As an individual who is constantly enlightened by the opportunity to visit new places and better understand and appreciate lives around the world by doing this, I didn’t ever expect to be questioning my position in traveling, but spending 4 months in the tourist filled Yucatan Peninsula this past year for school has left me doing just that. Despite having some familial ties to the peninsula, this summer was the first time I had ever visited it. My grandmother, and nearly all of her family, migrated to the United States when she was young, but she remembered enough to share with me vivid stories about a skyward serpent bringing storms to the cenotes that impacted me enough to keep me longing to see them. This year, a study abroad trip and research program finally gave me the opportunity to see cenotes in person, but the experience wasn’t what I had imagined.
Cenotes are limestone sinkholes and caves filled with freshwater located all over the Yucatan Peninsula–the peninsula is even coined the Ring of Cenotes because of their prevalence (Kurjack, 2006). These cenotes are all connected via the groundwater table in the Peninsula. As described by my abuelita, powerful storms and hurricanes fill these reflective, turquoise caverns via runoff and percolation. For as far back as water use in the area has been recorded, groundwater sources have always been the only source of water for those in the peninsula and the religions of the Maya have reflected this importance (Kurjack, 2006). While cenotes can be found in special places across the world, the Yucatan Peninsula is home to a particularly high concentration of them. The peninsula the south-east most part of Mexico comprised of the states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo and is home to some of the world’s oldest known civilizations. It is kissed by the Caribbean on the East, the Gulf of Mexico on the West and to the North. This unique, karstic geography has also influenced its ecology via its vast, dense, humid, and biodiverse tropical forests. Its population numbers are nowhere near as high as in other parts of the country, but its states have some of the highest populations of indigenous peoples in the entire country of Mexico–the Maya being the most dominant one (Yucatan Times, 2014).
Hundreds of years ago on the peninsula, before contact with the Spanish, the story my grandmother told me about the feathered serpent would not have been an uncommon way to describe the existence of cenotes and water. However, today cenotes are often talked about for one of two reasons: their conservation value as a crucial water resource or their beauty and intrigue for tourism. The nature of cenotes in relevance to the people who occupy this area has changed as a result of policies that have evolved into what appears to be conservation efforts today.
The issue of the conservation of cenotes is a complicated story that requires substantial context, but political ecology can be a crucial tool for understanding the complexity of this situation. The central questions this paper will ask around cenote conservation efforts in the Yucatan Peninsula are: How is and has the nature of cenotes been constructed? How do changes in the construction of nature contribute to the dispossession of land for various actors in the Yucatan Peninsula? What role does tourism, or other historic development goals, play in ideas of acceptable cenote use? There are a few goals I hope to achieve in my writing. The first is to analyze the relationship with cenotes that people living in the Yucatan Peninsula have had with it over time in order to better understand the differences between and the relationship that is present today. This includes pre-Columbian conceptions, colonial, and contemporary conservation conceptions. Second, I want to apply political ecology framework to analyze the way water and land conservation efforts as well as political economic pressures today have formed new relationships with cenotes. Last, I would like to to provide critical feedback for seemingly “progressive” institutions of sustainability that govern cenote use in ways that allow Western-centric values to thrive over the cultural values of indigenous and local people in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Pre-Hispanic Conceptions of Cenotes
As cultural academic Raymond Williams points out, “Ideas of nature…are the projected ideas of men. …nothing much can be done, nothing much can even be said until we are able to see the causes of this alienation of nature, this separation of nature from human activity” (Williams, 1972, 82). Understanding how ideas of nature and cenotes as nature have been constructed is crucial for evaluating the way power over land is executed and access to nature is defined in the Yucatan Peninsula. In addition to this, we must also understand that the way most of the world explains pre-colonial relationships is limited to the knowledge we have from often unsituated, Western academia or from what Spanish missionaries found important to document. This being said, adequately acknowledging the presence of a pre-colonial human relationship with cenotes is a central part to my case, as it tracks changes in the land and culture of the peninsula. As part of my efforts to provide accurate depictions of this, I have focused on sources that center Maya culture and ideals.
