Mexican Studies Research Collective

Join us on Thursday, March 5, 2026 at 3-4pm CT for a work-in-progress workshop with Matt Johnson (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) on “The Maya Tourist: Archaeological Tourism and Revolutionary Cultural Politics in Early-Twentieth-Century Yucatán.”

Reading materials will be circulated with registered participants a week in advance.

This chapter-in-progress studies the cultural politics of mass tourism in early-twentieth-century Yucatán. It focuses on the period stretching from the arrival of Constitutionalist General Salvador Alvarado as governor in 1915 to the socialist governorship of Felipe Carrillo Puerto in 1922-1923. It argues that, during these years, the development of archeological tourism to sites such as Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, in conjunction with revolutionary political processes culminating in Carrillo Puerto’s governorship, allowed for the emergence of projects for local Maya tourism. Maya tourists, in this context, are local villagers who, through their dignified, free labor as citizens of the socialist state, and through their communion with the past splendor of Maya civilization via touristic visits to the ruins, will (it is imagined) make a triumphant entrance into modernity. Through close readings of literary works such as Antonio Mediz Bolio’s La tierra del faisán y del venado; political essays and speeches by Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto; and textual and visual materials from Tierra, the cultural magazine of the governing Partido Socialista del Sureste, this chapter narrates the history of these projects for Maya tourism. While these projects largely come undone in the wake of Carrillo Puerto’s capture and execution in the De la Huerta Rebellion in early 1924, they mark a significant moment in the cultural politics of tourism in Mexico, in which traditional host-guest distinctions are destabilized as Yucatecan elites position Maya tourists at the center of their political and aesthetic projects.