About the Book
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The land is, once again, being rewritten in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula. A new tourist train is running, heritage revival sites and New Age resorts are being constructed, factory farms are expanding. These are contested development projects, promoted as progress even as each contributes to a symbolic and material form of death for Maya people. Drawing on decades of ethnographic work, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate chronicles how the transportation, heritage revival, real estate, tourism, and agricultural industries converge as proyectos de muerte, forms of coordinated capitalist extraction that reawaken colonial logics. These projects threaten Maya lifeways, memory, and land through novel forms of dispossession, ecological neglect, and cultural commodification enabled by new tourism archiving. In contrast, Córdoba Azcárate brings equal attention to an emerging countermovement, called archivos de vida, which practices embodied refusals through territorial defense, intergenerational dialogue, and site-specific cultural production. These archivos enact Mayanidades in conflict and coalition with one another, producing open-ended and ambiguous formulations of Maya culture, identity, and territory that resist erasure.