homogeneously poor and uneducated indigenous
people.
I saw an eloquent testament to the relationship be-
tween movement between village and country, class anx-
ieties, and urban racism in a bit of hate graffiti scrawled
on the seat of a second-class bus that passed through a
dozen or more pueblos on its route from Cancun to Merida.
The text was written in Spanish sprinkled with some Maya-
language curses that are familiar to most Spanish-speaking
Yucatecans. The Maya-language portions are transcribed in
bold: To all the dudes from the pueblos, fuck your mother,
you are dirty vaginas of your mothers. And those who do
not understand [Spanish] fuck your mother, faggot Mayas.
Sincerely, X.7
The intended audience of this text, the passengers who
board the bus in the rural communities between the three
urban stops, is a diverse body that includes unskilled labor-
ing equipment, well-off members of the rural middle class
who travel to Merida to shop or enjoy the nightlife, and
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
university students who return to their home communities
for vacation. Some aspects of this graffiti might be particu-
larly offensive to members of the rural bourgeoisie. Whereas
older and less educated rural people would be familiar with
traditional racial slurs like guiro and indio, the phrase
faggot Mayas is probably more intelligible to persons for
whom being Maya offers an ethnic label without the pejo-
rative connotations of being indigenous. Even if they did
not self-identify as Maya, middle-class students and shop-
pers could read this message in terms of the traditional cor-
respondence between being de pueblo and negatively con-
strued Indianness.
This sort of discrimination takes placealbeit in more
subtle formsin the spaces in which many self-identified
Mayan intellectuals and businesspersons attain the special-
ized knowledge and cultural capital that serve them as lead-
ers in politicized cultural movements. I recall participating
in a particularly poignant conversation with Sebastian and
Martina, two undergraduate anthropology students at the
regional university. Sebastian is a native speaker of Yucatec
and a self-identified Maya from a village of a thousand peo-
ple. Martina was born and raised in a blue-collar district of
the city of Merida. When Martina complained about the dif-
ficulty of the mandatory course in Yucatec Maya, Sebastian
laughed and said, Thats the only exam that I dont have
to study for. Annoyed, Martina waved her hand dismis-
sively and replied, Well, its easy for you because youre de
pueblo.
Something that I found particularly telling in this in-
cident was that, although the young man from the pueblo
was a fluent speaker of Maya and a proud cultural activist,
he came from a prosperous and very respected family in
a community where most people under 30 are more flu-
ent in Spanish than in Maya. In effect, his own fluency in
an indigenous language reflected his and some of his fam-
ily members conscious choice to preserve certain elements
of traditional culture despite the success that might have
allowed them to pass as hispanophone urbanites. Still,
these details of Sebastians biography are not necessarily
perceptible to a student born and raised in the urban world,
who assumedjust as I had in my first research trips as an
undergraduatethat the pueblos were peopled by homo-
geneously Indian bearers of a Maya culture. Although I
doubt that this was her intention, Martinas response dis-
missed Sebastians prowess in Maya as a result of his eth-
nic origins and as a kind of innate knowledge that is dis-
tinct from and of lesser value than the kinds of book learn-
ing through which typical anthropology students learned
Maya as a second or third language.8 By extension, I felt an
even greater appreciation for the complexity of Sebastians
situation. Although his potential as a leader in his own com-
munity is a function of his education and cultural capi-
tal, the same linguistic and cultural features that consti-
tute him as an authentic subject of official multicultural
 American Ethnologist
politics would be read by many of his urban colleagues as
linking him to a homogeneous peasant mass that inhab-
ited a world that was external to spaces of educated his-
panophone culture.
Discrimination notwithstanding, the relative
anonymity afforded by urban spaces can offer rural
Maya speakers the opportunity to assert identities that
would be more difficult to maintain in their own commu-
nities. Note, for example, how Robert Redfield and Alfonso
Villa Rojas described early 20th-century attitudes toward
people known in rural communities as kas tsuul, a Maya
term that is still used to describe persons of undeniably
rural origins who have adopted some elements of urban
culture:
The term dzul [sic] is one implying respect. It recog-
nizes the social superiority of Spanish name, white skin
color and education. A man may be a genuine dzul
even though his skin is dark, provided he lives the life
of the city and is well educated and authoritative. . . .
There is, probably, a slight disposition to mix the su-
periority accorded the kaz-dzul [half-tsuul] with a
modicum of contempt, he is neither one thing or the
other. [1934:101102]
This modicum of contempt is nicely exemplified in
a story, probably apocryphal, that I have heard in Piste
and neighboring communities. It concerns a boy named
Juan Puc.9 Like all boys and young men named Juan, he
was affectionately addressed with the nickname Tuul (Ma.
Rabbit) by most of his neighbors. Tuul was a very dedi-
cated student in the primary school of his home village, and
as he grew into a young man who spoke excellent Span-
ish, he chafed against his nickname and insisted on be-
ing called Juan. Having earned a government scholarship,
he traveled to Merida for his secondary and preparatory
school training. When he returned to visit his home village,
he refused to answer to his old surname, claiming that he
was now Juan Sierra (puc is the Maya word for hill, and
Sierra is a common Spanish surname that means moun-
tain range; this homonymy is one of the most common
means of hispanicizing Mayan surnames). Always an ex-
cellent student, Juan Sierra earned an additional scholar-
ship to study in the United States, from whence he returned
as the monolingual English speaker Johnny Mountain. This
story is essentially humorous, poking fun both at the anxi-
eties of upwardly mobile rural people who struggle to adapt
to their new surroundings and at the pretensions of a self-
made tsuul who denies his past before fellow villagers who
remember him as a boy named Rabbit. What is particularly
significant here is that the memory of Johnny Mountains
humble origins is betrayed by the communitys knowledge
of his background, not by any real failure on his part to per-
form the Spanish or English languages and urban manners.
305
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
This is an accurateif humorousrepresentation of the
ironic reality that the same urban spaces that expose ru-
ral Yucatecans to discriminatory acts and attitudes can of-
fer opportunities for inhabiting prestigious identities that
might be more difficult for them to maintain in their home
communities.
