Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

‘La Ruta Maya: Resurgent Politics in the Memory Migrations of the Maya.’

Robert John Brocklehurst

Department of English and Drama 

Loughborough University

Loughborough, Leicestershire

United Kingdom/Reino Unido

‘La Ruta Maya’ was a five-state initiative set up in 1988 between Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. Its aim was to attract tourists to the more remote regions of Central America by mapping and reconstructing the sites of the Ancient Maya. The success of certain major sites, such as Tikal in Guatemala and Chichen Itzá in the Yucatán, Mexico, overshadowed the fact that many other ‘lesser’ sites had also been reconnected via the reconstruction of ancient sac-beh (sacred Mayan roads). Used in ancient times, these roadways were used to gather peoples of varying origin for the purpose of political-social welfare. 

The desired growth of a modern tourist industry therefore strangely coincided with a resurgent rise in a desire for political autonomy amongst the indigenous populations of this extensive region. Re-instigated was a Mayan ‘mind map’ where migration as a memory activity, previously the norm, had been allowed to proliferate, indigenous peoples once again able to physically as well as temporally converge and bring to life what had been ghosted by earlier (colonial) forms of centralized civil autonomy. From fieldwork studies conducted in the states of Yucatán and Campeche (bordering Guatemala), this paper draws on the ontological-migratory philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Victor Turner looking beyond the destinations and cod history light shows of Uxmal to suggest that ‘synaptic pathways’ reveal the bi-product of a tourist economy, where ‘active-ism’ (being simply active as mobile) for the oppressed is as effective a form of protest as any attempt to mobilize through political ‘activism’. 

This physical revival offers the opening of pathways of cultural exchange and a return to the intransigent, as a positive state of being, where fluidity is once again allowed despite attempts at centralizing political directives. Sac-beh offered the freedom to move, originally built to form a structural whole, linking differing polities across distance for the purpose of a trade in not just goods but in an understanding of the relations between people and their place in a wider (cosmic) world. With globalization has come the mirrored realization of the importance of a socio-ecology understood so well as a necessary balance for survival by the earliest Mayan peoples. Mexican writer Octavio Paz in his Nobel lecture highlighted such concerns in 1990 when he called for a ‘bridge between the modern and the ancient’ for the purposes of socio-political stability. 

Today, migration is rarely talked of as being key to freedom or integral to understanding the need to sustain a healthy dialogue with changes in nature. But through media we are now once again aware of such changes in the world across vast distances. Officialized in the most basic of movements of the Maya are memory-related migrations as a responsive tripartite between the social, political and economic so desired by central governments. Though later civilizations perverted and lost such temporal connections, the physical route ways remained and recent reconstructions have inadvertently re-revealed and regenerated the past to the present. With the arrival of new (tourist) peoples has migrated new social and political ideas so that what may have previously been just an ‘economy of escape’ (Levinas) for one, the tourist, is actually far more than that for the other. It is a return to the freedoms of the past, be that for the indigenous Maya, Mestizo or maybe a new future type of engaged travelling tourist.

About Robert John Brocklehurst

Robert John Brocklehurst is currently teaching theatre and performance at Loughborough University whilst working on a performative memory project for the Centre of Latin American Cultural Studies, University of Manchester. Visual Communities: Video Rituals and Mayan Memory focuses on the connections between memory language and ancient Mayan politics, working with Yucatec Mayan communities in Campeche, Mexico. He has previously studied Cultural Memory at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and has worked as both a visiting lecturer and practicing filmmaker in California, Bosnia Herzegovina and Ghana, West Africa. He has just published a book titled Excessive Narratives: Georges Bataille, Self-Sacrifice & the Communal Language of the Yucatec Maya, available from Amazon.com.