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Settlement Patterns, Intangible Memory, and the Institutional Entanglements of Heritage in Modern Yucatán

Landscape, Community Heritage, and Rights

Despite the vast historical, social, and political gulf that separates 1877 Maní from present-day Chanmul, there are important continuities. In both cases, members of rural communities understand the prerogatives of local government—be they municipal or ejidal—as including control of heritage objects that are officially considered to be the purview of higher-order political dependencies. Although the claims on these objects that are made by community members are only weakly sustained by the letter of the law, we think that scholars and heritage professionals have an obligation to consider them as part of the larger terrain of heritage management.

We don’t make this argument as a simple appeal to help the more disadvantaged social groups or because of the ethnic status of the ejidatarios as descendants of the ancient Maya. Rather, the arguments of the ejidatarios reflect assumptions about territoriality that are consistent with a body of vernacular knowledge and quotidian practices that have defined how generations of rural Maya speakers relate to the landscape that they inhabit. This in turn places their claims within a terrain of intangible heritage that enjoys certain protections under Mexico’s heritage laws, particularly as relates to Mexico’s ratification of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal People’s Convention in 1990. The importance of places such as the bush around Chanmul or the town landscape of Maní rests in their subsistence value and in the historical and symbolic content that is attributed to them by living Maya people. According to the late Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, a central figure in the development of modern indigenous rights discourse in Mexico, this kind of landscape knowledge embodies “the memory of ethnic territory that historically belonged to each people and whose recuperation is a constant object of indigenous struggle” (Bonfil Batalla 2012:240). Reconciling this sort of intangible heritage with the traditional bailiwick of archaeology is not always easy, but offers some promise for creating more equitable approaches to heritage in a multicultural and neoliberal Mexico.

In this context, local governments such as the municipality or the ejido play an especially important role, since they provide the formal institutional context that promotes the survival and development of indigenous patterns of subsistence, social organization, and worldview. Although the specific title held by the residents of Chanmul and other people stems from the twentieth-century agrarian reform, the original formalized territorial claims that the local community had already established by other means. In the decades that followed, local customs and knowledge of landscape shaped Chanmul’s particular iteration of the federal ejido law. A similar process occurs in the formalization of different forms of community government through federal laws for the management of municipalities. In this sense, the ejido, the municipality, and other such institutions are a hybrid of the liberal political structures embodied in the Mexican Constitution and indigenous forms of political organization and land tenure.

Bonfil observed that “there was no rupture, or negation of indigenous history as a result of European invasion” (Bonfil Batalla 2012:241). In some senses, his insistence on the integral continuity of a “deep Mexico” amidst the institutions of the modern state seems like a romantic oversimplification of processes of cultural change and adaptation that marked centuries of colonial and postcolonial interaction. But there is something to the assertion that different means of cultural transmission tended to reproduce indigenous patterns of landscape use and perception that existed parallel, if not always in direct opposition, to the official regimes of colonial and postcolonial states. We would argue that the case of landscape memory and territoriality in the rural Yucatán illustrates an especially powerful mechanism for this reproduction. By extension, rural Yucatecans’ stake in archaeological sites stems from a larger body of collective memory that is embodied by named places in the physical landscape and reproduced through the narratives and subsistence practices of local communities.

Toponyms play an especially important role in this process. The names of thousands of places in the Yucatecan bush have been preserved over long periods of time despite the fact that many of these places have been abandoned and resettled over the course of centuries (Armstrong-Fumero 2013; see also Solari 2013). This naming is particularly striking given the high historical levels of illiteracy in the region and the fact that many of these named places have not been recorded in written sources that would have been readily available to subsequent generations of agriculturalists. The cultural transmission of place-names occurred in tangent with, but often independently from, the formation of documentary records that constituted official land titles. This process points to the fact that oral narratives associated with agriculture and other subsistence practices reproduced knowledge of the landscape across the generations of Mayan agriculturalists, even as they experienced changes in the state-sponsored institutions of land tenure.

One of the historical ironies of the northern Maya lowlands is that the same processes that have worked against the long-term residence of specific communities in specific locations have also contributed to the reproduction of detailed knowledge of the larger landscape over time. Central to this are a series of short-term and long-term populations movements conditioned by the exigencies of swidden maize agriculture and a history of colonial control, local resistance, and large-scale violence. Some of these same demographic movements will be discussed in depth by Rani Alexander in chapter 7 (this volume) and Kray et al. in chapter 4. Here, we introduce them very briefly to focus on how the confluence of territorial politics with subsistence practices and collective memory of the local landscape have contributed to continuities in some forms of occupying and using space.

