Yo, cenote

Verse

Verse ¡Cuídame! Porque soy un lugar grandioso, sé que a muchos les gusto, y a otros tantos asusto, poseo historias grandiosas, que algunos desean conocer, grandes piedras tengo, que me gustaría proteger.

Introduction

The poem above reflects the sentiments of a middle school student at the Escuela Secundaria Tecnica Num. 69 in the Maya community of Xocén, Yucatan, Mexico. In English, the poem translates closely as follows (and in keeping with the original rhyme scheme):

I, Cenote

Verse

Verse Take care of me! Because I am an impressive place, I know that many like me, And some others I scare, I possess grandiose stories, That some wish to know, I have great stones, That I would like to protect.

The student’s poem is written from the first-person perspective of a Yucatecan cenote, a natural freshwater sinkhole common in the karst geology of the otherwise dry, Yucatan Peninsula. Known as ts’ono’oto’ob (singular: ts’ono’ot) in the Indigenous Yucatec Mayan language of Maaya t’aan, cenotes form when the surface limestone erodes and dissolves, exposing the groundwater beneath that has, over time, carved out channels within the layers of limestone bedrock and sediment that make up the peninsula (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1
A photograph focuses on a group of students who stand at the periphery of a water-filled land with plants in the foreground. One of them points at something toward his left side.

Students gathering knowledge while photographing plants and animals in the Cenote Yax Ek’ (Green Star in the Yucatec Mayan language) in the community of Kaua, Yucatan. Photograph by Khristin N. Montes

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Thousands of these solution sinkholes dot the Yucatan Peninsula, and they come in a variety of types, ranging from closed cenotes that are entirely subterranean to open cenotes that have the appearance of surface ponds. Between these are a variety of other types that are all connected to the subterranean aquifer system (Anda Alanís, 2010; Batún Alpuche et al., 2021; Landry-Montes et al., 2020; López-Maldonado & Berkes, 2017). Prior to the drilling of modern wells, cenotes provided the main access to natural sources of freshwater, as there are very few surface rivers and lakes in the region (Beddows et al., 2007). Cenotes have long been important and powerful places in the Maya world. The reliance on groundwater here means that Yucatecan people have had to develop multiple strategies for collecting and storing freshwater. Cenotes are essential biocultural resources, simultaneously carrying biological, ecological, cultural, and historical significance for Indigenous people who have lived in this tropical savanna biome for millennia.

In ancestral Maya times before the Spanish invasion, as well as more recently, cenotes were understood as central places and animated features of sacred geographies (Bassie-Sweet, 2008; Crumley, 1999). Associated with agricultural fertility and cyclical renewal, they were often considered portals where rain and maize deities, along with other supernatural forces, dwelt and could be reached by humans (Brady & Ashmore, 1999; Brady & Prufer, 2005; Hernandez & Vail, 2013; Luzzader-Beach et al., 2016, p. 428; Moyes & Brady, 2012). Cenotes retain a visual language specific to Yucatec Maya communities that is shared with this ancestral past.

Specific cenotes, such as the Sacred Cenote in the Maya city of Chichén Itzá (late sixth–early eleventh centuries), were sites of religious offerings and foci of rituals essential for the well-being of the community as is apparent from the vast array of highly valued prestige objects dredged from that cenote between 1904 and 1961. Among these include gold and jade offerings associated with, and dedicated to, the rain god Cháak, a deity intimately linked to cenotes (Coggins, 1984). This suggests that Chichén Itzá’s largest cenote remained a place to make offerings and petition for non-human intercession beginning in at least the sixth century, through the Postclassic period (thirteenth–early sixteenth centuries), and into Colonial times—well after the city’s apogee.