The general terminologies and specific vignettes that I
have outlined above provide a sketch of some of the quo-
tidian experiences that mark the collective memories of ru-
ral Yucatecans and of the repertoire of narratives and styles
of performance that they bring to engagements with older
state institutions and contemporary multicultural politics.
In particular, the same opportunities and anxieties that ac-
company movement to and from the city also emerge in
bureaucratic procedures and ethnological studies through
which members of local communities experience the in-
scription of officially legible class and ethnic status. These
encounters are the focus of the next sections.
Maps and metropolitan anthropologies
The discourses on social categories that were employed
by anthropologists and representatives of the Mexican
state were rooted in a very different relationship between
ethnicity and geography, something that was instantiated
through a series of specially drawn ethnological maps. By
the beginning of the 20th century, anthropology, sociology,
cartography, and other scientific means of generating
and applying knowledge of the national population were
well established within the logic of governance and citizen
participation in Mexico. Local experiences with these
institutionalized practices became even more prominent
when agrarian institutions and rural schools that emerged
after the revolution of the 1910s established a series of
new and more intimate contacts between the state and
the rural population. Encounters between these official
ethnic cartographies and the vernacular anthropology that
I described in the previous section were marked, from fairly
early on, with the ambiguities that figured in the drama of
the illegitimate artisans at Chichen Itza. reaucrats, parish priests, and peasants on whom he re-
By the beginning of the 20th century, revolutionary
teachers and anthropologists who engaged members of ru-
ral communities were armed with an official ethnologi-
cal knowledge that fragmented the national territory into
bounded language groups that were often assumed to
share a similar cultural and biological substance. Contem-
porary critical literatures have demonstrated how this sort
of ethnic cartography has tended to obscure the fluid so-
cial and cultural processes that accompany the movement
of people, things, and ideas through time and space (see
Appadurai 1996; Malkki 1992; Marcus 1998). In modern
Mexico, such maps were drawn within a broader context in
which, as the historian Raymond Craib (2004) has argued,
cartography became a state fixation. The lack of rigor-
306
ous knowledge of the national territory was equated with
the lack of rational government that contributed to the na-
tions ills. For Mexican ethnologists and applied social sci-
entists, maps that clearly delineated the different territories
occupied by peoples such as the Otomis, Mayas, or Tepe-
huanes represented an important first step in understand-
ing the particular problems of these different groups and,
ultimately, facilitating their incorporation into a homoge-
neous, hispanophone national culture (Bonfil Batalla 1987;
Cifuentes 2002; Gamio 1916; Lomnitz 2001; Tenorio Trillo
1999).
It is important to recall here that these ethnological
maps were not simply ideas or images but functional arti-
facts that were produced and circulated amidst other prac-
tices of writing that were deeply complicit with technolo-
gies of governance and citizen participation. A sense of how
some of these more mundane procedures played an early
role in the formulation of canonical knowledge about the
national population emerges in the notes of Manuel Orozco
y Berra, who drew an especially influential map of Mexico in
1864:
My manner of working was the following. With the plan
of a given [administrative] Department in sight, I stud-
ied and compared the materials that I had compiled re-
garding that political unit. Once I was confident that I
had interpreted them properly, and felt that I had re-
solved all the questions that presented themselves, I
proceeded to mark one by one all of the towns of a
single language. I distinguished one language from the
other by diverse colors. I then drew the lines separating
them. [1864:12]
Significantly, here the minimal unit of language usage
is not the individual speaker but the pueblo. This choice
was, in part, an issue of scale, given that the pueblo was
probably the smallest unit available on the maps onto
which Orozco y Berra transposed his linguistic territories.
But this emphasis on political entities also hints at the so-
cially and ethnically heterogeneous networks of urban bu-
lied for reports. In this sense, one distinctive feature of his
linguistic cartography is the erasure of these networksa
process familiar from Bruno Latours (1999) discussions of
black boxes in the creation of science. Most of the politi-
cal entities and social structures that operated within these
different linguistic regions, and that furnished the data that
were essential for Orozco y Berras ethnocartography, are
erased in the gesture of drawing the lines separating them.
This is particularly evident in the linguistic maps included
in many popular textsnear or distant cousins of the origi-
nal 19th-century drawingsin which the national territory
is divided into spaces filled by a single bit of text nam-
ing a particular language group. Emptied of other political
and economic divisions, the areas populated by speakers of
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
Nahuatl, Zapotec, or Triqui are filled with a single layer of
homogeneous content: language.
Although the invention of discretely bounded language
communities might seem like a fairly innocuous act of sci-
entific pragmatism, the authority of these linguistic maps
became entrenched through their frequent use as guides
for generating additional bodies of anthropological or de-
mographic knowledge.10 Foreign and Mexican physical an-
thropologists like Frederick Starr, who entered the field
without maps that situated the location of different physi-
cal types, had little choice but to derive bounded popula-
tions from the earlier linguistic maps (see Starr 1902). Mea-
surements of people selected through this sort of sampling
were often compiled and averaged into tables that consti-
tuted a biologically normative individual or physical type
whose range might appear to be contiguous with the ter-
ritories that had already been defined by linguistic or philo-
logical research.11
The kinds of nondisruptive ambiguities that played
into the drama of the illegitimate artisans in 2005 are fairly
evident in the records of earlier moments, when these eth-
nological maps and the writing practices that they facili-
tated were brought into direct contact with the vernacular
anthropologies of rural communities in Yucatan. Note, for
example, a narrative by Morris Steggerda, a North American
anthropologist who conducted anthropometric research in
Yucatan in the 1920s and 1930s:
Naturally, one questions the genetic purity of the race
studied. Judging from the comparison of the measure-
ments, it is the authors opinion that the Maya studied
by Starr and the groups A and B of Williams, and those
constituting this study are relatively pure Maya Indians.
