LIVE FROM PORTLAND, YUCATAN: FELIPE DE JESUS

CASTILLO TZEC AND THE TRANSNATIONAL

MAYA EXPERIENCE

Paul Worley

IntroductionIn recent years more and more scholarship has taken notice of the

cultural, social, racial, and political nuances glossed over by the words“immigration to the U.S. from Latin America.” Studies and edited vol-umes such as those by Lynn Stephen (2007), Wayne Cornelius, DavidFitzgerald and Pedro Lewin Fischer (2007), and Jonathan Fox and GasparRivera-Salgado (2004), all point to the fact that, even within a given coun-try like Mexico, there are myriad, highly specific reasons as to why somepeople immigrate and others do not. As such, as expressed by JonathanFox and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, we must begin “rethinking Mexican mi-gration in terms of the diversity of different ethnic, gender, and regionalexperiences.” (45).

An important part of this rethinking must be the recognition that muchof what we term “immigration” is actually better thought of as a kind oftransnationalism, or transmigration. With this in mind in this paper I ex-amine “Taanxal kaajile’ ku chıimpoltaj maaya kaaj, ma’ je’ex tu lu’umile’,”a short story by Yukatek Maya author Felipe de Jesus Castillo Tzec thatwon the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan’s 2006 prize for narrative inMaya, and show how the text’s treatment of the immigrant experiencepoints toward the emergence of a transnational Maya identity through theproduction of transnational Maya communities.1 I begin with a discussionof these transnational communities, which I refer to as Dzan, Oregon andPortland, Yucatan, and provide background on contemporary transmigra-tion between Yucatan and the United States.2 Given that Maya identityin Yucatan is central to this article, in the following section I examineMaya identity in Yucatan, relating Castillo Tzec’s use of the word “Maya”to negotiations of indigenous identity since the conquest and the currentinternational Pan-Maya Movement. With these as a backdrop, in the fi-nal section I demonstrate how the transformative immigration experienceof the protagonist of Castillo Tzec’s story, Chucho Panucho, leads to theproduction of a new transnational Maya subjectivity. Having found thatMaya culture, history, and language are viewed differently in the UnitedStates than they are in Mexico, when Chucho Panucho returns to Yucatanhe recasts what it means to be Maya, using Western discourses of an-thropology and tourism to reimagine contemporary Mayas’ relationshipswith Mexican and Yucatecan cultures. As a transnational subject, he repro-duces the social space he found living among Maya in the United Statesand asserts a revalorized Maya identity in public, speaking Yukatek Maya

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in urban settings and engaging in Maya cultural practices. The story thusdemonstrates how the remittance of ideas and knowledge from the UnitedStates holds the potential to reshape social and cultural landscapes the wayfinancial remittances reshape economic ones.

At Home in Dzan, Oregon, or Portland, YucatanReflecting on the current state of the Central American Diaspora in the

United States, Arturo Arias has observed, “Los Angeles is the second-largest city of Guatemala and the second-largest Maya city . . . Todaythere are more K’anjobal Mayas in the United States than in Huehue-tenango, so the Feria de San Miguel, their major yearly festivity, has alsobeen displaced to California” (184-5). By identifying these people as bothGuatemalan and K’anjobal Maya, Arias adds nuance to our understand-ing of what constitutes Latino identity, an identity that he claims “is oftenconstructed through the abjection and erasure of the Central American-American. Members of this group are doubly marginalized, and therebyinvizibilized” (186). One must not overlook that within this formulationindigenous Central Americans such as the K’anjobal Maya in Arias’s arti-cle would in turn be triply marginalized insofar as culture would relegatethem to the margins of three different communities: being Latino in theUnited States; being Central American within the Latino community; andbeing indigenous within the larger Central American community. How-ever, I am not as concerned with exploring the “marginal” status Ariasascribes to such immigrants as I am interested in how indigenous immi-grants use transnational processes in ways that contest the very notionthat they, in fact, exist at the margins. Arias himself experiences this senseof non-marginality by attending the Feria de San Miguel that K’anjobalMayas hold in the United States. The act of holding the Feria in the UnitedStates claims that space for the articulation of K’anjobal Maya subjects,thus representing the efficacy of K’anjobal Maya agency in a “foreign en-vironment” by laying claim to that environment.

Along these lines, in this section I argue for the existence of a transna-tional Yukatek Maya space that I will refer to as Dzan, Oregon, or Portland,Yucatan. Throughout this paper Dzan, Oregon is the term I will use to de-scribe the Yukatek community created in the United States by the YukatekMaya immigrants in Castillo Tzec’s story, while Portland, Yucatan is thename I will give to the space that the story’s protagonist, Chucho Panucho,produces upon his return to Yucatan. The two spaces are inextricably in-tertwined and comprise a single transnational community that flows backand forth across the U.S-Mexico border.

Focusing on how “the every-day life practices of migrant workers pro-duce a space in Chicago that conjoins it irreversibly to Mexico,” NicholasDe Genova shows how the interconnectedness of transnational subjectsultimately results in, “A Chicago that belongs to Mexico, a Chicago thatcan be claimed for Latin America” which contradicts “the U.S. nation-state and U.S. imperialism [. . ..] at the very core—‘in the heartland’—in

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Chicago” (98). More recently, in her book Rancheros in Chicagoacan Mar-cia Farr has noted how the transnational communities that exist in SanJuanico and Chicago are imbricated such that every day discourse on bothsides of the border, from radio stations to conversations in the street, takesfor granted “the cohesiveness of Chicago and Michoacan” (59). Appro-priately, the third chapter in her book is titled, “The Spatial Context: SanJacinto, Illinois, and Chicago, Michoacan.” Following Farr, I feel that myprivileging of two municipalities, Dzan and Portland, instead of national-ities, Mexican or even Maya, underscores the fact that what we refer to astransnational processes are actually interpreted, negotiated, and in manyways arbitrated by individuals at the local level.

Arjun Appadurai claims, “local narratives and plots in terms of whichordinary life and its conflicts are read and interpreted become shot throughwith a subtext of interpretive possibilities that is the direct product of theworkings of the local imagining of broader regional, national, and globalevents” (153; itals in original). Dzan, Oregon and Portland, Yucatan arethus transnational spaces whose very production and reproduction reflectYukatek Maya agency, but these terms also reflect that these communitiesare translocal, local imaginings of the “interpretive possibilities” pointedout by Appadurai. Given late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centurytechnology’s ability to facilitate the movement of capital, information, andpeople around the globe, immigration no longer entails complete isola-tion from one’s home community, much less one’s home country. Livingin relation to more than one locality and to more than one nation-state,immigrants themselves are perhaps best seen as being “transmigrants,” acategory that Cristina Szanton Blanc, Linda Basch, and Nina Glick Schillerdefine as, “immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constantinterconnections across international borders and whose public identitiesare configured in relationship to more than one state” (“From Immigrantto Transmigrant” 48). Thus, the concept of transnationalism itself may bebest thought of in terms of its processes and their consequences (SzantonBlanc, et al., “Transnationalism, Nation-States, Culture,” 684). We can gobeyond these relationships to multiple nation-states, however, and assertthat transmigrants’ lives are also shaped by multiple localities. Recog-nizing the localized interpretation of immigration experiences and theextreme difficulty of drawing generalized conclusions from their study,Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey have suggested that the variablesdetermining emigration from Mexico to the U.S. should be “observed andanalyzed comparatively across communities” (4).