Returning to the student’s poem, we see how the animacy and agency of cenotes continue to be appreciated and expressed in contemporary Yucatecan communities. Certainly, a rich tradition of oral histories and legends surrounds cenotes today, many of which are preserved in memory and communicated by village elders, including jmeen, or healers. Maaya t’aan (Yucatec Mayan) is the primary language of many jmeeno’ob (the plural term for jmeen). Unfortunately, both Maaya t’aan and cenotes in Yucatan face sustained threats from the effects of colonization and globalization. With less than 500,000 speakers, Maaya t’aan and much traditional knowledge are in danger of being lost as intergenerational transmission declines (López-Maldonado & Berkes, 2017, p. 10). Yucatec Mayan is rarely spoken in the home today, even in communities where the majority of the population are direct descendants of Indigenous Maya (Lizama Quijano et al., 2011; Quijano & Sosa, 2014). Most adolescents and young adults learn Spanish as a primary and “official” language, taking up English as a way to expand opportunities within the global tourist market—the economic vehicle that supports Yucatan through the state’s internationally celebrated archeological sites, beaches, and proximity to resorts in Cancun and the Maya Riviera (Re Cruz, 2003). In the case of cenotes, pollution resulting from increases in population and untreated wastewater, trash-dumping, intensive farming, animal husbandry, tourism development, and other industries like thermoelectric power and tortillerias, all adversely affect the delicate environments of cenotes and the aquifer (López-Maldonado & Berkes, 2017). Furthermore, cenotes’ importance and traditional cultural value in Maya history are not standard components of state or national primary and secondary school curricula.

As anthropologists, archeologists, and art historians who have worked and lived in Maya communities for many years, we recognize the ongoing threats to Maya biocultural heritage and language, as well as the potentially positive impact that young people could have at the local level in resource conservation, provided they have greater opportunities for exploration and access to information. Like many of our collaborators, we agree that education is an integral component of any effort to overcome heritage distancing, bolster the transmission of traditional knowledge, and restore control over tangible and intangible biocultural resources to Indigenous people (López-Maldonado & Berkes, 2017, p. 12; McAnany & Parks, 2012).

In 2018, InHerit: Indigenous Heritage Passed to Present at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill partnered with the Universidad de Oriente (UNO)—a community university in eastern Yucatan with a majority Maya student population—and nine middle schools in Maya communities in Yucatan, Mexico, to undertake the Cultural Heritage, Ecology, and Conservation of Yucatec Cenotes project. It is also referred to as Patrimonio Cultural, Ecología y Conservación de Cenotes Yucatecos (PACECCY) in Spanish. With financial and material support from the National Geographic Society and other institutional partners, we collaboratively created middle school-level experiential education resources focused on the environmental and cultural preservation of cenotes—with language survival included as part of cultural preservation. Three broad and interrelated, cenote-centered themes provided entry points and a flexible framework around which educator workshops and lesson plans were designed. These themes coalesced through our connections and collaborations with students, teachers, and researchers from both Mexico and the U.S. These included: (1) oral history and folklore of cenotes, (2) science and safety of cenotes, and (3) the archeology and heritage of cenotes. Over the course of the project, our team implemented experiential education activities in the nine middle schools related to each of these themes. To enhance the sustainability of the program, we also authored an open source textbook (Batún Alpuche et al., 2021; available at https://in-herit.org/resources-2/resources-for-teachers/) that organizes learning activities and related resources on cenotes into specific units designed to be used by secondary school teachers in Yucatán for their classes. In November 2022, hard copies of the textbook were published and disseminated to the participating middle schools, another 459 middle schools across the state of Yucatan, libraries in the state capital of Merida including the city’s Central Library, the main library at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, the state hemerotheque, and the state archive. More detail on textbook themes, activities, and preliminary results can be found in Landry-Montes and colleagues (2020).

In many ways, the Cultural Heritage, Ecology, and Conservation of Yucatec Cenotes project focused on dialogs of Maya placemaking. Keith Basso (1996) has explored placemaking in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache as the dynamic act of making meaning in the world, a method of world-building that requires multiple, yet culturally agreed-upon methods for remembering the past in ways that inform and influence the present. The concept suggests that particular sites, or environments, can elicit powerful cues for this kind of remembering and world-building. What happened here? Who was involved? What was it like? These are the kinds of questions that involve place in the function of creating realities in the present. Remembering is intimately linked to imagination and futurities. New realities are formed from the specific set of verbal and visual accounts that a place embodies (Basso, 1996; Casey, 1976, 1987). As Basso (1996) states,

What is remembered about a particular place—including, prominently, verbal and visual accounts of what has transpired there—guides and constrains how it will be imagined…Essentially, then, instances of placemaking consist in an adventitious fleshing out of historical material that culminates in a posited state of affairs, a particular universe of objects and events—in short, a place-world—wherein portions of the past are brought into being. (pp. 5–6)

For the Apache, this kind of living in a place and engaging with memory through a landscape’s features, laden as they are with mnemonic capabilities, ultimately serves as a context through which traditional wisdoms are taught and preserved across generations. In the Maya world, certain places and certain kinds of placemaking carry similar agency.