It would be impossible to say with assurance of any in-
dividual in the State of Yucatan that he is a genetically
pure Maya Indian. No doubt there are such individuals,
but to distinguish them from persons who have a trace
of white blood is impossible. Certainly this can not be
discovered with certainty from the individual, for they
all say that they are pure Maya, even though upon fur-
ther questioning one learns of a remote Spanish an-
cestor. An earnest effort was made to secure relatively
pure Maya. The interpreter was instructed as to the
genetic meaning of the word mestizo, and told that
we did not want such individuals for this study. Then,
too, most of the individuals constituting this series
were thoroughly questioned in regard to their ances-
tors, and a pedigree of at least three generations was
made, showing all family relationships. It was all deter-
mined whether or not any of the four grandparents was
Spanish. It is estimated that none of our subjects has
more that one-eighth to three-sixteenth white blood,
and all are relatively pure Maya. [1932:34]
From the beginning of this passage, it is evident that
Steggerdas satisfaction that his sample consisted of full-
 American Ethnologist
blooded Maya was based more on the similarity between
his tables of average measurements and the averages pro-
duced by Starr (1902) and George Dee Williams (1931) than
on any definitive correlation between his notions of pure
bloodedness and the autobiographical narratives of his re-
search subjects. Just as the ethnic geography established by
the linguistic studies of Orozco y Berra was taken as a matter
of faith by early anthropometrists, congruity with the writ-
ten text-artifacts that emerged from earlier anthropomet-
ric studies seems to be the primary means through which
Steggerda validated his own work.
The successful compilation of Steggerdas record still
leaves space for a great deal of ambiguity in how the peo-
ple of Piste understood and experienced the process be-
hind its creation. When local people identified themselves
to Steggerda as pure Maya, were they using the terms
mayero and maasewal or referring to their use of the Maya
language? In the statement the interpreter was instructed
as to the genetic meaning of the word mestizo one gets the
sense that Steggerda was aware that most Yucatecans un-
derstood this term to mean something other than a biolog-
ical hybrid between indigenous and European blood.12 But
how exactly might Steggerda and his interpreter have artic-
ulated the idea of a Spanish grandparent to people liv-
ing over a century after Mexicos independence from Spain?
Were the Spanish grandparents people with Spanish sur-
names, people identified as tsuul or xunam, or persons
who had particularly light skin or hair?
Just as these ambiguities ultimately did little to hin-
der Steggerdas ability to produce an intelligible body of an-
thropometric data, the process of creating an ethnological
document did not necessarily undermine the ability of the
people that he measured to identify themselves in terms
of locally relevant categories. Quite likely, the many infor-
mants who identified themselves as pure Maya did so as
mayeros who knew that this label was something that was
being sought by Steggerda and that it would earn them the
payment being offered to research subjects. It is also likely
that the production of a Spanish grandparent might have
served others as a means of evading a pejorative indio la-
bel. In this sense, the creation of this piece of anthropomet-
ric knowledge is not simply a case of dialogue between
native and anthropological perspectives (Castaneda 1996;
Tedlock and Mannheim 1995) but an interaction in which
the people of Piste could quite literally participate in their
own terms. What is more, they could do so without the
particularities of their emic understanding of ethnic cate-
gories becoming relevant or even perceptible to Steggerda
(see Rosaldo 1989:4647) and without significantly altering
the final arguments and presentation of his text.
The central drama of this vignettethe tsuul re-
searcher and the rural Maya speakers talking past each
other with a shared set of wordswas repeated again
and again over the course of the 20th century and forms
307
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
part of the historical substrate for the experience of the
Maya artisans of Chichen Itza. The ambiguities that marked
Steggerdas interaction with the people of Piste were an-
ticipated by a long tradition of engagements between ru-
ral Maya speakers and writing practices that inscribed a
fixed ethnic or social status onto individuals. The rich cor-
pus of colonial-period documents attests to the extent that
censuses, land titles, and baptismal records figured into
the lives of rural Yucatecans in the 16th century (Gabbert
2004; Restall 1997). And, probably from early on, ambiguity
played a role in how these documents recorded the social
category of rural people.13
One means through which rural Maya speakers could
self-consciously use bureaucracy to alter their social cate-
gory was through the hispanization of Mayan surnames, the
act of social climbing mocked in the story of Johnny Moun-
tain. Formalizing the hispanization of a surname through a
bureaucratic transaction is still quite common. A good ex-
ample is the case of a prominent man from one of the com-
munities where I conducted research, who hispanicized his
surname in the 1940s. When his children were born, he bap-
tized and registered them under the hispanicized surname
in the civil registry in the nearby city of Valladolid. His chil-
dren were raised in his home village, where many other fam-
ilies saw the name change as a silly pretension and referred
to the family as people who had purchased a surname.
But, for all intents and purposes, the man and his children
appeared in the bureaucracy of the Mexican state as per-
sons with Spanish surnames born in a city.
Other instances of bureaucratic practice, however, pro-
vided far less clear-cut means for individuals to select a
given social category. After the Mexican Revolution was
imported into Yucatan in 1915, institutions such as the
agrarian reform and rural schools turned the recording of
censuses and other demographic or ethnographic data into
a far more common aspect of the life of rural people. They
also added more layers of meaning and ambiguity to the
kinds of interaction that marked Steggerdas anthropomet-
ric studies and the purchasing of surnames. In the archive of
Mexicos Secretara de Educacion Publica (SEP; Secretariat
of Public Education), I have seen records of dozens of cen-
suses conducted to determine if communities had enough
young children to justify the construction of a school. Most
of them recorded the languages spoken by students and
their parents and often included questionnaires in which
teachers noted the race that predominated in the com-
munity. Although race was a less common category in
the censuses used to determine the allocation of agricul-
tural land, its use in that context was not unknown. I have
read several texts in which the assignment of white sta-
tus to persons with Spanish patronymics shows the kind
of manipulation that was used elsewhere to purchase sur-
names.14 Other cases, however, show teachers or census
takers indiscriminately ascribing a Maya ethnic category
308
to all of the members of rural communities, even as they
made a formal public record of the Spanish surnames of
some of them.15 In the next section, I look more closely
at one case in which tensions between the vernacular an-
thropology of rural Yucatecans and the official categories
promoted by this earlier generation of cultural and peasant
institutions bears especially striking parallels to the more
recent experience of the artisans of Chichen Itza.