One of the foremost benefits of this shift in emphasis from nationallyoriented perspectives on transnationalism and immigration towards morenuanced, localized interpretations is that this shift entails a recognition ofthe agency exercised by individuals as well as acknowledges the varied,even contradictory nature of immigrants’ diverse experiences. With re-gard to the agency that local, transnational subjects have in the framing oftransnational processes, Michael Peter Smith theorizes the existence of a

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“transnational grassroots politics” in order “to establish a new point of de-parture for research on the globalization of cultural and political practicesproduced ‘from below’” (17). In other words, the shift in emphasis fromseeing the global as a hegemonic imposition to recognizing how local sub-jects selectively reproduce the global across myriad borders enables us tobetter understand the situation of transnational, transmigratory subjects.As noted by Michael Kearney in a paper on Mixtec transmigrants in theUnited States, these people occupy “‘new revolutionary subject position(s)’largely independent of the state” (qtd. in Szanton Blanc, et al., “Transna-tionalism, Nation-States, Culture” 684-5).3 Rachel Adler goes so far as tosuggest that, in the case of Yukatek Maya transmigrants, “National loyaltymay not be an important priority for many migrants whose allegiancestend to be much more localized” (“Human Agency” 185). With an accessto the global that circumvents national control, transnational subjects arecapable of interpreting the global in ways that privilege the local over thenational and justify social, economic, political, and cultural change.

It follows, then, as asserted by Akhil Gupta, that “Citizenship oughtto be theorized as one of the multiple subject positions occupied by peo-ple as members of diversely spatialized, partially overlapping or non-overlapping collectivities” (73). In the particular case of Mexico, thetransnational Mexican subject has been the object of scholarship, in vari-ous forms, since Manuel Gamio’s work in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Despitethe fact that the topic of the voting rights of Mexicans living abroad hasbeen debated since 1929, the possibility of this subject’s possessing a dualnationality remained unarticulated until 1995’s “Soberanıa del Plan Na-cional de Desarrollo” (Dıaz de Cossio 3; qtd. in Santamarıa Gomez andZackrison 74).4 Today, given that Mexican nationalist ideology links race,via Vasconcelos’s raza cosmica, with national identity, the Mexican gov-ernment actively seeks the re-incorporation of Mexicans living abroad(Santamarıa Gomez and Zackrison 74; Shain 681). Mexican presidentialcandidates have campaigned in the United States, and Mexicans living inthe United States now vote in presidential elections.

However, as implied by the formulations Dzan, Oregon, and Portland,Yucatan, we cannot construct a totalizing narrative of transmigration be-tween the United States and Mexico, or even a definitive narrative ofYukatek Maya transmigration. For the remainder of this section I will out-line the contours of transnational Yukatek Maya communities in the UnitedStates and Yucatan. Who are the people who populate this transnationalspace and how are their experiences of nationality, immigration, and trans-migration different from those of immigrants from other parts of Mexico?In order to reconcile the contradictory conclusions of scholarship dealingwith this topic, Durand and Massey identify four factors that determinethe face of emigration from a given locale at any given time. They are:the age of the migration stream itself; the workforce niche occupied bythose already in the U.S.; the position of the community within Mexico’spolitical economy; and the distribution and quality of the community’s

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land (Durand and Massey 33-4). However, these factors cannot accountfor the all reasons why people would choose to leave their homes, family,and friends, and immigrate to the United States (Adler, “Human Agency”172-73; Adler, Yucatecans 2; Fink).

Compared with the better-studied immigration patterns of other in-digenous peoples, and the rest of Mexico as a whole, immigration fromYucatan is a recent phenomenon. Emigration from both the state andpeninsula of Yucatan is predominantly Maya, meaning that one mustrecognize that these immigrants pertain to a “contingente migratorio cul-turalmente especıfico que conserva fuertes lazos simbolicos con su tierra ysu comunidad de origen” (Lewin and Guzman, “Migracion” 9). Althoughthere was limited Yukatekan involvement in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), the immigration of Yukatek Maya to the United States reflects abroader trend of immigration among Mexico’s indigenous populationswhich has taken shape predominantly during the last twenty-five years,reaching a peak during the 1990’s which it has maintained to the present(Loret de Mola 229; Lewin Fischer 4). Even so, according to Silvia TeranContreras’s study of immigration in Oxkutzkab, immigration to the UnitedState prior to the 1990’s still held the power to reshape local economies.Teran Contreras found that in Oxkutzkab, “El 55% de los campesinos ricoshan sido ellos mismos o sus hijos, braceros en Estados Unidos” (186; qtd. in Loretde Mola 229; itals in original).5

Following Durand and Massey, we can hypothesize that, due to therelative youth of the migration stream, Yukatek Maya tend to have moredifficulty obtaining work and documentation than those immigrants whopossess access to more established communities in the United States. De-spite the proximity of tourist havens Cancun, Playa del Carmen, and theever-popular Maya ruins, on the whole Yukatek Maya occupy a disad-vantaged niche within the economies of Mexico and the peninsula itself.In the state of Yucatan, for example, subsistence agriculture still playsa vital role in the survival of many rural families (Ramırez Carrillo 64).As Yucatan’s thin soil spreads ever thinner with increases in population,the peninsula’s agricultural situation means that immigration to internaland external labor markets is a necessity for many. Internal immigrantsto cities like the aforementioned tourist venues or the peninsular capitalsof Merida, Campeche, or Chetumal fare little better. Speaking of theseMaya immigrants, Pedro Bracamonte y Sosa makes the observation that,“El entorno urbano y turıstico no esta cumpliendo con las expectativas detrabajo y mejor renumeracion para muchos de los inmigrantes” (131).

External immigrants tend to head toward the west coast of the UnitedStates, principally to the cities of San Francisco and Portland, but by nomeans do they leave their cultural identities behind. Rather, while in theUnited States they produce a transnational space that in Castillo Tzec’sstory I call Dzan, Oregon. For example, Garance Burke cites one YukatekMaya living in San Francisco, Nic, as feeling that it is, “his duty to keepthe Maya identity alive in the United States and [he] makes a point of

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reminding younger Mayan immigrants of their ancestors’ cultural prac-tices” (346). To these ends, “He recounts stories about the planting cycleand the rain god, Chaac, as a way to keep his paisanos [. . .] connected totheir traditions” (Burke 346; itals in original). In her article on the evolvingtransnational practice of the traditional Yukatekan hetzmek in Oxkutzkab,Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola describes how this practice is part of theprocess through which Yukatekan immigrants “reproducen, re-crean y re-inventan su comunidad de origen en la de destino [. . .] de tal forma que losdos sitios se transforman en una sola comunidad transnacional” (226; italsin original). Similarly, Rachel Adler describes how transmigrants fromthe town of Kaal, a pseudonym, living in Dallas, Texas, frequently returnhome to participate in religious observances and important family events(Yucatecans 56; “Human Agency” 176). People even make use of camerasto photograph and to film events on both sides of the border that absentfamily members cannot attend (Adler, Yucatecans 77).

