 |
The Maya have been called the Greeks of the New World. In the first millennium A.D., they created the most intellectually and artistically advanced civilization of the Americas. In ensuing centuries, as neighboring empires fell in warfare and the Spanish invaded, the Maya endured, certainly shaken up but not destroyed. There are five million people who speak Mayan languages and preserve a Mayan identity today.
The people of the Yucatan substitute Mexicanismo with an intense Mayanismo: the cleanliness, the gentleness of the country, the warmth of the people, the sophisticated and varied cuisine of the Yucatecan, the splendid history and the astounding archaeology of the peninsula.
|
Kate Simon in Travels in Mexico compares the Yucatan's relationship to Mexico this way, "The Yucatan is to Mexico what Sicily is to Italy-without the bitterness; what Brittany is to France - without the tight-lipped shrewdness."
By the sixteenth century the Mayan-Toltec vitality was an wavering candle when Hernandez de Cordoba, a recent arrival to Cuba, accidently landed on the shores of the Yucatan peninsula in 1517. After a fierce battle at Campeche, the Spaniards were defeated and returned to Cuba, but their descriptions of this different world spurred many an adventurer to try his luck. The quest was on. In 1542 the Spanish finally managed to establish Merida as their capital in this isolated part of Mexico, building it on the ruins of an abandoned Maya city. The lure of cheap land and labor set off another tide of European adventurers who became rich from the local species of agave plant, whose fibers, or sisal, could be made into binding twine. Having few ways to spend their wealth in this remote part of the world, they designed lush parks and long boulevards lined with flowering trees, and each tried to out do the others in building the most ornate townhouses. The competition extended into the kitchen, with wealthy families vying to present the most elaborate and abundant dining tables to their guests.
Like most subjected people the Mayans continued as stubbornly as they could to hold on to their language and their customs. D.H. Lawrence saw the New World civilizations as a forest of great trees felled by the white invader, but he believed the roots were still alive, sending up shoots through the foreign soil deposited above them. It was a metaphor the Maya would recognize. They saw, and still see, themselves as part of a great ceiba, a silk-cotton tree that stands at the center of the earth, supporting the heavens, and symbolizing life itself.
Their isolation from the rest of Mexico (early explorers called the Yucatan an island) helped the peasants cling to their indigenous image as it helped the rich to achieve a rare cosmopolitanism. Until rather recently, the only way to get to and from Merida was by boat via the port of Progreso. It was easier to go to Havana and on to Europe for education or pleasure than to Mexico City. One still finds physicians with degrees from Leipzig, and matrons whose old-fashioned china was bought in Limoges. Add to this a mild disdain for the lately arrived, far from perfect people of the north, and the lack of Mexicanismo becomes understandable.
Thus the Yucatan possesses a sense of identity that is almost national in itself. Not only is it like nowhere else in Mexico, as Yucatecos enjoy reminding outsiders, it is like nowhere else in the world.
The stone pyramids and observatories of the Mayans are unlike those of the Aztecs, Zapotec or Olmecs. In fact, these monumental temples rising from green meadows and surrounded by jungle, with their sober, sharply angled and minimalist design looked so amazingly modern that the late Luis Barragan, Mexico's great 20th century architect, claimed to have found inspiration here for many of his masterpieces.
|
 |
The churches are not like the gilded cathedrals of central Mexico either: their majesty is in simple stone walls that rise to barrel-vaulted ceilings 100 feet high. Taking the Convent Route which meanders through a half-dozen villages, you can see churches and monasteries built by the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries. You might wonder why they are as big as some of Europe's largest cathedrals. But after visiting the great Mayan ruins, it makes sense that the only way the Spaniards could impress Indian converts with the power of their new catholic religion was to construct churches nearly as imposing as pyramids.
|
Come and rediscover a less-religious artifact of European civilization in the old henequen plantations and haciendas. In the 19th century, the fiber made rope for the world (and riches for the Yucatan) providing a life of luxury for its gentry that collapsed with the arrival of nylon.
|
The landscape's dusty browns and gray greens are a perfect backdrop for bright tropical flowers, pink flamingos and turquoise seas, men in crisp white guayaberas and women in white huipiles bordered by garlands of embroidery. Today the Yucatecan hat of choice is not a sombrero but a finely woven Panama. Although Yucatecans eat tacos, they prefer cochinita (a pork dish) or pollo pibil (chicken wrapped in banana leaves), and they season their food with lime as much as with chili. They do, on occasion, listen to the blaring mariachi music of Guadalajara, but their hearts are full of romantic ballads played by soft guitar trios accented with sounds imported from Cuba and Columbia.
A fitting way to approach the Yucatan is to savor its attractive, gentle, people whose sophisticated lineage shows in their profiles, in their open, trusting manner, their easy smiling, and complete lack of xenophobia. You will be of interest to them, they assume they will be of interest you. They are quick to make it clear that the encounter is a mutual pleasure.
|