Being a real Maya before multiculturalism
Thus far, most of the cases that I have discussed are situa-
tions in which the ambiguous dialogue between official and
vernacular discourses on ethnicity became a space in which
rural Maya speakers hoped to assert prestigious non-Indian
identities. Although situations in which it became advanta-
geous to assume officially recognized markers of indigene-
ity were considerably scarcer in the early 20th century, they
did exist. The experiences of rural people whose success
was contingent on their ability to pass particular tests of
Indianness provide a particularly rich perspective on the
deep historical precedents of incidents like the most recent
invasion of Chichen Itza. One such individual was a rural
teacher named Alvaro Noh, whose career I have been able
to document through texts housed in the historical archive
of the SEP.
Between 1926 and 1929, Alvaro Noh was one of seven
Yucatec Mayaspeaking students at the Casa del Estudiante
Indgena (CEI; House of the Indigenous Student), a special-
ized school in Mexico City that was designed to train stu-
dents representing over 20 different indigenous language
groups as teachers and cultural ambassadors who would re-
turn home to civilize their native communities. For Noh, a
teenager from the village of Tibolon, whose occupation was
listed as agriculturalist (read: peasant), this represented
an unusual opportunity. The CEI offered a cutting-edge ed-
ucational experience, and successful completion of the pro-
gram all but guaranteed a teaching job and some degree of
social mobility. But, in what may have seemed like an ironic
twist, this mobility was conditioned on Nohs ability to in-
habit precisely the kind of indigenous identity that many
upwardly mobile Yucatecans sought to avoid by adopting
Spanish surnames and other markers of urbanity.
Imagined as a microcosm of the diversity of indige-
nous Mexico, the student body of the CEI was a living man-
ifestation of the linguistic and ethnological maps that had
developed since the mid-19th century. It was also an in-
stitution that transformed the conflation of race, language,
and culture embodied by this ethnological map into a ped-
agogical philosophy. The directors of the CEI assumed that
pure-blooded Indians would possess linguistic skills, cul-
tural background, and biological features that made them
uniquely suited to serve as missionaries of culture to
members of the indigenous populations of the bounded
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
regions from which they were recruited. Purity was a cen-
tral concern for the CEI, and whole cohorts of students were
rejected and repatriated to their native regions when they
were revealed as mestizos who had been admitted to the
school through the influence of relatives or political pa-
trons (Britton 1976; Dawson 2001; Loyo 2003). At the time
of their admission into the institution, students were issued
an anthropological certificate (Sp. cedula antropologica)
that recorded the results of an anthropometric examina-
tion, a medical and family history, and details about the en-
vironment, industries, and vernacular customs of their na-
tive region. Just as the students were themselves metonyms
for whole regions of Indian Mexico, such features as their
first language, their folk dress, and the shape of their crania
became metonyms for a more generalized authenticity that
constituted them as pure-blooded representatives of their
respective peoples.
How the students, natives of diverse regions of the
republic and representatives of an equally diverse set of
class and ethnic positions, interpreted or internalized these
racializing discourses is a more complicated question. Most
historical treatments of the CEI suggest that the institu-
tion was ultimately too successful in inculcating its students
with the values of modern hispanophone society, to the de-
gree that few of them were inclined to return to their native
communities (Britton 1976:5762; Dawson 2001). Still, the
experience of Noh, like that of some of the students who
were expelled as inauthentic mestizos, implies that their
survival in the institution was motivated by some degree
of complicity in the substantiation of the CEIs ethnological
map.
Nohs anthropological certificate described him as
being brachycephalic (wide headed) with light yellow
skin, yellow eyes, brown, straight and thin hair, a straight
nose, and thin lips. Most of these features conformed to
the Mayan physical type described in 1902 by Starr, whose
findings would have formed part of the base of anthropo-
metric knowledge available to the experts who measured
Noh for the purposes of the CEI. Noh was also apparently a
fluent speaker of the Yucatec Maya language, which, along
with the anthropometrists assessment of his physical pro-
portions and skin tone, sufficed for his race and language
group to be listed as Maya. Through this gesture, he was
transformed into a linguistic, cultural, and biological ana-
log for the entirety of the Indian population of a discretely
bounded region on the national map and as an appropriate
agent for its modernization.
As with Steggerdas description of his field methods, el-
ements of Nohs anthropological certificate can be read as a
record of features whose significance would have been fun-
damentally ambiguous in a dialogue between vernacular
and official anthropologies. Born with light skin and eyes,
Noh was someone who would likely have been character-
ized as chel, or light skinned, in his home community. This
 American Ethnologist
sort of appearance is today considered to be highly desir-
able and is often associated with tsuul parentage and high
social status. This association might have been especially
strong in Nohs case. Although he himself was a peasant
agriculturalist, other documents in his dossier suggest that
he was closely related by either blood or patronage to a lo-
cal family with the Spanish surname Pereira.16 As I discuss
below, this association would figure more strongly in Nohs
self-crafting later in life. What is important to note here is
that his movement from his home community and into an
institutional space in Mexico City might have allowed him
to assume an indigenous identity that would have seemed
less congruous in a village where he might well have been
seen as a kas tsuul.
