Maya (Yucatán Peninsula)

By John R. Sosa and Ian Skoggard

Maya, Masehual, Mayero, mestizos.

The term "Maya" is of indeterminable antiquity and today is still used by many in the Yucatán peninsula of México to refer to the language and the people of the same name. For self-identification, other terms used are "Mayero," which refers to a speaker of Maya; mestizo, which in Spanish means "mixed people"; or "Masehual," an adapted Nahuatl word that is used more in the traditional Maya Zone of Quintana Roo to mean "indigenous," or "legitimate" Mayas.

As in pre-Columbian times, the Maya still inhabit the Yucatán Peninsula, including the Mexican states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Campeche. They also live adjacently with other Maya groups such as the Kekchí and Mopán in Belize, Guatemala, and the Mexican state of Tabasco. Since the Yucatán peninsula has been calculated to be 53,000 sq. miles, this results in a very large culture area.

It is difficult to enumerate the Maya population because classification criteria used by the Mexican government, anthropologists, and the Maya people themselves differ, owing in part to the mestizaje, or Spanish/Maya "mixture" process, as well as the isolation of thousands of communities. The best estimate is about 1,000,000, which may have surpassed pre-contact levels.

The name "Maya" has been taken by linguists to represent the Maya language family of related languages, including Quiché, Tzotzil and over twenty others, even though it is the language and the name of the Maya people. This has resulted in the Maya being re-named "Yucatec Maya" in English-speaking academic circles, even though such a term has no relevance or use among Maya or Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the peninsula. The Maya language of Yucatán is believed by these linguists to have separated from the other languages in about 1000 B.C. Although there are regional Maya dialectical differences identifiable by native speakers, the language used by all Maya speakers is rather homogeneous, the result of frequent population movements during pre-Colombian, colonial and contemporary times.

The earliest archaeological evidence of human settlements in the Yucatán Peninsula comes from ancient fishing villages on the eastern coast, suggesting a Maya presence in the area for many thousands of years. From a Maya cultural point of view, Mayas were created by divine intervention out of the soil of the peninsula, or out of corn dough. The earliest Maya historical records in the form of hieroglyphic texts date to the fourth century A.D., with earlier texts found to the south. These Maya were either Chol or Maya speakers, or both, with a large-scale system of trading city-states, each having a government called Méek'tan, or "the embrace." They built many sacred centers such as Cobá, Ek' Balam, Edzná, Chichén-Itzá and, Dzibilchaltún. These centers sometimes entered into conflict, perhaps leading to the end of what has come to be known as the Classic period, from A.D. 250 to 900. The cataclysmic collapse of this system, well documented and publicized by archaeologists, has led to the misconception that the Maya "disappeared." In fact, it seems that there was less depopulation in the northern Yucatán peninsula than in southern Maya areas. There is some evidence that when the sites in the Guatemala region were abandoned, through some combination of environmental damage, internal discord or invasion, there was significant Maya population movement to the north.