The relationship between immigration and ethnicity, however, is by nomeans straightforward or universal. On the one hand, Blair Lyman, Marıade Jesus Cen Montuy, and Edith Tejeda Sandoval find that there is a lack ofperceived discrimination against Mayas in the town of Tunkas, Yucatan;that Maya immigrants from Tunkas tend to identify with Latino culturewhile in the United States; that these Maya do not recreate a Maya Tunkasin the United States; and that immigrants who tend to speak Maya are alsothose most likely to resettle eventually in Yucatan. On the other hand, inan article arguing in favor of a public policy adapted to meet the specificneeds of the Yukatek Maya immigrant, Pedro Lewin and Estela Guzmanobserve that Yukatek Mayas abroad have begun organizing in order tosponsor cultural projects in the U.S. with the result that there has been anincrease in the number of Yukatek Maya immigrants who self-identify asMaya (“La polıtica publica”).

Finally, it is important to recognize that the remittances transnationalMayas send home from the United States are reshaping the Yukatekancountryside materially and ideologically. This is the transnational spacein Castillo Tzec’s story that I am calling Portland, Yucatan. In towns val-ued by anthropologists for their traditions one can observe large con-crete houses, many vacant, awaiting the return of their owners. In addi-tion, U.S.-based migrant clubs have sponsored community developmentprojects in Yucatan ranging from the expansion of a town’s waterworksto improvements to another town’s baseball field (“Reunion”). However,transmigrants also remit ideas and technology that offer Mayas the op-portunity to re-imagine how they see themselves, their communities, Yu-catan, and the Mexican state. Certainly, it remains to be seen if the above-mentioned migrant clubs will eventually organize along the lines of the bet-ter known and overtly political Frente Indıgena Oaxaquena Binacional (FIOB)which represents the interests of Oaxaca’s indigenous peoples in both theUnited States and Mexico. At present, some Yukatek Maya in the UnitedStates have identified with and been inspired to organize by Maya from

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Figure 1. Photo of Felipe de Jesus Castillo Tzec in his parents’ house inDzan, Yucatan, Mexico (October 2007). Photo taken by Author. C© Paul

Worley 2008.6

Central America who also live in the United States (Lewin and Guzman“La polıtica publica”). One therefore wonders if Guatemala’s Pan-Mayamovement may soon be among the things that Yukatek transmigrants re-mit to Yucatan. As in both Figure 1 and in Figure 2, transnational practicesdo offer the opportunity to reinterpret historical narratives and culturalidentities. In Figure 1, on the wall behind the Yukatek Maya author Fe-lipe de Jesus Castillo Tzec we see a tapestry of the Virgin de Guadalupe,the symbol of mestizaje par excellence, flanked by the flags of Mexicoand the United States. This graphic representation symbolically constructstransnational identity as cultural practice rather than presence in a partic-ular nation-state. We find a similar construction in figure 2, a photographof the sign at the entrance to the bilingual town of Santa Elena. A power-ful statement about the reciprocity between the transmigrant and his/hercommunity of origin, this sign narrates a radical, new vision of Maya his-tory in terms of its past, present, and future. Framing the town’s churchare Chichen Itza’s Pyramid of Kukulkan and San Francisco’s Golden GateBridge, all of which are presented as coexisting cultural reference pointsfor the town’s transnational subjects.

Being Maya in Yucatan, Oregon, and BeyondIn some ways a “Maya” identity is always already transnational

through Mayas’ negotiations with non-Maya cultures, and before proceed-ing with my analysis of Castillo Tzec’s story I would first like to explain

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Figure 2. Southern entrance to Santa Elena, Yucatan, Mexico(December 2007). Photo courtesy of Maria Rogal. C© Marıa Rogal 2008.

my use of the term “Maya” in this essay. First and foremost, “maaya” is theterm that the storyteller/narrator of Castillo Tzec’s story uses to denotethe indigenous peoples living in the Yucatan peninsula. This term appearsin the title in the reference to the “maaya kaaj” or “Maya people,” and thestory opens with the phrase “Le kuxtal yaan ti’ maaya kaaje’[. . .]” ‘The lifeof the Maya people [. . .]’ (Castillo Tzec 97; 113). In deference to the worldof the text, in this article I will also use “Maya” or “Yukatek Maya” to referto the Yucatan peninsula’s indigenous peoples. However, and as we willsee, reproduced across national borders in places like Dzan, Oregon, andtransformed in places like Portland, Yucatan, Maya identities are far fromthe essentialized entities of tourist brochures.

Having lived and studied in Yucatan, I recognize that there tends tobe a rift between the self-identifications of the peninsula’s indigenouspopulation and the identifications that non-indigenous anthropologists,archeologists, tourists, and cultural critics place upon them. Juan CastilloCocom, who claims that “For [him] to identify a Maya is far more difficultthan to identify the nationality of a tourist,” observes that on the peninsulapeople’s “identity is based on a sense of belonging to their communitiesrather than an ethnic group.” He goes on to assert that he identifies himself,“first as a Xocenpicheno because [he] grew up in Xocenpich, and secondly,[he] self-ascribe[s] to a Maya identity. But [his] Maya identity is a west-ern invention” (Castillo Cocom, “Maya Scenarios” 19). In fact, in anotheressay he states that he prefers to identify himself as “post-Maya” ratherthan “Maya” (Castillo Cocom, “Perdido” 124). With regard to the westernroots of Mayaness, elsewhere he argues quite forcefully that “cientıficossociales utilizaron cuatro disciplinas—historia, linguıstica, antropologıa, y

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arqueologıa—para crear la nocion de ‘la’ cultura maya” (Castillo Cocom,“El Quincux” 259-60). Certainly, the notion that there exists an essentialMaya culture permeates popular and academic discourses in, on, andabout the Maya area. One must acknowledge the validity of Castillo Co-com’s statement as well as the challenges it issues to the production of“knowledge” about non-western others. In Ueli Hostettler’s words, wemust “ir mas alla del uso omni-comprensivo, distorsionado y deformadordel membrete ‘maya’ que impone una historia etnica unificada sobre genteque no ha pensado necesariamente de sı misma como ‘maya’ ni en elpasado ni en el presente” (134).

So, we may ask, how do “Mayas” in Yucatan refer to themselves? BothQuetzil Castaneda and Peter Hervik have written thorough explicationsof the topic. For his part, Castaneda offers that terms of self-identification,“estan basados en criterios que cortan a traves de clase, genero, y lenguajemas no la etnicidad. Entonces un hombre ‘maya’ podrıa ser maya, peromas probablamente un masehual, hostil, humilde, mayero, catrın, y mestizo”(19; itals in original). Here “mestizo” differs from how it is used in otherparts of Mexico and Latin America insofar as, “una mujer ‘maya’ es unamestiza porque se viste ‘como’ una maya, habla maya, y vive la ‘culturamaya’ [. . .] cuando una mujer yucateca ‘blanca’ se viste ‘como’ una maya(es decir, como una mestiza) para eventos publicos formales, ella no esmaya ni mestiza (19; itals in original; see also Hervik 50-3). That is, atleast in some instances, one may harness symbols of Mayaness withoutappearing, wanting to identify, or being identified as “Maya” or “mestizo.”As for the origin of “mestizo” meaning “indigenous,” according to Hervikthe use of “mestizo” to identify a Maya person in Yucatan dates to thenineteenth century. “The contemporary meaning of the term ‘mestizo’ insouthern Yucatan began in the decades after 1853, when the peace accordof the Caste War was signed; adding to the separation between ‘pacified’and ‘fierce’ rebels i.e., between ‘mestizos’ and masewales” (Hervik 50).