Differences between the Indianness documented by
the anthropological certificate written at the CEI and the
range of other social categories into which Noh could have
been placed in his home community suggest that his partic-
ipation in the CEI involved many of the anxieties and ambi-
guities that characterized other encounters between rural
Yucatecans and official anthropologies. These are, to a cer-
tain extent, evident in texts that Noh wrote as a student. In
1928, at the behest of his teachers, he penned a short essay
in which he detailed the specific benefits that his training
would bring to his home community:
I have thought about the easiest way to help the com-
munity of my town [Sp. la comunidad de mi pueblo],
and I became aware that what they need to learn
most is how to read and write, and after learning this,
which is the first thing that they must learn, show them
some small industries, such as mechanics. I have there-
fore thought that when I arrive in my town the first
thing that I will do is to found a small school to show
them how to read, write and at the same time show
them something about soap making and afterwards
give them some classes regarding mechanics and at the
same time give them practice.17
Given the stated mission of the CEI, Nohs short es-
say is remarkable for what it does not mention. Just as he
does not use terms like indigenous people, Indians, or Maya,
he makes no reference to the fact that literacy training in
rural Yucatan also tended to entail teaching the Spanish
language to monolingual Maya speakers. Noh frames the
task of bringing modern industries and knowledge to his
pueblo in ethnically neutral terms, stressing projects that
would have been as central to the modernization of a his-
panophone community as they would have been to an
indigenous one. This is, in effect, the narration of a teach-
ing project that would have been as relevant for an ethni-
cally unmarked working-class barrio in Mexico City as for
the Indian communities whose particular characteristics
were the focus of CEI pedagogy.
309
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
Some aspects of this letter, such as the unusual phrase
the community of my town, lend themselves to a range
of readings. By referring to his pueblo, Noh assumed a
de pueblo identity that would have been as appropriate for
a member of the rural middle class as for a self-identified
maasewal. But given the context of early 20th-century an-
thropology, the term mi pueblo could also be translated
as my people, a reference to the geographically bounded
ethnic group that Noh represented at the school and on the
ethnological map. The term community in this narrative is
just as polyvalent. In 1928, it could be read as a reference
to the gemeinshaft that early 20th-century social science
ascribed to folk societies or to the idea of forging a sense
of community. Today, community is sometimes used as a
euphemism for indigenous by persons who wish to refrain
from denoting an explicitly Indian identity. For example,
I have heard educated, middle-class Maya speakers refer to
the discrimination that they experience in urban areas as
the result of their being from a community (Sp. de una
comunidad). Although it is impossible to know how exactly
Noh and his teachers understood these terms, these seman-
tic ambiguities meant that the 1928 essay might have been
successful both as an expression of a not-explicitly-Indian
identity sought by Noh and as an expression of some-
thing similar to the ethnically marked scholar sought by his
teachers.
The pressures for Noh to conform to the image of the
full-blooded Maya seem to have diminished outside of
the doors of the CEI. In 1929, he left Mexico City and the
CEI to return to Tibolon. In 1930, his former teachers tried
to induce him to teach in isolated Maya-speaking commu-
nities in the frontier region of Quintana Roo, a post that
Noh declined after citing the relatively low pay and the
high cost of living in that territory.18 Later that same year,
incomplete credits on his transcripts hindered his official
posting as the teacher in his home community of Tibolon,
despite very positive reference letters from instructors
at the CEI.19
In 1935 Noh was working as the teacher at the commu-
nity school of Xcanteil, a peasant village in the southeastern
municipality of Peto. By then, he had been integrated into
the system of federally employed rural teachers and does
not appear to have been specially marked as an alumnus
of the CEI. In his letters from 1935, he also appears to have
been far more comfortable in an explicitly nonindigenous
identity. He signs these letters Alvaro Noh Pereira, partially
hispanicizing his own name by annexing the surname of his
kin or benefactors from Tibolon. His letters from Xcanteil
are also far more consistent with the image of the ethnically
unmarked, urban schoolteacher than with the cultural am-
bassadors imagined at the CEI. In his response to a survey in
which rural teachers were asked to discuss the best method
for teaching Spanish to monolingual Maya speakers, Noh
observes that
310
it is well known that the Indian [Sp. indio] is distrustful
by nature, bashful and of few words. These defects im-
pede his ability to speak Spanish in front of strangers,
particularly if the stranger knows this language bet-
ter than he does. Therefore, he will not try to learn
[Spanish] for fear of being mocked. Because of this, the
teacher should offer him all of his confidence, without
sacrificing his authority, in order to then develop the la-
bor of castillianization.20
The use of the normally pejorative word Indian, refer-
ences to common stereotypes of indigenous bashfulness
and distrust, and an emphasis on authority seem to re-
flect a markedly condescending attitude toward the peo-
ple of Xcanteil. Although Xcanteil was not quite the wilder-
ness of Quintana Roo, it was still a very small community in
the economically marginal maize zone (Ramirez Carrillo
2002:6475; Warman 1985) that has traditionally been con-
sidered far less civilized than Nohs native microregion.
Whatever he may have considered the people of his own
pueblo to be, it is possible that, before his integration into
the federal school system or his admission into the CEI, Noh
would have thought of the people of Xcanteil as indios.
Nohs attitudes toward the use of the Maya language by
the schoolteacher also seem to run counter to ideas about
racial and cultural affinity that prevailed within the CEI:
The stranger who does not speak Maya and arrives in
an Indigenous Community receives what he needs and
converses with the residents. They speak in Maya and
he in Spanish, but they understand each other with
more or less regularity. When the friendship between
them expands, the Indian will begin to say a few things
in Spanish so that the teacher can understand better.
That is, as long as he ignores the fact that the teacher
knows or understands the Maya language, for other-
wise, [the students] would be incapable of speaking it
[Spanish], even knowing it partially.21
Several useful insights can be gleaned from tracing the
course of Nohs writing from Tibolon to Mexico City to
Xcanteil and from 1928 to 1935. As I note above, contem-
porary accounts of the CEI emphasized that many of the
students became too accustomed to urban life and man-
ners to want to return to their home communities, some-
thing that would seem to be supported by Nohs attitude
toward his students in Xcanteil. But it seems that Noh him-
self had every intention of returning to Tibolon. At the CEI,
the assumption was that knowledge of the Maya language,
along with the possession of a certain phenotype, would in-
duce Noh to feel a degree of ethnic solidarity with indios
from a village in a microregion that was both geographically
and socially distant from his native soil. But, quite likely,
the larger ethnological abstractions that made sense to the
planners of the CEI would have been far less tangible in the
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
quotidian life of rural society in the 1920s and incompatible
with Nohs wishes to return to his pueblo.