By A.D. 1000, a different political system was in place, centered at the northern center of Chichén-Itzá, representing some mixture of a Maya confederacy and central Mexican Toltec domination. This has been referred to as the beginning of the Post-Classic period by archaeologists. By A.D. 1250, Chichén-Itzá's role has declined and Mayapan emerges as a coordinating center until 1451, with many regional chiefdoms also spread out throughout the peninsula. Each region still had a particular name when the Spanish first arrived off the eastern coast in 1511. The whole peninsula was probably called Mayab by the Maya, yet it is the Spanish who first named it Yucatán, perhaps because some of the first Mayas they met said, "Yéetz'k a t'àan, "Your words are twisted." In 1526 Francisco de Montejo ("El Adelantado") began a military campaign that culminated in the official Spanish domination of the Yucatán peninsula in 1545, although many Maya groups remained isolated and autonomous. Thousands of years of indigenous cultural development were superseded by a European colonial system of encomienda (Spanish seizing of Maya lands and the enslavement of the inhabitants); forced religious conversion by Spanish friars, often through torture and Inquisition-style campaigns; centuries of forced labor to the Spanish-speakers, especially in terms of henequén and sugar cane cash crop agriculture; and being required to dedicate the majority of their labor to the payment of exorbitant tribute to both the Spanish crown and local encomendero slave masters, consisting of food, cotton cloth, animals, honey, salt, chocolate, and many other products . The abuses of both this landed elite and Spanish priests led to one of the most widespread indigenous uprisings in the Americas, known in the history books as the "Caste War of Yucatán," but to many of today's Mayas as "The War of God," since it was and is believed by Mayas that this resistance movement to end enslavement was only made possible by divine assistance. Also of importance was the local government of Yucatán's attempt to secede from Mexico in 1846 and the use of Maya conscripts in the Yucatán militia. Now armed, these Mayas began this organized revolt in 1847, and drove surviving Spanish-speaking Yucatecos or tz'úulo'ob, to the state capitals of Mérida and Campeche. Nevertheless, the Maya soon lost their military advantage. There are two versions of what happened, which both may be true. One says that the arrival of spring rains obliged the Maya to return to their cornfields, while the other describes how the surviving Spanish-speakers managed to divide Maya leadership. Skirmishes and retribution against the Maya continued until about 1910, with the majority of the rebels retreating to the thick jungle of Quintana Roo. During the Mexican Revolution, the Maya in various parts of the peninsula made their most recent attempt to "throw off slavery," by joining in local fighting against dominant landlords. Today, the majority of Mayas are agriculturists, yet the development of tourism in the peninsula has put them in increasing contact with North Americans and Europeans. The Maya generally regard these light-skinned people with respect for their socioeconomic prominence but consider their morality questionable or unclear. The labor demands of the tourist industry attract many Maya men and women to seasonal or permanent jobs, especially in Cancun, having a significant impact on many communities and families.

There is virtually no running water in the Yucatán Peninsula because of the karst (limestone-cap) topography with its maze of underground caverns; consequently, most settlements are found near naturally occurring sinkhole wells (Maya: tz'ono'ot; Spanish: cenotes). Both the pre-Columbian city-state and the colonial village or hamlet relied extensively on these cenotes for drinking water, although in the city-states, containment systems for rain water were built as well. Contemporary villages depend on wells dug in the twentieth century or on electronically run potable water systems installed by the Mexican government. Farmers and the general populace lived on the outskirts of the ancient centers, which, like contemporary hamlets, were constructed as quadrilaterals, with their four corners marking points aligned with the four corners of the flat Maya earth that correspond to the solstice horizon extremes of annual solar motion. This quadrilateral form still provides a framework for integrating human living space with a cosmological order, through ceremonial activity that fosters human health and prosperity with supernatural assistance. Today, the thousands of communities, often isolated in the scrub brush of the north or the jungle of the south, can be contrasted with the few urban centers that also have considerable Maya habitation. In most of these, Maya is a lingua franca that many non-Maya must speak out of necessity.

As far as we know, for most of the thousands of years of occupation of the peninsula, the Maya have relied upon slash-and-burn (milpa, or kòol) agriculture. Evidence exists that ancient Mayas supplemented kòol agriculture with other more intensive techniques such as raised fields. To make kòol, quadrilaterals of jungle are felled and burned in the dry spring. Planting occurs after the arrival of the first rains and continues for a total of three consecutive years. The fertilizing ash supplements the shallow soil. The field is then left fallow for fifteen to twenty years. This digging-stick-based system is perfectly adapted to the rocky Yucatán environment, which makes mechanized agriculture impossible in most of the peninsula. Maize, beans, and squash have long been planted together. The corn tortilla (wàah) is a dietary staple, and fruits and vegetables are often grown in house gardens. Before Spanish contact and the drastic population movements of encomienda enslavement, Maya communities were more stable, making it possible for fruit tree orchards to be a very important source of nutrition as well as a focus for ancestral land rights. Since pre-Columbian times, and to a lesser extent today, salt has been produced from coastal lagoons.