To the Yucatec Maya cenotes are sacred, transient spaces that are central for renewal rituals. There is debate about how precisely Mayan land and resources were organized socially and spatially, but the Maya often centered entire cities around cenotes because of the importance of water in their theology and cosmology (Villa Rojas, 2012) (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 590). Some even say that cenotes, “symbolize the ‘navel’ or heart of the earth and provide a means of accessing the underworld”–therefore, they are an important place for offerings to deities to ensure fertility via storms and other natural phenomena (Vail & Looper, 136). Cenotes in the precolonial context are also sites of transition in which those who were able to could communicate with the underworld.
When I was 5 or 6, listening to my grandma’s stories, I didn’t try to understand what they meant in the context of her culture or the way the Yucatec Maya understand nature like I do today. My imaginative mind had pictured what she was saying as a far off story of fantasy, but never did I realized the connections that were made between la Serpiente Emplumada and life, rebirth, and water. Today, I realize that the Maya understood the connections between water cycles through deities: “there was a relationship between rainfall, cenotes, and caves; they revered all three of these phenomena. Shrines and offerings are frequently encountered in Yucatecan caves” (Kurjack, 2006). In addition to this, the Maya pulled from caves and cenotes to influence innovative ways of storing water in cisterns and aqueducts when there were times with less rainfall (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 591). Cenotes were a pervasive force throughout lifestyles of the Yucatan Peninsula in ways that they aren’t today.
Bearing in mind what Williams says about the purpose in understanding how nature is defined, we can look for understanding about what nature is in the Maya context compared to how we, Western proprietors of environmentalism and nature conservation, define nature. Most of the “we” that I have defined would agree that cenotes qualify as nature. However, these examples of how cenotes–these sparkling, fresh water-filled sinkholes–should be viewed and used in Maya context show how different the Maya understanding may be from today’s understanding. The Maya relation to cenotes is based off of values of reciprocity, animism, and spirituality that is tied to things found in nature. This distinction of relationships with cenotes is important because it shows that prior to colonization, people of the peninsula saw cenotes as something more than how we characterize and interact with nature today.
Colonization Begins
The scarcity of water in the Yucatan Peninsula was a well understood reality, however, pre-Hispanic Maya settlements adapted to environmental conditions and limits. In addition to innovative water storage systems, there was some degree of social stratification that employed power dynamics to limit the usage and distribution of water resources in the area (Chacon et al., 2010, 25-29). This isn’t to say there wasn’t conflict between Maya settlements over land and water resources, but it does show that there was a different understanding of how resources were to be used before colonization entered the region (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 591).
When the Spanish arrived to the Yucatan Peninsula, their intent was to conquer lands with resources to extract. Their goals did not mesh with existing Maya people whose civilizations, cultures, and values had occupied the region for centuries before their arrival and learned how to adapt to resource availability. The Maya questioned the goals of the Spanish and resisted the institution of colonizing of their civilization by them for many years–some argue they still do today. As the Spanish looted their way through the peninsula, they realized that hydrologic features were different than the Spanish had ever seen. The Spanish even describe these confusing realizations in their journals that are sent back to Spain (Chacon et al., 2010, 16-25). There were no mountains and few rivers or streams. Water existed completely different than anywhere in their homeland.
Paul George Munro & Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita also describe this shocking realization in the context of indigenous values, stating, “The cenotes, which were seen as the mythical underworld to the Maya, were now being viewed by the Spanish with a European biological and ‘scientific’ curiosity, with questions being asked about the depth of the cenotes, the sh species that lived in them and the possible existence of underground rivers” (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 593) It is important to draw on this contrast between the Maya view of cenotes and the scientific, European eye on cenotes because it preludes a series of management policies for cenotes that lead to the dispossession of cenotes for the Maya and survive structurally today.