In the end, the outcomes of this particular experiment
in indigenous education were as disappointing for Mexicos
educational planners as they were for many of the students,
something evident by the closure of the CEI in 1932. But
during its brief period of operation, the school left a record
of an instance in which representatives of official institu-
tions and rural people who were identified as indigenous
engaged in a dialogue over the exact meaning of the indige-
nous social category. This was a conversation in which Noh
and his teachers in Mexico City actively collaborated in the
production and maintenance of the CEI, even if they were
speaking and writing past each other the whole time. As
I argue below, striking parallels and continuities exist be-
tween these incidents and the dialogue between vernacular
anthropologies and official cultural projects that continues
over half a century later.
Ambiguity and its constraints
What light can Nohs experience in the CEI shed on the
experience of the illegitimate Maya artisans at Chichen
Itza? In very general terms, his experiences in Mexico City
and Xcanteil demonstrate that the nondisruptive ambigu-
ity of categories such as Maya or indigenous person has
a history that predates the emergence of indigenous move-
ments and official multiculturalisms after the 1980s. Like
the experiences of todays illegitimate artisans, Nohs en-
gagement with official discourses of indigeneity was moti-
vated by interpretations of Mayanness that were initially
compatible with the function of an official cultural institu-
tion (the CEI) but that ultimately clashed with the dominant
logic of state-sponsored indigenous education. Just as Noh
and the teachers at the CEI wrote past each other using a
shared vocabulary of communities and pueblos, many of
the Maya-speaking vendors who currently occupy the ruins
of Chichen Itza have interpreted and employed elements
of the discourse of official multiculturalism in ways that
seem to be quite consistent with the formal goals of this pol-
icy, only to find that theirs was not necessarily the same kind
of Mayanness that more dominant segments of national
society had in mind.
Nowhere are these new twists on older ambiguities
more evident than in the role given to the Maya language
in multicultural policies. The equation of being Maya with
speaking Maya is one aspect of Nohs ethnological certifi-
cate that would seem familiar to rural Yucatecans today and
that plays an important role in generating official figures
on the indigenous population of this part of Mexico.22
All of my informants who have completed their prepara-
tory and university studies on scholarships intended for
indigenous students recall being tested on their fluency
in Maya as one of the prerequisites for securing such fi-
 American Ethnologist
nancial assistance. I have spoken to more than a few ru-
ral Yucatecans who are engaging the ambiguous seman-
tic terrain of Mayanness primarily through their status as
mayeros (Maya speakers). A friend of mine, whose family
had worked in the tourist sector for decades and who par-
ticipated extensively in the invasion of the archaeological
zone, noted that multicultural discourse and touristic de-
sires have lifted much of the shame that had been instilled
by the prejudiced schoolteachers of an earlier generation:
And thanks to what the anthropologists say, we know that
Maya is important. Now we know that it is important and
that it has grammar. Not like before, when it was said that it
was a dialect. We know now that it is important to preserve,
because Maya is being lost. The way we speak it has become
very mixed.23
But if language seems like a fairly secure route through
which to assert Mayanness, the ambiguities that still exist
in the working definition of indigenous identity leave am-
ple space for deeply rooted assumptions about the socioe-
conomic status for Indians to reappear in the practice of
multicultural politics. In 2001, I interviewed the director of
a state-level organization that sponsors the production
of ethnic handicrafts. The director mentioned having met
an artisan and handicrafts merchant whom I know from
the town Piste. I knew that the artisan in question was the
Maya-speaking son of peasants, someone that any foreign
anthropologist would likely consider to be an ethnic Maya.
But he was also a successful entrepreneur who invested his
substantial capital in a prosperous business that employed
over a hundred local artisans and vendors. It was precisely
this status as a rural entrepreneur that led the state-level or-
ganization to reject his funding proposal, seeing it as having
come from a wealthy merchant without clear organic links
to a traditional community.
Whether the exclusion of Mayan capitalists is a strate-
gic power play by members of government agencies who
seek to cultivate dependent rural constituencies or simply
a result of unreflexive assumptions about indigeneity is a
complicated question. But, in any case, this particular script
for engagements between illegitimate Maya and multicul-
tural institutions creates the somewhat tragic situation in
which some rural Yucatecans begin to revalorize elements
of traditional culture only to find that a new sense of eth-
nic pride offers few of the benefits that their parents and
grandparents enjoyed by participating in older peasant in-
stitutions. This particular experience seems to be consis-
tent with both the distinction that is often made between
the redistributive politics and the politics of recognition
that emerged in the last decades of the millennium (Fraser
1997) and with some recent assessments of neoliberal mul-
ticulturalisms. Referring to parts of Central America that
were characterized by far more extensive grassroots orga-
nizing than was evident in Yucatan, Charles Hale notes
that the nightmare settles in as indigenous organizations
311
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
win important battles of cultural rights only to find them-
selves mired in the painstaking, technical administrative
and highly inequitable negotiations for resources and po-
litical power that follow (2005:13; see also Hale 1999b).
The situation of the illegitimate artisans at Chichen
Itza offers a somewhat different insight in that the artisans
engagement with the contemporary politics of authentic
Mayanness cannot be reduced to an effect of emergent ne-
oliberal institutions. Taking part in negotiations on the ob-
tuse semantic turf of institutions that determine who is
and who is not Mayan is hardly an unprecedented night-
mare for a society that still recalls the bad dreams of Noh or
other anxious dialogues with bureaucrats, schoolteachers,
and anthropologists. Indigenous identity politics and offi-
cial multiculturalisms might be phenomena that unfolded
on a regional scale in tandem with the neoliberalization and
the increasing globalization of national economies. How-
ever, the tangible basis through which these political forma-
tions are experienced locally is derived from a repertoire of
narratives and symbols that rural Maya speakers developed
through generations of interactions with official institutions
that inscribe social categories onto individuals.