In the Yucatan Peninsula, cenotes play important, active roles in Indigenous placemaking and can be further conceptualized as a type of living archive. The student’s poem introducing this chapter, for example, invokes an image of the cenote as an animate being, one who holds and guards stories. From a Western perspective, archives are places where records have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. They are normally unpublished and almost always unique. One of their most important functions includes the preservation of primary sources, including oral, written, and visual accounts (these descriptions of archives and their functions in the West are adapted from the Society of American Archivists. “A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology”, http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/archives).

Archives are also situated places—locations where primary sources are collected, stored, and shared. Archives are often associated with powerful institutions like local and national governments. Much like archives, cenotes are dynamically situated places capable of collecting, preserving, protecting, conveying, and informing intergenerational memory and knowledge. In this sense, they have the unique capacity to function as centers for promoting and developing sustainable measures for knowledge collection, language revitalization, and maintenance. In the ancestral past, many cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula—including the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá already discussed, as well as Cenote Ch’en Mul at the nearby Maya city of Mayapán (1220–1440 CE)—were important to the overall cosmological significance and social memory of those centers. Offerings to cenotes or, rather, offerings to the sacred forces that cenotes embodied and provided access to, materialized stories connected to them. For the ancestral Maya, these stories were about primordial times, places, and their protagonists. Objects deposited within cenotes as offerings represent these stories and point to the considerable longevity of cenotes to function as knowledge collectors and disseminators—much in the same vein as living archives.

Cenotes were also, historically, cosmological anchors or “axis mundi” in city layouts and planning. There are many examples of the deep connections between watery caves, mountains, and pyramids that were widely shared across the entire Mesoamerican world (the term given to the broad Indigenous cultural area now comprised by the nations of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador) (Carrasco et al., 2002; Pasztory, 1997; Vail & Hernández, 2010). At Mayapán, for example, the major pyramid was built just over the cenote, Ch’en Mul. The pyramid rises nine levels above the cenote, in reference to the levels of the underworld, and was constructed as a “radial” pyramid featuring four staircases oriented to the cardinal directions (Masson & Peraza Lope, 2014). Like a world tree or creation mountain rising to the heavens, as referenced in the later K’iche’ Maya creation story the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996), the pyramid-cenote complex was an embodiment of the centered cosmos. The pyramid and cenote anchored vertical and horizontal directionality and provided a fulcrum around which all life moved. Anchoring these powerful directions and linking the world itself to a watery, life-giving space, the pyramid-cenote complex was also a symbol of agricultural fertility (for further discussion on Mayapán and a general overview of the pyramid-cenote complex see Landry, 2018).

Today, cenotes and caves across the Yucatan Peninsula maintain many connections to the built environments they are part of and are still situated and centering places in hundreds of Maya communities. For the majority of these Maya towns, the centrality of cenotes likely began out of necessity, as cenotes have always provided Maya towns with access to groundwater for drinking, bathing, and irrigation. When Spanish colonial grids were imposed on Maya mission towns, such grids carefully worked around cenote locations, as happened at Tahcabo in eastern Yucatan. Today, cenotes are widely used for bathing, municipal plumbing systems, irrigation, and to a lesser extent for consumption. Many have also been re-branded as tourist destinations. Like their Western archival counterparts, cenotes embody important and priceless cultural and historical value.

In contemporary Yucatan, cenotes as biocultural places are also intimately related to the Indigenous language, Maaya t’aan, as well as to primary source materials including local oral histories, shared folklore, and Maya codices—illustrated books of prophecy and fate created by Maya scribes in the fifteenth century. Cenotes are particularly strong placemaking devices, which serve as memory-keepers, and contemporary world-making features on the Yucatecan landscape. In short, cenotes are places that elicit both storytelling and documenting, in the sense that they simultaneously preserve and create Maya mythhistories.