As Alexander will discuss in more detail, many settlements that had existed at the time of the Spanish conquest were abandoned due to forced resettlement policies imposed by colonial authorities to concentrate the population in large towns (Quezada 1993:81–101). Despite being deprived of the right to live in their traditional lands, it is evident that many families retained formal and informal usufruct rights over them and used them for agriculture, hunting, and other subsistence activities. In many cases, the people forced to live in larger settlements continued to hold titles to their original lands that were recognized by the indigenous authorities of the new towns. This was the case with the towns of Tixcacalcupul, Tekom, Cuncunul, and Ebtún, to the north and east of Chanmul. For example, the residents of the settlements Kulha, Kankabdzonot, Hulmal, and Yaxoy were moved to the town of Tekom. Texts in the Titles of Ebtun record the names of the various lineages of Tekom and the title that they held to lands that they had inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest (Roys 1939:73–81).

From the perspective of landscape history, these titles establish two important things. First, resettled kinship groups continued to be closely identified with particular stretches of land. As Amara Solari (2013) has discussed in her analysis of the Book of Chilam Balam and related texts, the commemoration of different places through which groups had migrated in the past was important to defining collective identities and territoriality for colonial-era Maya speakers. Second, this commemoration was reflected in legal documentation, since the survival of ancestral titles contributed to the remembrance of toponyms such as Kulha, Kankabdzonot, Hulmal, and Yaxoy, even though the lands to which they referred were essentially uninhabited.

There was more than just identity bringing Maya people back to their ancestral settlements; this form of memory also played a distinct subsistence role. The itinerant forms of cultivation that are most adaptable to swidden agriculture, combined with tribute pressures applied by the colonial administration, often induced people to cultivate lands far from their formal place of residence. In this sense, the remembrance and repopulation of abandoned settlement sites involved an integration of cultural memory with a series of environmental and productive factors that were essential to the survival of Yucatec Maya communities.

There is evidence that relocation to distant settlements expanded toward the end of the eighteenth century. Social and economic changes that were prompted by the Bourbon reforms, and which accelerated after independence from Spain, included policies that contributed to the annulment of indigenous title and the purchase of land by nonindigenous Yucatecans who competed for the production of maize and cattle. It’s telling that a number of historians have characterized this period as a “second conquest” of the Yucatecan landscapes whose effects on indigenous land tenure were more devastating than what had occurred in the sixteenth century (Farris 1984:539). Sources, including a regional census from 1841, suggest that many Maya people reacted to these processes by occupying abandoned lands. Akulá, Hulmal, Kancabdzonot, and other sites that had been depopulated since the sixteenth century, and whose residents had been resettled in Tekom, were all repopulated late in the eighteenth century.

This resettlement also involved changing political jurisdictions and seems to have continued through the first decades after Mexico’s independence from Spain. For example, Akulá, a site that was historically associated with people who had been resettled in Tekom, was designated as a hamlet with twelve residents in 1841, and was then subject to the political jurisdiction of Muchukux. This change indicates that the older tie to Tekom was ruptured and that the families that resettled the site retained the old toponym, even if the specific jurisdictions to which these places corresponded shifted.

These same places experienced a new series of dislocations during the Caste War of 1847 and the endemic violence of the succeeding four decades. If the events of the late eighteenth century contributed to the dispersal of population, the aftermath of the Caste War was marked by a strong pull toward places that guaranteed better security. This movement involved the abandonment of even relatively large communities. Muchukux, for example, had had 714 inhabitants in 1841 and was abandoned along with Akulá by 1888. Tihosuco and Tela, had 3,500 and 5,000 residents respectively. Both were abandoned between the 1870s and 1890s, and Tihosuco was only resettled between 1920 and 1930.

The Mexican state’s defeat of the powerful rebel polity of Chan Santa Cruz in 1900 greatly diminished the risks associated with living and growing crops in the east of Yucatán and prompted a renewed movement of population out of larger towns. As had happened a century earlier, families were returning to abandoned sites whose names and particular features had been preserved in collective memory in spite of the fact that they had been abandoned for a generation. So, for example, the town of Muchukux was reoccupied at the beginning of the twentieth century. The letters written by the residents of this new settlement hint at the degree to which the place had not lost its social and cultural status during the period that it was uninhabited.² A document filed in 1931 detailed the history of the site that had been gleaned from the stories of its current inhabitants and observed that “this settlement has existed for many years, though for unknown reasons, it had been de-populated, and was not re-populated until the last thirty years.” In effect, the idea that Muchukux was an old site with deep historical roots had not faded from historical memory, even if the exact reasons why the site had been abandoned had.