Policies and Procedures of Accumulation
When the Spanish arrived, one of the many concepts they employed to accumulate capital was terra nullius–the argument of no man’s land that allowed Europeans to justify colonization across the world–which validated their material goals while disregarding the spiritual and material goals of the Maya. While this was met with resistance from the Maya who fled towns and fought back, they began to forcibly capture people, towns, and resources and employ direct policies that could structuralize their conquest (Mysyk, 2015).
The first of these policies that impacted the way cenotes were handled was the encomienda system. Encomiendas gave grants from Spanish rulers to conquistadors who helped conquer to build Hispaniola, allowing them to claim and govern land on behalf of Spain (Farriss, 1984, 39). Under this system the conquistadors became encomenderos and were given, “rights to extract surplus in goods, services, and labor from indigenous rulers and their subject populations in return for protecting them and instructing them in the Catholic faith” (Mysyk, 2015). While the initial colonization on the Peninsula began the act of dispossession, the encomienda system allowed the Spanish to settle in to institutionalizing and expanding dispossession of land and resources from the Maya. Historian, Nancy Marguerite Farriss, further explains this process in stating, “The major growth of landed estates in Yucatan coincided with a shift to labor intensive export agriculture, primarily henequen, so that as Indians were dispossessed of their own land, they could be absorbed into the plantation labor force.” (Farriss, 1984, 221). While some continued to resist and flee in undeveloped places throughout the Peninsula, most natives were put in no other postion than to forcibly work for people who had seized their resources. This labor also further distanced the Maya from their understanding of cenotes and nature as a whole by using their labor on public works projects that situated water access sites next to churches and other symbolic institutions of Spanish authority (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 594).
As colonization of the indigenous people of the Peninsula continued, they endured harsh treatment, violent conquest, and disease, their population numbers began to rapidly decline. After becoming concerned about where labor would come from, some Catholic missionaries and encomenderos began to disagree with encomienda system and advocated to the Crown for a new one that allowed for more control over populations. Although they are used interchangeably and have many similarities, the repartimiento system replaced the encomienda system in the mid 17th century. Under the repartimiento system, labor was re-distributed to Spanish settlers, entitling them to a certain amount of forced labor (Farriss, 1984, 43-45). However, after many reforms of the repartimiento system that did not improve the system of forced labor for the Spanish, it became more unlikely to be able to execute and some settlers began to offer wages to indigenous laborers to compete with settlers not offering wages (Mysyk, 2015). These economic pressures undermined the occupation of the area by Spain and in the early 19th century, Mexico declared independence from Spain. This was followed by the impact of the Caste War in the Peninsula, which gave the Maya more opportunities to rebel against the Spanish, as well as Mexico, in the region. When the war was over and Mexico had declared victory, the entire structure of civilization that had existed around nature, water, and cenotes had been completely revamped as the Spanish transformed the Yucatan the once Maya knew into a place for the unconsented extraction of labor and resources.
Defining Accumulation by Dispossession
In order to understand why cenotes have such vastly different meanings from today to pre-Hispanic times, we must understand that the legacy of structures created during colonialism but it did not stop when the Caste War ended or when independence was proclaimed. Through these structural systems implemented during Spanish occupation, the Spanish accumulated various forms of capital that exploited the Maya and degraded their local habitat during this time. In addition to this, they were forced into a wage-labor market even after they proclaimed independence. A central concept that must be brought up in discussing the colonization of the Yucatan Peninsula is primitive accumulation, which can be defined as a process by which pre-capitalist modes of production, such as feudalism and slavery, are transformed into the capitalist mode of production. As Karl Marx describes in Vol. 1, Chapter 31 of Capital, exploitation via primitive accumulation is undeniably linked to the legacy of colonialism in the Americas because it uses enclosure of land and the creation of “free” labor from forced labor to accumulate capital.
While it is important to understand the idea of when framing the impact of colonization on the Maya, this concept does not employ contemporary ideas to situate the impact of primitive accumulation in today’s context. To achieve this, geographer David Harvey coined the idea of accumulation by dispossession, which I will later use to explain how the legacy of colonialism has been used to validate contemporary methods of development via cenote conservation and tourism which have dispossessed many Maya people of land, forced them into a wage-labor market, and altered the relationship the Maya have with cenotes.