The deep historical roots of these ambiguities can re-
cast the dichotomy that is often seen between traditional
ways of experiencing social categories and forms of essen-
tialism imposed by social movements or official cultural
policies. This dichotomy has been an especially thorny ter-
rain for Mayanist anthropologists who have struggled to ex-
press solidarity with indigenous social movements, even as
these movements employ a discourse of cultural continu-
ity that clashes with more constructivist anthropological
perspectives on indigenous culture (Montejo 2003; Warren
1998). The broader ramifications of this tension have be-
come evident in cases in which anthropological analyses
of how contemporary indigenous movements are formu-
lating new kinds of identity have fed into the very politi-
cal argument that dismisses mobilization such as occurred
at Chichen Itza as opportunistic or instrumental (Hale more radical agenda proposed by the Chiapanec Zapatista move-
1999a; Hernandez 2002; Yashar 2005).
By better understanding the history of quotidian expe-
riences that have made cultural policies tangible in the lives
of rural Yucatecans, one can move beyond the simple bi-
nary of essentialism and authenticity to recognize identity
politics as a phenomenon that is marked as much by ambi-
guity and incomprehension as it is by bureaucratic violence
and self-conscious subversion. Such ambiguity has been a
recurrent theme in the lives of generations of rural Maya
speakers, who are often actively complicit in the consolida-
tion of official institutions even when their understanding
of key social categories remains consistent with distinct and
locally relevant paradigms. Paying closer attention to his-
torical continuities in ways of engaging ambiguity reframes
the analyses of politicized ethnic identity within a historical
and social context that allows one to see beyond the bina-
312
ries that fill headlines with authentic subalterns and ille-
gitimate artisans. Just as importantly, this approach helps
to ground analyses of the successes or failures of the poli-
tics of diversity within a more rigorous understanding of the
historical and cultural precedents that shape how specific
policies are made relevant to communities on the ground.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The research represented in this article would
not have been possible without a great deal of help from friends
and colleagues. Besides numerous people in various communities
who have been consultants, friends, and gracious hosts over the
years, my fieldwork was greatly enriched by dialogue with my col-
leagues Julio Hoil Gutierrez, Lisa Breglia, Quetzil Castaneda, and
Juan Castillo Cocom. Renato Rosaldo, Paulla Ebron, Miyako Inoue,
and other faculty mentors at Stanford University also gave me in-
valuable feedback and support. I am especially grateful to Elliot
Fratkin, Donald Joralemon, Suzanne Gottschang, Ann Zulawski,
Maria Helena Rueda, and Jocelyn Chua, all of whom gave me feed-
back on earlier drafts of this article.
1. For a discussion of the consolidation of a distinctly peasant, or
campesino, identity in a different region of Mexico during the first
decades after the revolution, see Boyer 2003.
2. For an interesting discussion of a similar contradiction be-
tween a high population of indigenous peoples and a lack of active
ethnic mobilizations, see Garcia 2005 on the case of Peru.
3. For a classic study of the arrival of the Mexican Revolution
in Yucatan, see Joseph 1985. Although the state of Yucatan made
nominal political transitions that brought it into line with the vari-
ous factions that struggled for control of central Mexico, it was not
itself the site of the kind of extensive armed conflicts that under-
mined the hegemony of the traditional planter oligarchy and its
supporters in the United States. The state was not pulled firmly into
the revolutionary fold until 1915, when the governorship was ceded
to Salvador Alvarado, a general from the northern state of Sinaloa,
who entered the peninsula with an army composed largely of sol-
diers from other states.
4. Here, I use the term antidiscrimination law to mirror ob-
servations by George A. Collier and Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello
(2005:167) regarding the degree to which the law excluded many
of the issues of resource rights and autonomy that had figured in a
ment.
5. Several independent online media sources circulated a Dec-
laration from Chichen Itza at 158 Years from the Caste War, dated
July 30, 2005, which bears language that resonates strongly with
neo-Zapatista rhetoric. Other declarations by representatives of the
artisans of Chichen Itza were published in the left-leaning regional
newspaper Por Esto!, particularly between 2005 and late 2006 (see
Mis Coba 2005, 2006a, 2006b). For one account of Marcoss visit to
Chichen Itza, see Giordano 2006.
6. Lisa Breglia (2006) uses the term illegitimate heirs in her own
discussion how questions of cultural continuity enter into the pol-
itics of archaeological heritage. My informants use of the idea of
legitimacy in this case, and my own use of the terms legitimacy
and illegitimacy throughout this article, are more pertinent to the
history of a different set of institutions that served as a link between
living indigenous communities and the Mexican state.
7. In the original Spanish: Todos los vatos de los pueblos
ke chinguen su madre, son unos sucios pealanaes, y los k-
noentiended, zizanah putos mayas. Atte, X.
 Continuities in cultural politics in Yucatan
8. For a discussion of parallel attitudes that undervalue the na-
tive skills of Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States against
linguistic expertise that can be developed through special educa-
tion courses, see Rosaldo 1994.
9. I have heard several versions of the story of Juan Puc and
other similar characters over the years that I have conducted field-
work in Yucatan. I am also indebted to Quetzil Castaneda for
sharing a version of this story with which he was familiar as I was
beginning research in Yucatan in 1997.
10. For succeeding generations of ethnologists and philologists,
Orozco y Berras map would represent a canonical artifact, to be
consulted, edited, and fine-tuned. Thus, for example, the author
of one of the earliest Anglo-American catalogs of indigenous lan-
guages of Mesoamerica noted that Orozco y Berras map has been
used as a basis from which there has been occasion but for
few and comparatively slight changes (Thomas 1911:1). Over the
course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the specific out-
lines of this map were adjusted several times, but the basic assump-
tion of these bounded communities, like the boundaries ascribed
to most of them, was a matter of canon.
11. This phenomenon is evident in the relationship of early
anthropometric studies to previous works in linguistics and
ethnology, to the measurements compiled by their respective
authors, and to vernacular notions of race and ethnicity among
the people whose bodies were the objects of research. At the turn
of the 19th century, the Anglo American Frederick Starr toured
Mexico and Central America collecting anthropometric measure-
ments from representatives of 23 indigenous tribes. He noted that
the only basis of classification of Mexican Indians has been
linguistic. We have naturally been interested in seeing how far
the relationships indicated by language harmonized with the
evidence of physical characters. The agreement was hardly so
strong as was anticipated. Where results of interest seem to
be brought out, we tabulate the data regarding linguistically
related tribes. [Starr 1902:45, emphasis added]
The weak correlation that Starr observed between anthropomet-
ric types and the affinities that philologists have posited between
different groups seems to support the emergent tendency in mod-
ernist anthropology to segregate race, language, and culture as
distinct and mutually independent aspects of the human species.