Art historian Elizabeth Boone (1999) coined the term mythhistory to describe a common form of Mesoamerican narrative tradition that blends elements typically characterized by the Western literary tradition as belonging in distinct categories, namely “myth” and “history.” In Native American literature, there is less of a dichotomy between accounts of the past that describe events, places, people, and activities that were witnessed or experienced first-hand and tied to specific calendrical dates and locations versus those associated with primordial time and celestial, spiritual, or supernatural realms. Whether spoken, performed, or written, Mesoamerican mythhistories are inclusive of primordial and historical times and places that all contribute to true accounts of the past. We agree that this concept more accurately expresses how Indigenous languages communicate histories and the peoples’ relationships to diverse landscapes across Mesoamerica.

During the implementation phase of the PACECCY project, middle-school students collected mythhistories from knowledge holders in their communities. Stories were usually related to them by community elders, including their grandparents and, in some cases, local jmeen, or healers, who often serve as de facto community historians and keepers of traditional knowledge (Fig. 10.2).

Fig. 10.2
A photograph focuses on a man and 2 students who stand in a green space with a tall tree at their back. One of the students at the right holds and looks at the mobile camera in her hand.

Oral history interview conducted in the town of Xocén, Yucatán, Mexico. Middle school students interview the community’s jmeen about the town’s cenote. Photography by Khristin N. Montes

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Stories related to cenotes were also shared by students through project surveys taken both before and after the implementation of class activities. These were recorded in Spanish as the students’ primary language (although several students are also fluent or passive speakers of Maaya t’aan) (see Landry-Montes et al., 2021). Students collecting mythhistories from elders used oral history backpacks developed specifically for the project. Later donated to the participating schools, the backpacks contained tools for collecting community stories, including voice recorders, notebooks, pens, and flashcards with cenote-focused vocabulary and oral history prompt questions in both Spanish and Maaya t’aan. The bilingual oral history and vocabulary cards gave students the option to interview community elders in Maaya t’aan and practice translating from one language to the other.

The students’ answers to survey questions, as well as the content of the oral mythhistories they collected contained certain reoccurring themes. Foremost and to this day, a cenote is associated with a specific deity, spirit guardians, or dueños (a pairing that corresponds to precontact times based upon the content of the extant Maya codices). Many of these dueños are thought to guard precious treasure and offerings within the cenote’s depths—a point that students across communities recounted. Second, cenotes are sanctuaries for, and linked with, powerful animals and Maya ancestors. It is said that certain cenotes can themselves embody zoomorphic and anthropomorphic qualities particularly those of snakes and feathered serpents. Though some aspects of contemporary Maya stories have changed from pre-Spanish contexts, the survival of feathered serpent ideologies, in particular, reflects a clear cultural continuity with the ancestral past. In Yucatan, the feathered serpent was a hero-deity who was intimately linked to the religion and politics of several of its major Indigenous cities (including Chichén Itzá and Mayapán). He was called Kukulcan in the Yucatec-speaking world and known as Queztalcoatl in Nahuatl-speaking regions further north (both translate to “feathered serpent”) (for further background on this figure see Carrasco, 1982; Landa & Tozzer, 1941; Masson & Lope, 2014; Miller & Taube, 1993; Nicholson, 2001; Ringle, 2004; Ringle et al., 1998).

The connections between cenotes, mythhistories, and animacy continue to be important to Maya communities. More important, perhaps, is the notion among Maya youth that cenotes should be cared for today because of these connections. It was explicitly stated in student survey feedback, for example, that cenotes were—and are—sacred and animate resources once cared for by their ancestors. It was noted that they have been handed down to Maya youth as patrimony to be protected now and in the future. Notably, however, these same connections and the belief that cenotes are living and influential places, can make cenotes dangerously powerful locations—many contemporary Maya stories about cenotes and their ecosystems include some element of peril. For example, there is a continuing notion that beautiful, but malevolent, female spirits live within certain cenotes and come out to lure men to their deaths at night (particularly inebriated men). Lastly, both oral mythhistory interviews and student surveys reveal continuance of the popularly held idea that cenotes were places of human sacrifice in the ancestral Maya past. We recount some of these collected survey answers and oral mythhistories below.