Today, the pressure to increasingly participate in wage labor can be seen as either eroding the link between the family, the land and Maya spirituality, or as supplementing subsistence and income-producing agriculture. In the northwest, residual henequén plantations still provide some agricultural employment, but the worldwide replacement of sisal twine with plastic and other alternatives has almost completely killed this colonial holdover. Tourist resorts are growing rapidly, perhaps only because of the availability of Maya maids, janitors, waiters and construction workers. Both pre-Columbian pyramids and 5 star hotels have been built by Maya labor. These jobs have great allure for Maya men, probably because of their increasing difficulty in meeting the economic demands of the family solely through agricultural work. While there are Maya doctors, lawyers, school teachers and government officials, the vast majority of Maya men are limited to manual wage labor, and the women, mostly monolingual, produce embroidered hipil dresses, as well as home-raised animals and vegetables for sale. Part of the economic equation responsible for Maya poverty is the difficulty they have getting to markets offering fair prices for what they produce. It is a well established colonial habit for Spanish-speaking dominant group (tz'úul) merchants to pay below-market prices for Maya produce, and charge above market prices for food purchases by these same Maya producers. The accumulated discriminatory effect of this practice is that it makes it virtually impossible for Maya agriculture to have anything but the barest impact on the wage-earning component of their economic life.

Certain communities have a reputation for producing high-quality hammocks (k'àan), hats, shoes, pottery, or hipil dresses, but such industry is highly localized and usually controlled by the household. Most recently, multinational maquiladora plants in northern Yucatán are providing Maya and Yucateco workers, often women, with low paying jobs to assemble electric products or clothing for consumption outside of México.

Pre-Columbian trade networks were both sea and land based, with the latter depending exclusively on foot transport, owing to the absence of draft animals. Markets, as centers for exchange were more common in the past than they are today, with private or government-controlled capitalism requiring Mayas to transport their wares to urban centers. Village-level exchange, often based on Mexican currency, is usually preferred, given the difficulties of transport. Regional annual fiestas and pilgrimages also provide contexts for a variety of economic activities.

The Maya man is known by his profession of kòolnàal, or maize farmer, and is complemented by his wife, who is in charge of the domestic unit. She usually ventures forth only to take her daily corn to the local grinder, collect firewood and water, go to market, go to church, or visit friends and family. Maya women are increasingly under pressure to engage in wage labor, resulting in a widely discussed stressful effect on women's health.

In pre-Columbian times, political and kin groups controlled land use. Today, the Maya have access to both private land, if resources allow, or federal ejido lands, which were made available through agricultural reform after the Mexican Revolution. Even though the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) has resulted in the national privatization of ejido lands, many Maya communities have ignored this and still manage a community-based system which provides access to ejido lands if men contribute a few weeks a year of community service.

Hieroglyphic inscriptions and archaeological study of house complexes suggest that the centers of pre-Columbian communities were inhabited by patrilineal and patrilocal extended families in which dynastic rulership would most often pass from father to son. Dynastic lineages are represented in great detail in hieroglyphic texts, tracing the right to rule back to cosmological creator deities and thereby linking these rulers with the supernatural realm and affording them divine authority. Spanish Conquest and subsequent subjugation removed this dynastic level from the social hierarchy, although a patrifocal system remains for the general populace.

Both Maya and Spanish terms are used in a patrifocal bilateral system.

Marriage is and has been expected of all adults, and in fact almost all Maya adults are married; those who are not are considered childlike in a number of contexts. Mexican law requires civil ceremonies for all, with those who can afford it also having a church service. In either, their parents' compadres, who are the couple's godparents, play a crucial role as they support and advise the couple, publicly and privately. First-cousin marriages are avoided. Postmarital residence is usually either neolocal or patrilocal, and divorce is uncommon. However, the stresses of increased poverty and limited wage labor possibilities seem to be having the effect of increased household violence.