According to Harvey, accumulation by dispossession is a set of neoliberal, capitalist policies–specifically privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions–that dispossess the public from their wealth or land and cause wealth and power to be accumulated in the hand of a few. In Yucatan, this started with the creation of haciendas after independence from Spain was declared. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, water from cenotes was controlled privately by wealthy owners of haciendas and was used to continue to develop the henequen industry and start the chicle industry, both of which became incredibly profitable during this time (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 598). Despite independence from Spain, it was impossible for the Maya, who were already situated in positions of forced labor from colonialism, to escape those positions because of the way hacienderos strategically, and legally, controlled access to water via cenotes (Arnold, 1909). In some cases, Maya still had access to small milpas, or small plots of community organized agriculture similar to personal gardens, but water was still controlled by hacienderos. Munro and Melo Zurita also describe the impact that the privatization of cenotes have on the Maya in stating they, “had little choice but to be integrated into the indentured labour due to the successive droughts and locust plagues that affected the region during this period. In the past they had camped out at cenotes during these crises but, due to the privatisation of the land and subsequent control over the area’s water resources, this was no longer a viable option” (2011, 599). This quote by Munro and Melo Zurita is important for emphasizing the way privatization via haciendas impacted the Maya because it shows that before cenotes were privatized, although the country was being occupied by an imperial power, access to cenotes was still more plausible.. This specifically relates to Harvey’s idea of accumulation by dispossession because it shows the start of land accumulation in an independent Mexico, whose laws still exist today, that dispossesses the Maya of their access to cenotes via the policies of privatization, state redistributions, and management and manipulation of crises. Not only were the Maya communities forced into a wage-labor economy, but they were dispossessed of any resources that would allow them to be self-sufficient. By the mid-20th century, the henequen industry had nearly all died out and, while surviving, the chicle industry began to as well. However, a new endeavor that would use cenotes to generate capital was just around the bend.
Development, Conservation and Ecotourism
At this point it is evident that there is a historic driving force behind the changes that cenotes have faced: development. Development has been a force in the peninsula that has driven dispossession of land since it was first brought to the area in the 1500s. This development was originally focused on extraction of the resources–from labor to chicle–in the peninsula for the development of European countries. After Spain no longer occupied the region, development was a rationale used by the Mexican government to justify marginalizing the Maya through privatization resources on haciendas. From the latter half of the 20th century to today, development began to utilize tourism as a way to generate wealth. Anthropologists and archaeologists may have used the Maya culture to create a distant fascination of the Maya in books and studies in the early to mid 20th century, but by the 1960s, with innovations in travel technology, people now had to opportunity to experience the the Yucatan Peninsula first-hand in ways that had never been done before. In the 1970s, the Inter-American Development Bank–an arm of the UN, WTO, and WB development project–took on the project of creating Cancun as the ideal tourist location for the American tourist market, creating a catalyst for mass-tourism style development in the region (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 603-605). According to development theorists, tourism was going to be the silver bullet to poverty in the Yucatan Peninsula and would develop the economy of Mexico like had never been done before.
In terms of bringing tourists to the region and increasing GDP, the project was highly successful and began to proliferate tourism based projects across the Peninsula. However, this GDP driven form of development did not improve access to basic needs for the Maya–and some argue it made accessing basic needs even more difficult (Brenner & Guillermo Aguilar, 2002). Tourism gave local Maya people who knew English or Spanish access to wages through hotel or tour guide jobs, but projects often neglected the need for Maya to have access to sustain themselves with food via a milpa, like they did in the earlier part of the 20th century (Juarez, 2002). Lack of access to water was also neglected as sites of water control, haciendas, were transformed into ideal tourist destinations. Maya individuals had to fully integrate themselves into a capitalistic, wage-labor system where they had to buy everything they needed in order to meet their basic needs (Munro & Melo Zurita, 2011, 599-605).