What are we then to make of a short story, written in Yukatek Maya, thatinterpellates a “Maya” audience and constructs its narrator and protago-nist as “Maya”? With regard to Guatemala’s Pan-Maya movement, KayWarren observes, “Maya skepticism of the ethics of foreign researcherscoexists with their recognition of the utility of foreign research for Mayanation building. Mayanists are interested in foreign scholarship that sup-ports Maya revitalization and are strategic in their appropriations of West-ern essentialism for their own ends” (21). So, even if we agree with CastilloCocom that “Maya unity” began as a formulation of Western social sci-entists, indigenous intellectuals have nonetheless reappropriated the term“Maya” from the Western academy and used it to serve as an ethnic, lin-guistic, and racial identifier for indigenous peoples living in the MayaArea. Certainly, as noted by Allan Burns, “Yucatan is often thought of asperipheral to new Maya political movements, especially those that haveled to violence in either Guatemala or Chiapas in the past decades. ButYucatan has a history of a strong Maya identity, and even today Yucatan

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is something of a ‘sleeping giant’ of Maya identity” (378). Ironically, theselines come from an article occasioned by Burns’s being “asked to teach acourse on Maya language to a group of Maya schoolteachers in 1996” (377).So, given that Yucatan’s indigenous peoples tend to identify more with alocality like Castillo Cocom’s Xocenpich or as being “mestizo” rather than“maaya,” we can situate Castillo Tzec’s use of the word “maaya” as par-ticipating in a broader project of Pan-Maya consciousness raising throughwhich Maya activists encourage others to self-identify as Maya. If Yucatanis a “sleeping giant” of Maya identity, it would seem that, as evidenced byBurns’s course and Castillo Tzec’s work, the “giant” is waking up.

Thus I would argue that, at least on some level, it would seem oddto claim that Maya nationalism (Pan-Maya or otherwise), to paraphraseErnest Gellner, invents a nation where one does not previously exist (168).Correctly or incorrectly, and as alluded to by Castillo Cocom, social sci-entists around the globe seem to agree that there are such things as Mayacultures, languages, and peoples. Moreover, as noted by Warren, membersof the Pan-Maya movement cite this wealth of information in their ownarguments for the existence of a “Maya” culture. For example, JakaltekMaya Victor Montejo references the “material remains throughout theMaya region” and linguists’ claims that there “was a unique proto-Mayanlanguage” to assert, “The cultural patterns that contemporary Maya shareconverge in one great Maya tradition, and thus, geographically, we canspeak of a distinct Maya culture in the Mesoamerican cultural area” (17).Therefore Maya nationalism is better thought of as a consciousness rais-ing movement rather than as the “invention” of a Maya identity by Mayaactivists given that, by using foreign research as a tool for nation building,Maya nationalism appropriates an entire corpus of “scientific” knowledgeabout the Maya world. In many ways this appropriation represents thereappropriation of Maya culture previously alienated by non-Mayas inso-far as, beginning in the sixteenth century, non-Mayas have stolen and/ordestroyed innumerable Maya cultural objects and other aspects of Mayaculture.

Therefore, by no means am I asserting that “Mayaness” is simply aterm borrowed from non-Maya academics. On the contrary, I agree withEmilio del Valle Escalante that “Los discursos y nacionalismos mayas,especialmente aquellos que asignan un rol capital a la cosmovision maya[. . .], se situan en un nuevo terreno epistemologico y polıtico” (39). In otherwords, the assertion of a “Maya” identity, despite the fact that this identitymay have aspects that draw upon the work of non-Maya academics, is alsothe assertion of a Maya political, social, intellectual, and cultural agencythat privileges Maya worldviews.

In fact, when we take a “long view” of Maya culture in Yucatan, wefind that such borrowings have long been a key element of political andcultural survival. For example, the Yukatek Maya author of the Histo-ria y cronica de Chac-Xulub-Chen (1769?), Ah Nakuk Pech, claims to bea “descendiente de los antiguos hidalgos conquistadores de esta tierra”

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(Pech 19). Restall points out that, in the original Yukatek Maya in whichthe text was composed, the author’s actual words are “yax hidalgo con-cixtador” (Maya 109). In other words, although writing in Yukatek, theauthor appropriates the Spanish categories “noble” and “conqueror” inorder to legitimate his own prior claims to power in Yucatan. It is worthnoting that the author does not self-identify as “Maya,” and according toRestall he even uses the term “Maya” to denote commoners living in thearea (Restall “Etnogenesis” 38).

We find a similar negotiation of indigenous identity among the penin-sula’s Maya writers and intellectuals in twentieth-century Yucatan, a con-text in which, “el hibridismo cultural en la region ha hecho que los mayashabitantes de [Merida] incorporen a su matriz cultural elementos prove-nientes de la sociedad dominante, y los utilicen en la lucha por revindicarsu identidad etnica” (Leirana, Conjurando 74).7 One begins to see an up-surge in Yukatek Maya literary activism in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s,a period of time roughly corresponding to the coming of age of a number ofYukatek Maya speakers who had worked with or been trained by anthro-pologists, archeologists, and linguists working in the area. One can recall,for example, Jose Tec Poot (1949-1985), the relationships that he had withresearchers like Alfredo Barrera Vazquez (1900-1980), and how he usedthese in forwarding the cause of Yucatan’s indigenous peoples. As noted byCristina Leirana Alcocer, such formal training and connections with Mex-ico’s dominant political and social mores “no les impide[n] concebirse a sımismos como herederos de una cultura distinta; como descendientes de losmayas del clasico” (Conjurando 78). Indeed, through his involvement in anumber of cultural organizations Tec Poot was a driving force in a numberof Yukatek Maya cultural projects, among them the standardization of theYukatek Maya alphabet in 1984 (Orilla Canche 15-22). He was also the firstperson to propose the creation of Yukatek Maya-language literary work-shops in 1982, workshops which lead to collaboration with the Mexicanwriter Carlos Montemayor and the publication of the Montemayor-editedseries Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e, Contemporary Maya Writing (Leirana, “Laliteratura” 63).

If there is one thing that the linguistic and literary activism of the early1980’s makes clear, it is that the men and women involved in these projectssaw themselves as Maya who are the cultural heirs to the Maya traditionsdescribed in the writings of Western academics. To cite but two examples,both an early document seeking the standardization of Yukatek Mayawriting from 1981 and the official document promoting the 1984 alphabethave the Maya god credited with the invention of writing, Itzamna, ontheir front covers (“Declaracion”; “Alfabeto”). The 1981 “Declaracion dela ortografıa practica y morfologıa del sustantivo del maya-yucateco” takesthis mode of representation one step further by including the glyphs froma stele at the Maya ruins of Quirigua on its back cover. Both Itzamnaand glyphic writing are easily recognizable as symbols of Mayaness and,as Circe Sturm has pointed out with regard to the use of glyphs in the

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literature of Guatemala’s Pan-Maya movement, whether or not peoplecan actually read the glyphs is irrelevant. Rather, “All Maya, includingboth peasant farmers and urban-based intellectual elites, ‘read’ the glyphssymbolically, which occurs regardless of an individual’s ability to deciphera literal message” (Sturm 118).