Extended families are often still important, especially in maize production, but with wage labor at tourist centers increasing as an economic option, nuclear families, with spouses often separated for long periods of time, are becoming increasingly common.

As imposed by Spanish conquerors, Mayas acquire both of their parents' first surnames, with the father's being first. Property is divided only when both parents have died and the children have married.

Parents seem quite lenient, and although Maya life is typically very demanding, great tenderness often exists between parents and children. A major paradox for parents is the conflict between maintaining pride in traditional culture and sensing the need for children to pursue economic opportunities outside the village. Toward this end, many parents will speak to their children in whatever little Spanish they know, although a high degree of Maya monolingualism is still evident. There is often great ambivalence for both parent and child if children leave either to attend high school or to seek wage labor. Whether children leave or stay, there is a Maya concept of the destiny of a person needing to be respected, which affects all phases of parent-child relations.

The more complex hierarchy of the pre-Columbian period changed to a system of local governance at the community or regional level, which has persisted from colonial times to today, as a result of the social and physical isolation of the Maya by the dominant Spanish-speakers. Local prestige is attainable with age, by being skilled, or by having likable personal characteristics, such as being able to converse well. Formally organized social events center on the church, as during certain fiestas, where gremios (religious groups) carry the burden (kúuc) of celebrating their saint through the preparation of food and care of the saint's ritual paraphernalia. The socios, or those in charge of such groups, enhance their status by bearing this burden well. Organized cooperation is also characteristic of the ejido group, which is managed at the local level by the comisario ejidal, who coordinates access to federal ejido farmlands and assigns labor to be performed as service to the community.

After the encomienda system of landlord rule ended with the Maya uprising, and later, the Mexican Revolution, the federal system of states and their municipio sub-divisions became the new political milieu for the Maya. The municipio is controlled by its largest community, which is called the cabecera, or head, and is governed by the municipal president. At the village level, a comisario (commissioner) represents local authority and is subservient to the president. He is elected for a multi-year term and is most effective if he is adept at negotiation and persuasion and refrains from trying to exert his power through coercion. Although mostly isolated in the bush and jungle of the peninsula, the Maya are integrated into the national political system, albeit at the bottom of the hierarchy of power. In the eastern part of the peninsula, in Quintana Roo, the so-called Maya Zone is still the home of the descendants of those who lead the uprising, and whose communities are still organized in an indigenous system of reciprocal ceremonial responsibilities.

Maya communities are noted for hospitality and reserved behavior, with theft and other crimes being almost unknown, except in the larger cities. The only type of village disruption might be an occasional display of drunkenness, which is either handled informally or by the police chief, who heads the community's guardia (unarmed police force). The guardia has rotating participation, through which men fulfill their community obligations and qualify for use of ejido land. Language also acts as a social-control mechanism, since in the majority of Maya communities there is pressure for Mayas and tz'úulo'ob alike to speak Maya in public, strengthening Maya ethnic identity and countering external social domination.

For some Maya and tz'úulo'ob, bitter memories linger of the killing that occurred during the "Caste War." In general, however, violence across ethnic lines is very rare. Most Maya seem to feel helpless in the face of tz'úul Spanish-speaking domination.