One particularly popular mythhistory shared throughout Yucatan concerns a giant feathered serpent (La Tzucán) that inhabits a cenote. A common version of the story that we heard, shared across smaller Maya communities in Yucatan, as well as in larger cities including Valladolid and Merida is as follows:

It is said that some cenotes have guardians who care for, protect and live within them. They can be animals or spirits, but they all have special powers. A story that is shared in various Mayan communities throughout Yucatan is about “La Tzucán,” a large snake that lives in the cenotes. In Yucatan there are all kinds of snakes, but La Tzucán is unique. He is very big, much bigger than any snake you have ever seen, and he has feathers. The history of this snake began thousands of years ago when there was a terrible drought in the land of the Mayab. Cháak, the God of rain, searched and searched for water, but the earth and the skies were dry. There was no water in the cenotes, caves or rivers, so he rode away on a winged animal in search of water.

He traveled for many, many days and finally got tired and to regain his strength he sat down on a thick log. And just as he sat down, the trunk moved! Because it was the body of a great snake! The snake was hungry and ate the animal that Cháak was riding, Cháak was so angry with the snake that he said—now it will be your duty to travel with me in search of water—The snake wanted to run away, but the god stopped it and after a fierce fight finally subdued it, and then Cháak with his power made the snake grow large, feathered wings and so it took flight, with Cháak on his back, looking for water. They traveled until they reached the sea and there Cháak filled hundreds of pots with water.

The snake wanted to stay in the sea, because there was so much water that it could swim in, but Cháak tricked him by telling him that as soon as they filled the cenotes and caves with the water they collected, there he would have as much water as he wanted, and he would be the guardian of that water. Cháak also promised him that he could return to the sea after having seen all the cenotes, that is, when he was about to die. But Cháak is smart because he knows that the snake will always lose its skin, it seems to die, but it will grow new skin year after year. And that is how the great Tzucán never died, and it is said that the plumed serpent, Tzucán, guards the water of the cenotes to this day. (Batún Alpuche et al., 2020, p. 42)

The feathered serpent guardian from the story above was described to us by many students in surveys and oral mythistories and seems to be an especially important figure in the town of Calotmul. There, students commonly recounted tales of a feathered serpent emerging during certain times of the year:

During Semana Santo (Holy Week) a giant snake with wings emerges from the cenote and flies around its rim to protect it.

A giant serpent lives in our [Calotmul’s] cenote. The cenote is very dangerous because of the serpent. It emerges during Semana Santa and flies around the outside of the cenote. It is the guardian of the cenote.

In the towns of Xocén and Kaua, three local middle-school students collected the following stories about other dueños of cenotes, the treasures protected by the dueños within the cenotes, and the concept of these treasures as offerings to cenotes.

They say about the history of my town, that all cenotes have a lord. A long time ago in ancient times, two girls went to take water out of the cenote. They just had a week of being married and living with their new families. There, at the cenote, they were talking, and they asked one another to show their wedding rings, but when they took the rings off of their fingers, they dropped them by accident. When they tried to take the rings out of the water, both of them were sucked into the cenote by the evil air living in the cenote.

According to the history of my town, they say that all cenotes have their own lord, and it is said that this cenote´s lord is a woman who gets out of the cenote during the night to take drunk men inside the cenote…

It is said that in the cenote during a special day, in ancient times, you may see the shadow of a treasure chest full of jewels and money. People say that all these jewels and money belong to the princesses who were given as sacrificial offerings to the ancient gods.

Cenotes are clearly elements of living, and lived, landscapes, as is attested to by the stories above. They also braid together and preserve rich Maya histories, environmental ecology, and the sense that such patrimony must be protected. Students from Kaua, Cuncunul, and Tahcabo shared the following stories with us about their connections to cenotes as special ecosystems—important for their own lives as well as those of their ancestors. The students’ stories reflect sentiments that as inheritors of the cenotes, it is now their job to care for them.

For me, the cenotes are most important because they were left to us by our ancestors, the ancient Maya. They protected the cenotes and cared for their plants and animals. It is important that we care for them now.

Cenotes are a natural gift left to us. They are the patrimony of humanity. They are especially important for their flora and fauna.

Cenotes are important for their natural, fresh water and they serve as a special ecosystem for different animals. We need to protect them because our grandparents and ancestors left them to us.