The 1981 “Declaracion” also states that it seeks constructive criticismfrom “nuestros hermanos y profesionales que se dedican al estudio de lamaya,” so that “todos unidos de la mano podamos reinvindicar nuestracultura que ha sido en parte destruida por los colonizadores,” later listingas one of its objectives, “escribir en lengua maya la verdadera historiade esta civilizacion” (12; 26). It is no coincidence that during this sameperiod Yukatek Mayas trained as “promotores culturales” were publish-ing monographs, resenas, and cuadernos de cultura popular through theirinvolvement with Mexican governmental organizations like the DireccionGeneral de Culturas Populares (DGCP) and the Secretaria de EducacionPublica (SEP). Many of the same people involved in the production ofthese Maya-language works later published volumes in the aforemen-tioned Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e series.

With regard to the present, there are many notable Yukatek Mayacultural organizations. Given the space allotted me I can only mention afew of them. La Academia de la Lengua Maya sponsors a number of eventsand classes in and around the capital of the state of Yucatan, Merida.The Taller de Calkinı (formed 1992), whose members have included suchnotable writers as Briceida Cuevas Cob and Waldemar Noh Tzec, haspublished several collective volumes and literary magazines (Leirana, “Laliteratura” 83-99). One also thinks of Mayaon, an organization foundedin 1990 by bilingual schoolteachers, one of whom has directly articulatedthe group’s identity as a political organization (Leirana, “La literatura”100-117). With regard to these objectives, in 1994 the group publishedthe Yukatek Maya-language “Declaracion de Valladolid” in the Diario deYucatan, a document that advocates more government support of Mayalanguage in the region (Ligorred, “U mayathanoob” 250).

Finally, INDEMAYA (Instituto para el Desarrollo de la Cultura Mayadel Estado de Yucatan) deserves a special mention. Not only does thisorganization employ Felipe de Jesus Castillo Tzec, but it has also soughtto engage Yukatek Maya living in the United States. Their most recentcultural awareness campaign, “Wey yano’one’” (Aquı estamos), has beenvisible throughout the state and takes as one of its slogans “U ch’i’ibalmaaya kaaje’ kuxa’an ichilo’on” ‘La cultura maya vive en nosotros.’ Mostrecently, in September 2009 INDEMAYA sponsored Yukatek Maya cul-tural events in Los Angeles and San Francisco and starting within the pastfew years has begun to offer a number of services to immigrants and theirfamilies. It has even published a Guıa del migrante yucateco that seeks tomeet the needs of those traveling to the United States from Yucatan. Inother words, as an institution INDEMAYA has begun responding to theneeds of transnational Mayas who live on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico

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border, in effect bestowing official recognition not only on transnationalYukatek Maya subjects but also upon the existence of transnational com-munities like Dzan, Oregon, and Portland, Yucatan.

Importing Portland, Yucatan: Transnational Maya Culturein “Taanxal kaajile’ [. . .]”

Lynn Stephen argues that scholars should “look beyond the nationalin order to understand the complete nature of what people are movingor ‘transing’ between,” favoring an analysis that recognizes the myriadof non-national linguistic, cultural, racial, and ethnic borders immigrantscross (Transborder 23). Following Stephen, in this section I focus on YukatekMaya transmigration to highlight how, in Castillo Tzec’s story, the pro-tagonist’s “transing” of the border between the United States and Mexicoenables his revision of Maya culture’s role within the Mexican nation-state.More so than the economic remittances usually associated with immigra-tion, the Maya transmigrant’s reception and rearticulation of Western im-ages of Mayaness, once remitted to Yucatan, open up the possibility forthe re-articulation of the Maya citizen-subject and the production of newsocial space for Maya participation within the Mexican nation. This newMaya citizen-subject is transnational insofar as his appropriations of U.S.-based knowledge circumvent Mexico’s institutional state apparatus. Thespace he produces upon his return to Mexico, what I call Portland, Yucatan,is imbricated with the Yukatek Maya community in the United States,Dzan, Oregon. These are highly localized manifestations of a transnationalculture, and the very existence of these spaces points to how the prac-tices, processes, and knowledges of transnational Maya subjects subvertthe impositions of dominant Mexican, U.S., and global cultures.

Chucho’s childhood constructs him as an archetype of Maya masculin-ity. Every morning he accompanies his father to the milpa on horseback,carrying his “chuuj yeetel jump’eel chan paawo’ tu’ux ku ts’aik u nukul umeyaj yeetel u k’eyem” (“calabazo and his little hunting sack where he putshis work tools and his pozole”; Castillo Tzec 97, 113).8 Within the phys-ical space of the milpa Chucho learns what it means to be Maya in Mayaterms, learning how to measure the land, make offerings to the gods, prayfor rain, in short “biix kajlik maaya kaajo’ yeetel u yuuntsilo’ob” (“howthe Maya community relates to its gods”; Castillo Tzec 98, 114). RecallingArjun Appadurai’s comments on the production of local subjects and lo-cality, we can observe that Chucho’s participation in ceremonies withinthe physical space of the milpa thus situates him as an actor within the ma-terial production of the Maya community and within that community’slarger social network (179-180).

Despite Chucho’s Maya upbringing, he engages in border crossingfrom the time he is a young boy. Upon entering school at age six, Chuchocomes into contact with dominant Yucatecan and Mexican cultures andfinds that, in order to participate in them, he must cross a linguistic border.A monolingual speaker of Yukatek Maya, Chucho cannot understand his

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monolingual Spanish-speaking teacher. This state of mutual unintelligibil-ity relegates the young Maya to a series of failing grades and, because ofthe explicit connections made between the Spanish language and success,Maya language and failure, he begins to question the value of Mayaness.He even asks himself, “ba’axten ma’ sak wıinkeni, ba’axten ma’ sıijenichil jump’eel kuchkabal kastlan u t’aani’, tumen letio’be jach noj ba’alo’”(“why aren’t I white, why wasn’t I born into a Spanish-speaking family,since they are better [than we are]”; Castillo Tzec 100, 116). Even thoughChucho achieves fluency in Spanish, eventually becoming the best studentat his primary and secondary schools, he finds that being Maya makes himalways already inferior to his classmates. In primary school his classmateswonder, “ba’axten ma’ t-chukpaachtik u na’ate’ Chuchoa’, tso’okole letiechan k’aaxi paal” (“why they were not as smart as Chucho, since he was achild from the woods”; Castillo Tzec 100, 116).