The Pre-Columbian symbolic complex representing a worldview of the joined yet distinct realms of sky, earth, and underworld endures despite centuries of forced Christianization. Only recently have the Maya begun to call themselves "Catholics," because of the increased presence of various evangelical Protestant sects. The Catholic/Protestant division is a clear schism that has been created by about a century of Protestant missionary efforts to try and convince Mayas that certain elements of their culture are corrupt and need to be abandoned. Although from an external perspective, Maya beliefs and ritual practices can be considered a syncretic mix of indigenous and European symbols; the Maya themselves make no such distinction, as they practice their religion as an integrated system. Many pre-Columbian terms for supernatural forces are still used today, although there is variation across the total population. The supreme creator deity of the past was probably a double-headed sky serpent representing the astronomical ecliptic. Today, Hahal Dios, or the "true God" can include the combined symbolic meanings of Jesus Christ and the sun. His assistants are the Càak (rain deities) and the báalam (guardians) grandfathers, who, like all supernaturals, can punish as well as cure, "lest people forget that they exist." Punishments come to earth as illnesses or injuries in the form of "winds" and are expelled or prevented through elaborate ritual offerings.

In response to the brutal crusades of the first Spanish priests, Maya shamans went "underground" and continued the traditional roles of curer, counselor, and diviner. Today called hmèen or ah k'íin, this individual occupies the dual social status of mediating between humans and supernatural forces yet being an ordinary farmer.

The central ritual has probably always been the rain ceremony, today called C'a Càak, or "take Càak," performed during the period of the summer when the cornfields are most in need of rain. The structure in time and space of this and all ritual activity is dependent on the four-corners concept, reflecting the centrality of the Maya worldview. Whether rain or a cure for an illness is being sought, the setting of the ceremony, whether the maize field, community, house plot, or corral, is always a quadrilateral, and becomes a model of the cosmos through the ceremony. These hmèen-directed functions share this symbolic structure with public fiestas centered on the church.

The monumental architecture, carved hieroglyphic texts, pottery, and other aspects of ancient Maya material culture are mainly responsible for the worldwide attention focused on the Yucatán Peninsula. Today, the hipil, or women's garment, with its embroidered floral patterns, is the most visible form of Maya artistry. Within the culture itself, however, perhaps the most commonly used art form is the language. Maya speech is extremely polite, highly metaphorical, very patient, and most of all, requires constant mutual support between speakers. People have enhanced social status if they are particularly adept at creating poetic speech, especially in front of large gatherings.

A hmèen has a sophisticated awareness of medicinal plants. These treatments, however, are always administered in the context of highly structured specific ceremonies, with this combination of ritual healing and organic remedy proving very effective over time. Governmental clinics notwithstanding, the Mayan hmèen continue to gain recognition for their curative capabilities and are sometimes even sought out by Spanish-speaking tz'úul Yucatecos.

It is evident from funerary remains, that the rulers of the past confirmed their divine qualities through pictographic renditions of their anticipated afterlife. Although the subterranean realm was a part of this spiritual domain, the flat-earth perspective and the constancy of astronomical motion within the earth and back into the sky added a celestial component to the assumed destination of souls. The contemporary hmèen and many in the general public still hold these beliefs, and today's mortuary practices still symbolically express the cosmological motion of the human soul after death.

Documents referred to in this section are included in the eHRAF collection and are referenced by author, date of publication, and eHRAF document number.