For me, cenotes are significant because their biodiversity is part of our patrimony. For many years, cenotes have helped the people in the community of Tahcabo live. We inherited the cenotes from our ancestors. Cenotes are beautiful places. It is there that we can forget our troubles and there is no noise, just the song of the birds.

Cenotes are important to me because we can consider them part of our patrimony left to us by our ancestors. One of our histories about the cenote in our town is that a meteorite fell here in our town of Kaua and formed a large hole. Water started to fill there and then a star fell in the hole and turned the cenote green (this is why the cenote in our town is called Yax Ek’ or Green Cenote).

Ultimately, telling stories about cenotes links language, people, and place to one another. This practice of storytelling about cenotes has a deep history in Yucatan. Stories featuring supernatural animals, like la Tzucán and Xtabay, correspond directly to the most common categories of the oral tradition documented by ethnographers and shared widely across the peninsula, namely supernatural animals, anthropomorphic beings, and witchcraft, all linked to caves and cenotes, which are both dangerous and guarded (Cervantes & Augusto, 2010, p. 44). Cenotes have long been key elements in visual as well as oral language systems. They appear, for example, in the iconographic and epigraphic contexts of the precontact Maya codices introduced earlier in this chapter (Hernandez & Vail, 2013; Vail, 2000). Although only four pre-Hispanic codices exist today (not one is currently archived in the Maya region), there certainly were hundreds, if not thousands, of pictographic documents curated in Maya communities throughout the Peninsula in the early sixteenth century. Unfortunately, the majority were destroyed by Spanish conquistadors or missionaries in the Colonial Period (Landa & Gates, 2015). Of the four that remain, at least two—the Dresden Codex and Madrid Codex (so-named for the European cities in which they are archived today)—were likely authored by scribes within communities located in the Yucatec zone of cenotes (Chuchiak, 2004). These books utilize standardized forms of glyphs and visual imagery that communicate Maya creation stories, chart and prognosticate ritual and agricultural events related to the Maya cyclical calendars, and document local celestial and terrestrial sacred landscapes (Knowlton, 2010; Vail, 2000; Vail & Aveni, 2008; Vail & Hernandez, 2013). The Madrid Codex, in particular, features several examples of cenotes, which are paired with important patron deities such as the rain god Cháak and refer either to underworld spaces or the central/fifth direction in Maya cosmography. Notably, Cháak is a deity that is still called upon by local jmeen during Ch'a Cháak, or rain-calling, ceremonies in Yucatan wherein altars are set up and oriented to the four directions with a special position on the altar saved for the center direction (Hernandez & Vail, 2013; Salvador Flores & Kantun Balam, 1997).

Like contemporary Ch'a Cháak rituals, cenotes from the ancestral Maya codices are closely associated with specific flora and fauna of Yucatan. Additionally, the ancestral Maya relationships among patron deities, cenotes, and animals from Yucatan closely mirror the contemporary oral histories recorded by students participating in the PACECCY project. In Fig. 10.3, Cháak is depicted as a patron deity of a cenote from the Madrid Codex. The cenote’s rim is formed by the body of a serpent. This visual representation of a cenote and serpent in Madrid is strikingly similar to the accounts given by students in Calotmul in which the feathered serpent emerges from their cenote and flies in circles around it—effectively becoming the circumference of the cenote itself through this action.

Fig. 10.3
An altered hieroglyph presents the rain deity Chaak in a cenote. A serpent body runs along the rim of the cenote. To the left, the lower body of a dysmorphic human body appears in lateral view.

Image of the rain deity, Cháak, depicted as the patron deity to a zoomorphic cenote from the Madrid Codex, page 5a, top register. Image altered after the combined Léon de Rosny, “Codex Cortesianus”, (Rosny 1883) Libraires de la Société d'Ethnographie, Paris, 1883 & Brasseur de Bourbourg, “Manuscrit Troano”, Imprimerie Impériale, Paris, 1869–1870.Footnote

The Codex Cortesianus and Manuscrit Troano represent two pieces of the Madrid Codex (they were reunited from two separate collections).