Chucho’s relationship to the Spanish language and the dominant cul-tures it represents merits special commentary as it contradicts popularMexican and Latin American ideologies that project Spain’s cultural legacyas a unifying factor among the region’s different racial and ethnic groups.As put forth by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, “Espana nos abrazaa todos; es, en cierta manera, nuestro lugar comun” (21; itals in original).However, the rejection Chucho suffers at the hands of his classmates echoesFrantz Fanon’s comments on the colonizer’s language never being any-thing more than a mask, as well as Fernando Garces’s claim that, no matterhow eloquent or well-educated, the mere fact of a given speaker’s indi-geneity means that his speech is always valued less than that of mestizo andcriollo citizens (Fanon 36; Garces 150). These statements do not mean thatindigenous people cannot or do not rightly claim Spanish as a legitimatepart of their cultural and linguistic heritage, as does the Nahua poet Na-talio Hernandez in his essay “El espanol tambien es nuestro-Noihquitoaxcacaxtilan tlahtol.” The social practice of the Spanish language, however, isnuanced and bears out the reality of the situations described by Fanonand Garces, as well as the bare necessity of Hernandez’s emphatic dec-laration. Although an indigenous person may indeed claim a right to theSpanish language, and even though dominant ideology may assert thedesirability of Spanish-speaking indigenous peoples, these very peopleare frequently denied equal status with regard to the use of Spanish. EarlShorris recounts a story, told to him by the Yukatek Maya writer and in-tellectual Miguel May May, in which a middle class Maya enters a cardealership to purchase a new truck. According to May May, “He waswell dressed, but clearly Maya. The dealer offered him ten pesos to washa truck” (Shorris). Presented with a Spanish speaking Maya who wantsto purchase a vehicle, the dealer falls back on racial stereotypes madepossible by a willed misunderstanding of the Maya’s Spanish. Maya arepoor and cannot speak Spanish well, therefore the man cannot possiblymean he wants to purchase a truck; he must want to be paid to washone.

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Within the story this linguistic hierarchy becomes more explicitly racial-ized when Chucho goes to the city to study for his bachillerato, showinghow moving between rural and urban environments entails a crossingof racial and cultural borders. Learning Chucho was “from a pueblo,”his new classmates “jo’op’ u ya’alal tie’ ke k’aaxi maak, chan indio, waamaasewaal” (“began to say that he was from the hills, a little Indian ora masewal”; Castillo Tzec 100-101, 117). This heightened sense of racialdifference parallels Chucho’s introduction to Maya culture’s place withinthe larger nation. Pushing him off to the side during most activities, Chu-cho’s classmates seek him out during the yearly competition to build altarsfor Janal Pixan ‘Food of the Spirits,’ the Maya Dıa de los Muertos. Chuchoknows how to make the altars “[ba’axten] ti’ letie’ tsola’an tumen u nool”‘[because] his grandfather had taught him how,’ and “cheen yoolal letieba’lo’o’oba’, ku beychaja’ u najaltiko’ob le ketlan ku yuchul ku k’imbesajletie ‘Janal Pixano’o’” (“only because of this [Chucho’s class] won the JanalPixan competition”; Castillo Tzec 101, 117). Within the context of the na-tional school system and its imaginary, Maya language does not transmitknowledge, properly speaking, and Chucho internalizes this lesson at ayoung age. It is a bitter irony, then, that his Mayaness and knowledge ofMaya culture, the very things his classmates use to stigmatize him, alsorepresent the only grounds upon which Chucho has positive interactionswith them. Within the context of the yearly Janal Pixan competition, how-ever, regional and national cultures reproduce Maya knowledge and prac-tices as folklore. Celebrated but never engaged as a living cultural product,these practices represent, in Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s formulation, “alien-ated culture.” Chucho, the living embodiment of this knowledge and thesepractices, finds his avenue of participation within regional and nationalcultures discreetly predefined. The rituals that gave positive content to hisMaya subjectivity define him negatively within the nation as their meaningin regional and national contexts is predicated on their recontextualizedreproduction. The Janal Pixan altar competition does not memorialize thedead and reinforce intergenerational communal ties. Rather, it domesti-cates the Maya, Maya culture, and Maya knowledge by displaying thesein a competition designed for the consumption of non-Mayas. Moreover,this is a competition in which non-Mayas are the ultimate judges of whatconstitutes the “best” representation of Mayaness.

As is the case with many indigenous students, Chucho, although aca-demically successful, leaves school and returns to working in the campoupon completion of his degree. In describing these actions, the text placeshim within a Maya cultural continuum by stating that he still performsthe rituals once performed by his father and grandfather. He also contin-ues to carry his calabazo (Castillo Tzec 117). Repeating Chucho’s earlierexperiences within the semi-urban milieu of the pueblo, the townspeoplemurmur that he “ke jach indio, ke k’aaxi maak’” ‘[is] a real Indian, [is]from the woods,’ and only come near him to listen to his grandfather’sstories (Castillo Tzec 101, 117-118). Whereas Chucho first confronted the

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schoolhouse as racialized space when he was six years old, now partici-pation in larger non-Maya, Yucatecan and Mexican regional and nationalspaces openly defines itself, via the townspeople’s murmuring, as nega-tively identifying “lo indio” with the countryside. After Chucho refuses tojoin his friends who work in cities like Cancun, Cozumel, or Merida, hisfriends respond by saying that he “mix bik’ıin u xu’ulul u indioi’” (“wouldnever shed his Indianness”; Castillo Tzec 102, 118). As his friends’ com-ments imply the capacity of such urban centers to cleanse one of one’sIndianness, we can infer that Chucho’s friends, already integrated intothe circuits of internal immigration, have undergone this process of de-Indianization themselves. We cannot, however, speak of this process asbeing totalizing. If the earlier Janal Pixan competition expresses a desireto domesticate Yucatan’s Maya others, the fact that people, a number ofwhom would be de-Indianized Mayas, gather around Chucho when hetells stories conveys an ambivalent local internalization of this dominantideology. The stories are living cultural products for the storyteller, Chu-cho, but frayed ties to a collective past for at least some of those in hisaudience.

Despite his reservations about going to work in Yucatan’s regionalmarkets, Chucho decides to go to the United States, “cheen ba’ax u k’aatletie’ ku k’ajoolt u laak kaajo’, tia’al u xu’ulu’ ya’ala ti’ ke k’aaxi maak”(“the only thing he wanted was to know other places so people wouldquit saying he was from the hills”; Castillo Tzec 102-103, 119). As unlikelyas this reasoning may sound, it must not be forgotten that economics isonly one of many reasons people come to the United States from Mexico.In Chucho’s case, the physical distance of the United States from Yucatantogether with the radical cultural difference such a distance implies wouldseem to promise the de-Indianization process par excellence. After all, ifthose Maya who immigrate internally to Yucatan’s commercial centersare no longer looked down upon because of their worldly experience andchange in economic standing, factors which conspire to make them ‘non-Indian,’ it would follow that the experience of international immigrationand the economic opportunities it entails must demonstrate, even moreconclusively, one’s non-Maya, non-indigenous identity.