For the most part, tourism in the Yucatan Peninsula today is somewhat similar to tourism when it first started, except control over lands used in it is further heightened by discourses of conservation and the development of tourism in these areas is further globalized by investments from international actors. This has led to the creation of ecotourism, a highly inconsistent form of sustainable development that advocates for sustainable use of lands through limited access and tourism. Under ecotourism cenotes, conservation and protection of the crucial, sparse water resources of the peninsula is centered, are even further dispossessed from Maya people and reappropriated for capitalistic use by tourists, with most of the cenotes being used for either private-enterprise ecotourist effort (Lopez-Maldonado & Berkes, 2017). As part of this ecotourism, Maya culture and the historical accounts of Maya experiences with cenotes are often used to exoticize the natural landscape for tourists–a trend that some geographers see paralleling colonialism (Brown, 2013) (Fairhead et al., 2012). Many conservation strategy reports even suggest using Maya culture to further conservation efforts stating, “Protection is more pertinent if the spiritual aspect of the site is considered as significant in itself, a useful lesson for the dominant society. This can be a call to protected area managers, landowners, government authorities, locals, and other stakeholders to recognize the importance and legitimacy of sacred values embedded in cenotes” (Lopez-Maldonado & Berkes, 2017). While the cultural importance of cenotes should be legitimized in conservation policies for this region as an act of validating the existence of Maya values, suggestions like these can be problematic when they are using the culture of the Maya to advance efforts that do not directly benefit Maya people. Policies that do not directly advance the interests of Maya people while capitalizing on their cultural understanding of cenotes can be seen as a gross cooptation and reappropriation of Maya values that mirrors the exploitation and dispossession that Maya have already been subject to in previous capital generating activities on the Peninsula.
Conclusion
As an individual who has taken part in the ecotourism of cenotes, my academic pursuits in understanding the legacy of colonialism and how it relates to my ancestors’–as well as the broader Maya–history on the Yucatan Peninsula have helped in creating a critical eye of conservation policies. Environmental issues are important, but we cannot adequately and equitably pursue methods of conservation when there are such stunning parallels found between ecotourism and colonization. We must create better policies that are respectful of the sovereignty, existence, health, and culture of indigenous people in (Hawn & Tison, 2015).
I’d like to bring the conversation back to William’s points around “ideas of nature” to understand how we are currently framing cenotes as nature. When we look at the history of how the nature of cenotes have been constructed, from pre-Hispanic times, to colonial occupation, to haciendas, to our modern, hyper-globalized, and capitalistic world, significant events can help us trace how and why change has occurred. Historicizing cenotes also allows for an understanding of how they are defined in different contexts of nature. In today’s context, a discourse of sustainable development has begun to further drive development in the region, however, this development is often unincorporated of the success of the Maya people while appropriating their culture after already dispossession of their access to cenotes (Medina, 2003). Furthermore, the idea of cenotes as a nature that must be conserved, while a valid point for advancing environmental concerns, is a continuation of the ecocracy regime that has distanced the Maya even further from traditional cultural representation of cenotes as they have been forced to become the workers of an idealistic, ecocentric “Mayan Paradise” for tourists.
As Wolfgang Sachs points out in the Development Dictionary:
“With the rise of ecocracy, however, the fundamental debate that is needed on issues of public morality – like how society should live, or what, how much and in what way it should produce and consume falls into oblivion. Instead, Western aspirations are implicitly taken for granted, and not only in the West but worldwide, and societies which choose not to put all their energy into production and deliberately accept a lower throughput of commodities become unthinkable. What falls by the wayside are efforts to elucidate the much broader range of futures open to societies which limit their levels of material output in order to cherish whatever ideals emerge from their cultural heritages” (Sachs, 1997, 35).
While ecotourism is often praised as an equitable way to achieve sustainability across the world, at the end of the day, we must be critical of it in execution as it is still sustaining the very Western system that enslaved and devastated Maya civilizations years ago. Adopting such nuance can, hopefully, aid in ensuring reparations for these atrocities.