The full codex can be found on FAMSI: http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/madrid.html

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Given that Maya codices are considered to be priceless examples of world heritage and embody a great wealth of information about placemaking, environment, and Indigenous language of Yucatan, it is a remarkable and tragic consequence of colonialism that most of the Maya students with whom we worked did not know of the codices’ existence prior to the project. This is one result of heritage distancing or the process whereby the dominant culture worked to systematically de-legitimize Indigenous cultural practices and knowledge systems (especially religions), separate Indigenous people from their lands and sovereignty, and ultimately attempt (unsuccessfully) to erase them and reduce their history to a footnote (McAnany, 2016, pp. 3–35, 2020, p. 322). Of course, the structural violence that has coalesced through colonialism over several centuries has taken many forms, including the nationalization of heritage as patrimony and the re-casting of the precontact, autochthonous civilizations of Mexico as progenitors of the mestizaje, a mixed race comprised of the equal blending of two great civilizations (Bonfil Batalla, 1994; Castañeda, 2009). While Indigenous people in Mesoamerica continue to be marginalized socially, economically, and structurally within the system, they are increasingly estranged from a sense of shared identity based on strong connections to the tangible and intangible expressions of cultural heritage like language, ancestral traditions, archeological sites, and artifacts (McAnany, 2020, p. 322). This is arguably reinforced not only in Mexico, but throughout the Americas in the educational curricula that eschew Indigenous knowledge systems and languages while presenting colonialist social hierarchies, landscapes, and resource extraction as innate or inevitable.

As we observed this kind of heritage distancing in operation first-hand during our project, one goal became the introduction of the codices into school curricula, including how they reference and valorize the visual cultural and linguistic environment of Yucatan. Since the collaborating teachers were also largely unfamiliar with the codices, significant resources were directed toward capacity-building in order to ensure that students could learn about their ancestors’ book making and literary tradition. This capacity-building is still an ongoing component of the project. The experiential learning activities included students authoring their own personal codices using the visual vocabulary and structure of the ancestral books (Fig. 10.4).

Fig. 10.4
A photo of a group of students who sit around a table. One of them writes on a piece of paper while the other observes him carefully. A few books are laid open in front of the students seated on the right side.

Students in the town of Xocén, Yucatán create their own codices. Photograph by Yaremi Tuz May

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The study of cenotes as biocultural heritage provides a context for the validation of community wisdom, with a strong capacity to link Indigenous knowledge systems (such as language) to environmental conservation and sustainability. Cenotes are capable of acting in these ways because of their powerful roles as placemaking devices and living archives. They have the power to center and preserve human stories, while simultaneously linking people to ecological environments and to one another, even across generations. Storytelling is an important Indigenous research methodology, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) points out:

Each individual story is powerful, but the point about the stories is not that they simply tell a story or tell a story simply. These new stories contribute to a collective story in which the Indigenous person has a place. For many Indigenous writers stories are ways of passing down the beliefs and values of a culture in the hope that the new generations will treasure them and pass the story down further. The story and the storyteller both serve to connect the past with the future, one generation with the other, the land with the people and the people with the story. (pp. 144–145)

Stories and storytelling ultimately provide bridges between people and people, and between people and places. Unfortunately, as López-Maldonado and Berkes (2017) discuss, one of the key issues limiting cenote conservation is the lack of cultural valorization of cenotes or, at least, the weak support for transgenerational bridging of knowledge/values about them. They suggest that one solution is to provide education about cenotes at the local level (the community level) and support emotional engagement people have with these special places. Our own project followed this recommendation and sought to create access to new educational opportunities, build capacity with teachers, and encourage a local “revalorization” of cenotes as archival and placemaking devices, linking together intergenerational knowledge shared through stories in place. Oral mythhistories recorded during this project and descriptions of cenotes recounted in student surveys strengthen intergenerational knowledge transmission and preserve narratives about cenotes as irreplaceable examples of cultural heritage. These reflections articulate a certain “iconography of cenotes” made tangible in the lived environment and visualized in cenote imagery, such as that presented in the Postclassic codices.

Cenotes are precious, unique places. They are contexts that inspire connection and deep emotion, and anchor entire communities—they have long done so. Cenotes are also spaces in desperate need of care, in the sense of ecological conservation and in terms of maintaining and preserving their priceless links to biocultural Maya heritage. For those who can hear them, cenotes themselves seem to tell us these things,

Take care of me,

I possess grandiose stories,

That I would like to protect.