Upon arriving in the United States however, Chucho finds Mayanessto be a mark of prestige. Moreover, he finds himself living in the transna-tional Yukatek Maya community that I call Dzan, Oregon. He obtains ajob in a restaurant because the restaurant’s owner, familiar with visions ofthe Maya and Mayaness constructed by the discourses of anthropology,archeology, and tourism, wants to know more about Maya culture. Heeven gives Chucho a job with the explicit condition that Chucho, “yaan awa’ak ti’ [letie’] u tsikbalilo’ a kaajal, tumen jach utsi t’aan [u] [y]ojeltik,jach no’oja’an u tukul yeetel u kuxtal [u] ch’i’ibal [Chuchoe’]” (“has to tellhim the history of the Maya people, because he was interested in know-ing more, and the [Maya] had always had a lot of knowledge”; CastilloTzec 105, 121). This moment, “yaax u yu’ubik u chıimpoltaj u ch’i’ibalo’”

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‘the first time Chucho had heard someone respect his people,’ producesan intellectual crisis in Chucho similar to the one he experienced at school(Castillo Tzec 105, 121). Only now Chucho finds Mayaness to be a valuablesource of what Pierre Bourdieu terms symbolic capital. Whereas his pre-vious experiences led him to question the value of Mayaness and to wishhe had been born into a Spanish-speaking family, he now asks “ba’axtenti’ kaajale’ miix maak a’alik waa k’a’anan u kuxtan maaya kaaj?” (“whydoes no one in my country teach us the importance of the Maya peo-ple?”; Castillo Tzec 105, 121). He thus no longer questions the value ofMaya culture in itself but the nature of its relationship with the Mexicannation-state.

This shift represents the moment in which Chucho, appropriating therestaurant owner’s discourse, begins to reassert Maya social agency andenact the decolonization of Maya history while in this transnational Mayacommunity. He speaks Maya in public and tells Maya stories to his cowork-ers at the restaurant. While previously ashamed of being Maya, Chuchonow feels pride in his heritage and is pained that he does not know morethan he does. Although limited to the stories, bombas, and histories told tohim by his grandfather, Chucho finds these re-valued, if not re-signified,as he relates them to his fellow employees.9 Maya history and Chucho’scapacity to embody it now have a positive social value. Despite Chu-cho’s recognition that Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Dzibilchaltun, are “cheenletie saak wıiniko’ob ku tal xiimbalo’ [. . .] waa letie ayik’al maako’obo’”‘only for tourists [literally white people] and rich people [. . .] to walkaround,’ he now sees the irony of a situation in which “keex tumen waa[u] ch’i’ibalo’ beetmile’, ma’ tu beytu’ cha’abal [u] wookli’, waa ma’ yaan[u] bo’ol” (“even though [his] ancestors built them, [he] can’t enter unless[he] pays”; Castillo Tzec 104, 120-1). Via the anthropological, archeologi-cal, and tourist discourses represented by the restaurant owner, Chuchoconstructs a decolonized Maya history. The exercise of such agency wouldseem to go beyond Bonfil Batalla’s categories of cultural control (pro-pio, apropiado, enajenado, impuesto) insofar as in the construction of thishistory Chucho reappropriates alienated knowledge about the Maya pro-duced for the consumption of non-Maya others. That is, the alienation ofMaya culture is never completed as Chucho, like the Pan-Maya activistVictor Montejo cited above, mobilizes these knowledges according to hisown political, social, and cultural agenda. Later on, in a passage ripe withirony, the narrator describes how Chucho learns the story of ChristopherColumbus, concluding that, given the explorer’s mistakes, “To’one’ ma’indioi’, to’one’ maaya’on” (“We are not Indians, we are Maya”; CastilloTzec 106, 123). With this statement Chucho directly challenges the primacyof Western historical narratives, re-framing them from a Maya perspec-tive and relocating historical ignorance with those who continue to use theword “indio” to describe Maya peoples.

As these acts of historical decolonization and their transnational lo-cale suggest, the new Maya citizen-subject Chucho embodies presents a

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radical re-envisioning of Mayaness, one that confounds most represen-tations of the Maya and immigrants to the United States. In the UnitedStates he meets many other Maya with whom he speaks Yukatek Mayain public. Chucho notes that no one laughs at them, and that in the U.S.people like that “keex naach yaano’ob ti’ u kaajalo’obe’, ma’ tu tubsko’obu ch’i’ibalo’” (“even though they [Chucho and other Maya] were far awayfrom home, they did not forget who they were”; Castillo Tzec 106, 122). Inthis situation language loses something of the qualities usually associatedwith it in essentialist constructions of identity. While Yukatek or any otherindigenous language is certainly an indicator of identity, the image of agroup of Maya in the United States speaking Yukatek and discussing theirlanguage with their gringo coworkers presents the Maya subject’s implicitmulti-lingual condition. After all, given the relative lack of emphasis onsecond language education in the United States, we can assume that thesediscussions about Maya culture and language take place in English orSpanish. Thus, languages usually considered to be colonial or imperial areplaced at the service of one of the languages they seek to colonize. Theemergent transnational Maya subject is multi-lingual, and yet insists onthe importance of Maya language to those who do not speak it.

A transmigrant who returns to Yucatan, Chucho remits this new subjectposition to the peninsula, thereby signaling the creation of the transna-tional Yukatek Maya community of Portland, Yucatan. With his savingsChucho purchases land and a truck, but he still carries his calabazo, po-zole, and green chili with him when he goes to work. He also continuesto perform the agricultural ceremonies taught to him by his father andgrandfather. These private and collective acts parallel the findings of Car-ole Nagengast and Michael Kearney insofar as these scholars, writing onMixtec migration, find that “one effect of migration is to revitalize someof the symbolic and collective expressions of commune identity” such thatthe subsequent upsurge in ethnic consciousness “is beginning to under-mine some of the results of [the Mixtecs’] centuries-long oppression” (87).However, Chucho’s purchase of the truck and the land prevents thesefrom signifying a return to an idealized, ahistorical tradition. BorrowingPartha Chatterjee’s words, we can say that Chucho is an active producerof modernity. “La idea de la modernidad maya,” as noted by QuetzilCastaneda, “no excluye la continuidad de la cultura, o sea de la logica cul-tural, las motivaciones, las formas, los estilos, los modos de pensar, y elcomportamiento” (22; itals in original). Elements of Mayaness usually seenas essentialist (language, the calabazo and the pozole, the agricultural cer-emonies) exist alongside Chucho’s new truck. This situation, however, isnot an example of the “paradoxes” produced by mechanisms of transcul-turation or hybridity. Rather, it represents that fact that, as Peter Hervikfound during his research in the town of Oxkutzkab, the Maya do not livein a world fraught with such paradoxes so much as our Western models ofcultural interpretation are unable to cope with Maya models of “ordinarylife” (171).