This particular series of letters comes from the archives of Mexico’s agrarian bureaucracy and marks a process that strengthened the claims that different groups had had to elements of the landscape, even as the bureaucracy transformed the region’s political geography. As we noted earlier, ejido grants provide communities with collective usufruct rights of lands that are titled by the federal government. Dialogs between the residents of rural settlements and urban engineers and notaries gave formal status to many sites that were represented through passing references in the spotty documentary record or simply through oral narrative. At the same time, this redrawing of land title tended to disrupt some older territorial divisions.

So, for example, Muchukux received an ejido grant in 1929 that consisted of 7,433 hectares that corresponded to the lands that were used by the settlers that arrived around 1900. However, these lands did not include all of the places that had been associated with the pre–Caste War community of Muchukux. Some ultimately fell into the ejido donation of Xcalakdzonot, a community where we conducted ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological research for a number of years.

The process of creating Xcalakdzonot’s ejido reflects the evolving relationship between traditional forms of landscape knowledge and the formal institutions of the agrarian reform. What became Xcalakdzonot was, in fact, a collection of several different named sites that had been resettled around 1900 (Armstrong-Fumero 2013; Armstrong-Fumero and Hoil Gutiérrez 2011). One of these was Akulá, which we first encountered in the colonial period as lands associated with kinship groups that had been resettled in Tekom, and again in the nineteenth century as a dependency of pre–Caste War Muchukux. The settlers who came in the early twentieth century were people from the towns of Cuncunul, Kaua, and Ebtún, some thirty kilometers to the north, who had historical awareness of these sites but had not resided there before. In order to raise the number of households above the number required to receive official title, the residents of these different settlements relocated to the site of Xcalakdzonot to solicit lands as group. Through this donation of land, Xcalakdzonot emerged as a formal political and territorial entity for the first time.

It is important to underscore how this “new” political entity came about through a twentieth-century iteration of the same kind of political and cultural process that has preserved the distinct relationship that Yucatec Maya people have had to their landscape for many generations. Knowledge of the location and geophysical qualities of abandoned settlements and agricultural sites has been central to the subsistence and territorial identity of these communities. Earlier, we described how the name of Akulá has been preserved in the collective memory of rural Yucatecan people despite the fact that it was repeatedly abandoned and resettled. The same can be said for thousands of other named places in the region. If the agrarian reform gave many of these places a formal juridical status, this act of bureaucratic naming was anticipated by a far older series of material and symbolic processes through which Maya agriculturalists stake claim to territory. This is very much the status of the ejido today: it is a formal institution that provides for the subsistence of rural communities and for the preservation of the intangible cultural heritage of landscape knowledge. This is a form of intangible heritage in which pre-Hispanic remains play a persistent, and often important, role.

Pre-Hispanic Artifacts between Tangible and Intangible Heritage

Which brings us back to the claims on pre-Hispanic artifacts made by the ejidatarios of Chanmul. As far as many in the INAH and other federal institutions are concerned, the ejido grant is simply a usufruct right over the surface of lands that in no way impinges on federal jurisdiction over subsurface archaeological remains. But for rural Maya agriculturalists, the institution of the ejido has been incorporated into an older series of practices that imbue sites that have been abandoned and settled repeatedly over the course of several generations. Thus, the ejido and all of the organisms and objects found within it accrue a series of material and moral features that have been a part of Yucatec Maya society for generations.

In essence, archaeological sites are traces of previous settlement in a landscape that Maya-speaking agriculturalists already assume has been settled and abandoned many times, both in pre-Hispanic antiquity and the more recent past. In some ways, as Solari (2013) has shown, the return to such sites echoes a time-honored practice of pilgrimage or ritual circuits. Conditioned by patterns of fallowing, abandonment, and resettlement that reflect the ecological and agricultural particulars of the Yucatán Peninsula, these returns are also marked by subsistence concerns. This dual nature of resettlement is evident in the uses of different objects that are found in the ruins of ancient pyramids or recent house sites. Some objects, such as clay figurines or stone bas reliefs, are imbued with a special aura of antiquity and “otherness” and are used ritually or avoided altogether. Other artifacts that are discovered during the process of founding new settlements are quite familiar and integral parts of the quotidian material culture of Maya agriculturalists. Objects from grindstones to ceramics are often repurposed in modern kitchens, and before industrial building materials such as cinderblock were widely available, it was common to see facing stones from pre-Hispanic ruins used in modern vernacular architecture.

