A Trip to New Communities

On Saturday I took my good friend Doña Felipa, a midwife and herbalist, back to her village, Tibolon. We left Xualtez early where she had spent the week in the clinic giving massages. We passed through Espita and headed south into a very marginalized zone. We went through the communities of Nacuche, Kunche and San Pedro Chenchela where the blacktop road ended. We traveled on four kilometers along a traditional, rural sac beh, or white road until we reached Santa Maria. There the road had recently been blacktopped and we headed on toward Tibolon passing Uayma, Tinum, Dzitas, Xocempich, Piste, Yodzonot, Libre Union, and Holca. We reached Tibolon where we ate and rested for a while. We then travelled south to the municipal head of Sotuta, town of the Maya chief Nachi Cocom. Doña Felipa took me to a house that also doubled as a motorcycle repair shop where in their backyard, a very nice family charged us the equivalent of 1USD to show use the cenote which they called Dzonot Miis, or Cat Cenote. They had discovered it when they dug a water well and noticed that there was a huge cave filled with water under their backyard. I took a few pictures of the family, along with Doña Felipa’s compadres across the street and we went on to Tabi.

Tabi has an open cenote in the center of the village. While looking at it a man was eager to tell me the history of his community. Doña Felipa knows several herbalists and healers that live there and we went to visit one, Don Florencio, who she had not seen since he suffered a stroke. I realized that it was 85 year-old Don Florencio who had done a ritualistic cleansing of me 8 years ago. He is regaining some strength on his right side and has begun to work again as a healer on occasion. The rain clouds started to build as we headed farther east to the town of Yaxcaba. There Doña Felipa introduced me to Don Juan Bautista, the healer in charge of the local Center for the Development of Traditional Indigenous Medicine. As a strong storm passed over us and his gardens of medicinal plants, he told me about his work and how he is teaching his grandchildren how to also heal with herbs. The rain passed and Doña Felipa and I left going back toward Tabi. We passed through the community and on the western edge we noticed women participating in a novena at a stone shrine adorned with wooden crosses, candles and flowers. Their singing and praying coincided with the Cha’a Chaak ceremony being held by the men a few hundred meters down the road where I was invited to take some pictures. There was a big difference in this ceremony and that of Tixbacab about which I posted a few weeks ago. The altar was much more traditional as you will be able to see in the album below made completely of materials from the forest. The same rain that passed over Yaxcaba, also passed over Tabi. I was told that this was a good sign because the rains have not been as consistent as they usually are prompting the people of Tabi to come together and hold the ceremony again after three years of not doing it. Doña Felipa and I left Tabi and visited her new grandson in Sotuta, one of 35 grandchildren. I took her back to Tibolon, and then arrived to Merida late after a day filled with visiting new communities, meeting new people and having experiences that I will never forget.

See the album below for photographs with captions describing these people and places.

Sotuta, Tabi, Yaxcaba

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A visit to Hacienda Regadio and Holca

While doing an internship 10 years ago, I briefly visited the abandoned sugarcane plantation of Regadio and the nearby community of Holca. On Sunday, July 20th some of my friends from Xualtez invited me visit the two places again. Holca is in the same municipality as Xualtez, and although it is closer to the much larger and mostly Spanish speaking municipal seat of Espita, the entire community speaks Maya. In Xualtez, where I am based, as well as in nearby Tusik, few people under 30 years old speak Maya. As part of my ongoing research about the rural youth of Yucatan and culture change, I have been conducting interviews this summer to determine the historical circumstances that account for the shift from speaking Maya to Spanish in Xualtez and Tuzik while the other communities in the same municipality are still composed of both young and old Maya speakers. One of the primary factors that accounts for this change is the opening of the community with roads and other forms of communication and trade that connect larger towns where Spanish is mostly spoken. Holca is more representative of the rest municipality because it lies several kilometers off the only road that connects the community to the principal highway between the larger municipality heads of Sucila and Espita. The fact that there is only one road to go in and out of Holca has helped keep it much more linguistically traditional. Below are a few of the pictures that I took while I was there and at the hacienda Regadio. You can see them full size by clicking on my “Portraits” album.


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This summer...

...I will be returning to Yucatan as I have many times since the first time I came 11 years ago. This year I plan to visit friends, continue researching cultural change and cultural identity, do photography workshops and exhibits with young people, and work on my own photography projects. Since I will not have consistent Internet service to send out many emails I decided to start this blog. I hope to be able to post updates several times during the summer.

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