However, his use of the tribea term that has virtually no signifi-
cance in the political or ethnic geography of rural Mexicobetrays
his debt to the older linguistic studies. In the writing of philologists
and ethnologists at the turn of the 20th century, tribe referred to a
series of human groupings that were roughly contiguous to the lin-
guistic territories defined by Orozco y Berra and other philologists.
If linguistic affinity correlated weakly with morphological similar-
ities, there was little reason to assume that speakers of the same
language would necessarily belong to the same race. But for an-
thropometrists such as Starr, the pragmatic necessity of finding ge-
ographically bounded populations was legitimated by an a priori
assumption about the physical homogeneity of indigenous people
living within these language regions. For a better sense of how lan-
guage came to be privileged as a means of studying the prehistory
of indigenous groups, see Brinton 1901.
12. A second, equally important form of translation was imposed
by the fact that Steggerda was essentially monolingual in English,
and his research relied particularly heavily on his translator and
chief informant. Quetzil Castaneda has documented the life of this
individual, a man named Martiniano Dzib. Dzib was a native of
Piste who had learned English during several years of residence in
the United States and had then returned home to become the first
 American Ethnologist
tour guide at the archaeological zone of Chichen Itza (Castaneda
1996). His privileged access to Steggerda, as well as[?] the local
knowledge through which he was familiar with the history of the
Tuul Puc behind every Johnny Mountain, would have transformed
him into a sort of gatekeeper for the kinds of identities that could
be assumed through dialogue with the curious foreigner.
13. For a detailed discussion of how nuances in the use of the
Maya language and Spanish borrowings may have been manipu-
lated by members of the colonial-era indigenous elite, see Hanks
1986.
14. The census recorded in 1932 in the small rural town of Yax-
caba shows what may have been a process analogous to the pur-
chase of surnames. A column marked race classified persons as
White or as Maya, a clear dichotomy reminiscent of Steggerdas
distinction between pure blooded and mixed-blood Maya. In
the case of the census of Yaxcaba, the deciding criterion for race
seems to have been surname, as all persons with Spanish sur-
names were classed as White and all those with Maya surnames
as Maya. In a community like the Yaxcaba of the 1930s, the peo-
ple listed as Mayas and Whites would all have been speakers of
the Yucatec Maya language, and the majority of them would also
have practiced peasant agriculture. The neat racial dichotomy of
the census simplified a series of ethnic and class categories as com-
plex as those of any Yucatecan community, as well as the detailed
collective memory of how different individuals and families moved
through these categories. Even for persons whose Spanish sur-
names were not recently purchased, elite status would have been
locally relevant through labels such as tsuulxunam or catrn
catrna rather than through a clear-cut whiteMaya dichotomy.
Similarly, it is unclear how low-status people in the community,
who might be identified locally as maasewaloob, indios, or mes-
tizos, would have understood the label of Maya. Still, those fortu-
nate enough to possess Spanish surnamesor to adopt one on the
spot during the recording of the censusnow existed in the agrar-
ian bureaucracy as members in a prestigious and explicitly racial
category (Registro Agrario Nacional [RAN], Merida, Yucatan, Expe-
diente YAXCABA).
15. The ascription of a single racial categoryphrased as the
race that predominatesto all of the members of a community
was a common feature of reports sent to the Direccion de Escue-
las Federales by rural teachers or by school inspectors. See Archivo
Historco de la Secretara de Educacion Publica (AHSEP), Mexico
City, Fondo Escuelas Federales.
16. His anthropological certificate lists him as an hijo natural,
the son of a single mother. Other records in his file document the
brief ceremony through which the municipal government of Sotuta
certified Nohs identity, during which he was accompanied not by
his mother but by a Celestino Pereira. See Miguel Carrillo, Official
del Registro Civil de Sotuta, November 8, 1925. AHSEP Direccion de
Escuelas Rurales, 9526. Later in life, Noh would append Pereira to
his own name.
17. Noh to the director of the Ciudad del Estudiante Indgena,
June 3, 1928. AHSEP Direccion de Escuelas Rurales, 9526.
18. Ismael Cabrera to the director de Educacion Federal, Payo
Obispo, QR., February 7, 1930. AHSEP Direccion de Escuelas Ru-
rales, 9526.
19. Enrique Corona, September 19, 1930. AHSEP Direccion de
Escuelas Rurales, 9526.
20. Alvaro Noh Pereira, April 28, 1935. AHSEP Direccion de Es-
cuelas Rurales, Cursos de Mejoramiento, Instituto de Maestros.
21. Alvaro Noh Pereira, April 28, 1935. AHSEP Direccion de Es-
cuelas Rurales, Cursos de Mejoramiento, Instituto de Maestros.
22. For example, a plan for multicultural social and economic
development published by the state government of Yucatan in
313
American Ethnologist  Volume 36 Number 2 May 2009
2004 draws figures on the Mayan population from sources based
mostly on linguistic criteria. Thus, the Maya people (Sp. el pueblo
maya) who were the beneficiaries of multicultural legislation in Yu-
catan counted adults who speak the Yucatec Maya language and
their young children. See Gobierno del Estado de Yucatan 2004.
23. Spanish: Y gracias a lo que dicen los antropologos, sabemos
que es importante que es el Maya. Ya sabemos que es un idioma
y que tiene gramatica. De antes no, se deca que era un dialecto.
Sabemos ahora que es importante que se preserve, porque ya se
esta perdiendo el Maya, ya esta muy revuelto como lo hablamos.
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accepted November 30, 2008
final version submitted December 2, 2008
Fernando Armstrong-Fumero
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Northampton, MA 01060
413-585-3776
farmstro@email.smith.edu