Sacred or profane, the use of pre-Hispanic stone is often characterized as “vandalism” by the INAH and related authorities. But it could also be argued that the reuse of vestiges of these earlier occupations, whether they be historical house sites or pre-Hispanic ruins, has often been an important feature of the process of reclaiming these spaces for human habitation (Armstrong-Fumero 2012; Armstrong-Fumero and Hoil Gutiérrez 2011). As such, it is part of the living heritage of landscape use that links the Maya agriculturalists who work the bush today to a deep historical tradition.

In making this argument, we are not claiming that institutions such as the INAH should abandon their mandate to protect historical artifacts or that the right of rural communities to practice traditional forms of reclaiming and recycling named places always trumps the interest of archaeological research or touristic development. In many respects, this reuse of stones is far less of an issue today than it would have been generations ago. As cinderblock and other industrial materials became more accessible, vernacular architectural traditions were altered in ways that diminished the need for precut stones that were once mined from pre-Hispanic and historical sites. What’s more, given the importance of archaeological tourism in the area, rural people are more likely to value the preservation of architecture in situ as potential attractions.

Still, as an ethicopolitical question, there are lessons to be learned from the difficulty of reconciling policy that treats tangible heritage objects as an eminent domain of the state whose physical characteristics cannot be legally altered with a form of intangible heritage that entails the physical alteration of those same objects. For one, the conflict can lead us to question the degree to which “multivocality,” the celebration of the right of different groups to narrate their own version of different places and historical events (Armstrong-Fumero 2011, 2014), is the best model through which to think about the inclusion of indigenous stakeholders in the management of heritage. For generations of rural Maya-speaking agriculturalists, objects found within territorial units such as the ejido are part of a larger complex of goods that contribute to subsistence. From this perspective, well-intentioned projects that constitute “inclusion” of indigenous perspectives as being independent from questions of subsistence (see McAnany and Parks 2012) tend to intentionally sidestep the values that many stakeholders ascribe to these places.

Furthermore, the economic and moral primacy that Yucatec Maya ideas of place grant to the physicality of found objects involves far more than controversial practices such as the recycling of building material. This confluence of subsistence and morality is evident in a particularly poignant oral tradition in which pre-Hispanic are said to have been built by a bygone generation of human beings, the uchben maako’ob, who were destroyed by God for some transgression. In some versions, these beings were dull-witted hunchbacks known as the p’uso’ob (see Burns 1983). In others, they were a primordial people known simply as the Itza, who lived before the creation of the sun and saw in the dark with eyes like those of cats. Almost all versions of this story are in agreement regarding the indolence of the ancients, the fact that their use of magical whistles or receiving favors directly from God spared them the pains of labor that marked the lives of modern peasant families. In some versions of the story, the sin that led to the death of the uchben maako’ob was the creation of the castillo at Chichén Itzá, which some Maya speakers associated with the tower of Babel. In some versions that we have recorded, the fact that the buildings at Chichén Itzá survived the death of their builders is a moral counterpoint to the sloth and pridefulness of the uchben maako’ob. A merciful God left the buildings behind so that the hardworking generations who inherited the land could derive benefit from the work of their sinful predecessors (Armstrong-Fumero 2014).

In these stories, it is the ability to work the ruins that validates living people. In essence, ruins are activated by the same act of usufruct that defined the granting of ejido lands in the early twentieth century and that marked the process through which earlier generations had reclaimed abandoned spaces through migration and the creation of new settlements. This is also a moral economy that is especially difficult to reconcile with the idea that an abstractly defined nation has eminent domain over artifacts that exist beneath the soil that other people are “working.”

In one sense, the intangible heritage of landscape use that is embodied in these traditions presents a challenge to archaeology, since it forces us to consider a complex, and potentially contradictory, ethicopolitical relationship between archaeologists, communities, and heritage objects. But in this sense, it also offers an opportunity. The kind of joint stewardship that was imagined by the ejidatarios of Chanmul when they insisted on the monument being displayed in a locally controlled museum would allow INAH officials to meet their mandate of preserving antiquities while also fostering institutions—in this case, the ejido—that preserve the intangible heritage of descendant communities. Doing so might involve challenging traditional hierarchies between local memory and national history. But in so doing, archaeologists would engage the landscape values of Yucatec Maya people on a terrain that they have always occupied, negotiating highly mutable territorial jurisdictions against a more durable backdrop of known and named places.