There are 16 documents in the Maya (Yucatán Peninsula) file. They represent sixty years of fieldwork, some in the same community, which taken together provide an excellent in-depth look at changes and continuities in Mayan culture in the region. There are five ethnographies of the village of Chan Kom in the state of Yucatán (Redfield 1934, no. 2; 1962, no. 3; Goldkind 1965, no. 9; Elmendorf 1976, no. 17; Re Cruz 1996, no. 15.) Goldkind offers an interesting and famous critique of Redfield's original work; Elmendorf focuses her study on Mayan women; and Re Cruz examines the sociopolitical split that arose in Chan Kom when some villagers left to work in the tourist Mecca of Cancún in the 1970s. Redfield (1941, no. 16) and Strickon (1965, no. 8) also did comparative studies of the urban and rural communities of Merida, Dzitas, Chan Kom, and Tusik. The town of Ticul and nearby village of Pustunich in southern Yucatán State are represented in the works of Press (1975, no. 19) and Burns (1983, no. 18). Press's study of Pustunich is an excellent monograph of a Mayan village adjusting to change and Burn's is a superb study of Mayan oral culture. Cobá and the nearby village of Yacolbá in the state of Quintana Roo are represented in works by Kintz (1990, no. 14) and Sosa (1985, no. 12; 1989, no. 13), respectively. Kintz's work is another community study, which includes descriptions of Mayan culture since AD 600. Sosa's work focuses exclusively on religious ritual. Villa Rojas (1943, no. 4) studied the X-cacal group of communities in eastern Quintana Roo. Two of Burn's (1983, no. 18) informants are also from this region. Thompson (1930, no. 7) is a contemporary of Redfield and Villa Rojas and studied Mayan communities in the Honduras and Belize. Another contemporary is Shattuck (1933, no. 5) who offers a general survey of the region as well as an examination of Mayan medical knowledge and practices. Steggerda's (1943, no. 11) ethnobotanical study of plants includes information on their medicinal use. Detailed information on Mayan economy, religion, and medicine can be found in the above community studies. For more detailed information on the content of the individual works in the file, see the abstracts in the citations preceding each document.

This culture summary is written by John R. Sosa. Dr. Sosa also helped to select the documents included in this file. The synopsis was written by Ian Skoggard in 2000.

• ALUX-dwarf trickster spirits-776

• BALCHE-a tree and drink made from the tree's bark-273, 137, 314

• BATAB-local chief-631

• CÀAK-(see chachac)

• CACIQUE-regional chief-631

• CATRIN-Ladino-563

• CEIBA-tree of life-778, 824, 772

• CENOTE-limestone sinkhole-312, 133

• CHACHAC-rain ceremony-789

• COMISARO-local official-631

• CUCH-household thanksgiving ceremony-592, 782

• DELEGADO-mayor-632

• DZUL-Spanish patronymic-551, 563

• EJIDO-communal land grant-423

• FAGINA-communal labor-476

• Fiesta-796

• GREMIOS-fiesta organizing committee-794

• HAANEAB-bride service-583, 591

• HENEQUEN-sisal-248

• HETZMEC-traditional baptismal ceremony--851

• H-MEN-shaman-756

• IK--evil wind-821

• JICARA-gourd cups-415

• KATUN-Mayan period of 7200 days-805

• KOOL-cornfield--243

• KUUC-(see cuch)

• MASA-cooked corn-262

• MAZEHUAL-Mayan patronymic-551, 563

• MILPA-cornfield-241, 243

• NOCHOCH TATA-esteemed elder and village priest-554, 793

• NOHUA-corn cakes-262

• NOVENA-ritual recitation of Catholic prayer-782

• PIB-earth oven-252

• PÌI SĂN-soul-774, 775

• PILA-cedar trough-415

• SAASTRUM-crystal used for divining-787, 755

• SACA-maize gruel-262

• SANTOS-Mayan cross-778

• SIP-plant spirit-776

• SOLAR-household, garden and grounds-351, 592

• TUN-rock spirits-776

• UHANLICOL-protection ceremony for household-527, 592, 782, 243

• VAQUEROS-young male dancers-535

• YALCOBAIL-resident of Yacolba-794, 621

Kintz, Ellen R. (1990). Life Under the Tropical Canopy: Tradition and Change Among the Yucatec Maya. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology, George and Louise Spindler, General Editors. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Redfield, Robert (1941). The Folk Culture of the Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Redfield, Robert, and Alfonso Villa Rojas (1962). Chan Kom: A Maya Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schele, Linda and David Freidel (1990). A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. New York: William Morrow and Co.

Sosa, John R. (1989). Cosmological, Symbolic, and Cultural Complexity among the Contemporary Maya of Yucatán. World Archaeoastronomy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Villa Rojas, Alfonso (1945). The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.