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In addition, Portland, Yucatan becomes a space in which Chucho assertsthe viability and relevance of the Maya citizen-subject to the Mexican na-tion. When he goes into the city Chucho stops switching into Spanish andinsists on speaking Maya, not caring if others stare at him because “letie’jach ki’imak yool tumen maaya u ch’i’ibal” (“he is proud to be Maya”;Castillo Tzec 108, 125). As he did in the United States, through this sym-bolic act Chucho appropriates public space for the articulation of a Mayasubject while giving new meaning to what it means to be Maya. Chucho’sappropriation of this space and his production of Portland, Yucatan rep-resent what Michael Peter Smith calls “transnational grassroots politics.”First, Chucho’s appropriation of this space claims the city for the Maya,connecting the rural with the urban while simultaneously reinforcing theties between Maya living in Yucatan and those living abroad. The very actof speaking Maya in an urban setting thus upsets dominant portrayals ofthe Maya and Maya culture insofar as these images, like the school childrenat the beginning of the story, tend to identify indigeneity with a lack ofeducation and a rural environment. Second, and as I have already touchedupon, the transnational space Portland, Yucatan facilitates the repatriationof Maya knowledge previously appropriated by non-Mayas. Having feltpride in the esteem given to Maya culture abroad, Chucho returns toMexico with a keen sense of “for whom” knowledge about the Maya isproduced, bringing that knowledge and its discourses back to Yucatanand placing them at the service of the Maya community. Finally, the prac-tices of Portland, Yucatan reconfigure Mayas’ relationships with centers ofknowledge in both the United States and Mexico. Chucho does not pas-sively receive discourses about the Maya constructed by anthropologists,archeologists, linguists, and tourists. Instead, he uses these to reinterpretcontemporary social conditions and the relationships Mayas have with theMexican nation-state and global culture. In other words, he is not thesedisciplines’ passive object of study but a subject capable of rearticulat-ing, interpreting, and using these disciplines and their discourses aboutthe Maya for his own ends. Chucho thus uses these transnational prac-tices to exercise a political, social, and cultural agency that flows backand forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, contesting dominant representa-tions of the Maya on a global scale while nonetheless doing so at the locallevel.

ConclusionIn theorizing the transnational community Dzan, Oregon and Portland,

Yucatan, describing the transnational practices of Yukatek Maya transmi-grants and how these practices are treated in this story by Felipe de JesusCastillo Tzec, I do not intend to gloss over the extreme difficulties of cross-ing the U.S.-Mexico border, the daily struggles of transmigrants in theUnited States, or the stressful effect that transmigration has on many fam-ilies. Works like Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

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and The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea and Enrique’s Journey bySonia Nazario demonstrate the harsh realities many people face in their at-tempts to reach the United States. Castillo Tzec has authored another story,“Juntuul maak k’eexu tukul taak’ıin” ‘A Man Who only Thought aboutMoney,’ unpublished at present, in which the protagonist journeys to theUnited States to provide for his family but forgets about them and movesin with a woman he meets there. HIV positive and abandoned by his loverhe returns to Yucatan, infecting his wife with HIV and ultimately orphan-ing his children. In another Maya immigration story from Yucatan told bySixto Canul, the protagonist returns to the peninsula but insists on speak-ing English. Even here, though, this situation does not mean the loss ofMaya language or culture as the boy’s mother hits him with a stick and hequickly remembers his Maya. None of these narratives, however, are anymore representative of the transmigrant experience as a whole than is thestory under consideration here, Castillo Tzec’s “Taanxal kaajile’ [. . .].” Aspreviously stated, transmigratory processes are locally determined in boththe United States and Mexico, and each transmigrant possesses a uniquestory arising from unique circumstances. One can no more claim that thetransnational subject presented in Castillo Tzec’s “Taanxal kaajile’[. . .]” isrepresentative of all Yukatek transmigrants any more than one could as-sert that this transnational Maya subject or the transnational spaces I havecalled Dzan, Oregon and Portland, Yucatan are merely fiction.

Castillo Tzec’s story emphasizes the space of social, cultural, and politi-cal agency that can be and is created by Mayas’ transing of the U.S.-Mexicoborder. I have called this space Dzan, Oregon when referring to the man-ifestation of this space in the United States and Portland, Yucatan whenreferring this space’s being produced in Mexico. The rearticulations ofMaya identities produced through these transnational activities are nei-ther inauthentic nor non-traditional. Following Stephen’s argument that“Conflict and competition imply that indigenous ethnicity is part of a con-tinual process of negotiation with other ethnic groups and with those whohold political and economic power,” we must recognize the potent rolecontemporary transmigration plays in these ongoing negotiations (“TheCreation” 18). As seen in Castillo Tzec’s “Taanxal kaajile’[. . .],” contempo-rary indigenous immigration does not mean the disappearance of Mayaculture, languages, or identities but can serve to reinforce these very things.Crossing multiple linguistic, cultural, and political borders, the transna-tional Maya subject demonstrates Mayas’ capacity to harness the forcesof globalization in order to revise Maya history and Mayas’ relationshipto the Mexican nation-state, and it remains to be seen how the economicdownturn of the past year will affect these transnational communities.However, given that these communities themselves came about as a re-sponse to economic hardships, one can imagine that, similarly, the currentcrisis will be dealt with in a way that emphasizes Maya agency in Mayas’ongoing negotiations with global forces.

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Endnotes1 The title translates as “Maya Culture is Valued in other Lands, UnlikeHere.” Translations from Yukatek Maya are my own.2 In the interest of readability, I will italicize these terms throughout.3 This quotation appears in an article summarizing papers presented at aWenner-Gren Foundation Conference. Michael Kearney’s paper was titled,“Transnationalism: From Hyphen-Nation and Profannation to Transna-tion.”4 I have been unable to locate a copy of the original article by Dıaz deCossio.5 I have been unable to locate the original article by Teran Contreras.6 Given the highly politicized nature of the subject of this article, I haveblackened out the author’s face from the photograph.7 The sheer number of people involved in this movement and the spaceallotted to me here prevent me from treating this topic with the atten-tion it deserves. I direct those interested in the topic to Francesc LigorredPerramon’s U mayathanoob ti dzib: Las voces de la escritura and his Mayasy colonials: Apuntes etnoliterarios para el Yucatan del Siglo XXI; as well astwo equally important works by Cristina Leirana Alcocer, Conjurando elsilencio: Algunos aspectos de la diversidad literaria and her licenciatura thesis“La literatura maya actual vista por sus autores (Un acercamiento a laliteratura maya-peninsular contemporanea).”8 I assume most people who read this story will read it in Spanish. As such,page numbers in citations refer first the story in the original Yukatek Mayaand then to the Spanish translation. The chuuj or calabazo is a hollow gourdused for carrying water. In Yucatan k’eyem or pozole is a drink/meal that isusually drank while one is in the milpa, the traditional Maya farming plot.9 Bombas are a Yucatecan comedic genre of rhymed quatrains that oftencontain Yukatek Maya words.

Works CitedAdler, Rachel H. “Human Agency in International Migration: The Mainte-

nance of Transnational Social Fields by Yucatecan Migrants in a South-western City.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 16.1 (2000) : 165–187.

——. Yucatecans in Dallas, Texas: Breaching the Border, Bridging the Distance.2nd ed. Boston: Pearson, 2008.

“Alfabeto maya acordado en la reunion de agosto de 1984.” N.p.: SEP,1984.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.Public Worlds. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Arias, Arturo. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

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Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. Pensar nuestra cultura: Ensayos. Mexico: AlianzaEditorial, 1991.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cam-bridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology No. 16. Cambridge:Cambridge U P, 2003.

Bracamonte y Sosa, Pedro. “Quintana Roo.” Los mayas peninsulares: Un perfilsocioeconomico. Coord. Mario Humberto Ruiz. Cuadernos del Centro deEstudios Mayas 28. Mexico: UNAM, 2002.

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