La Interculturalidad es un asunto de Estado

Despite the project’s focus on multiple localities, the municipality of Yaxcabá can be considered a kind of center in this multi-sited research. With respect to the implementation of the research design, it was the setting where the multi-sited ethnography started and from which the connections to the cities of Mérida and Cancún were established. Indeed, perhaps more importantly, the municipality of Yaxcabá was also the site in which an essential part of my socialization as “Mayanist” or anthropologist specializing in the Maya lowlands took place. It was there where I learned about the milpa mode of production in situ (cf. Re Cruz 2003:494f.)

and significantly improved my language skills in Yucatec Maya. Accordingly, my view on the everyday lives of the Maya-speaking population in rural Yucatan is significantly shaped by my fieldwork experience there, even though the decision on the site was rather made from the armchair (see chapter 4.1.1).

The present section provides information on the rural setting in which the multi-sited ethnography was carried out. The research focused on the two communities Yaxcabá and Tiholop within the administrative unit of Yaxcabá. Accordingly, the following part describes how I arrived and lived there respectively.

Yaxcabá

The research site that represented the (re)starting point of my multi-sited research was selected based on mere scientific considerations. Accordingly, my access to the “field” was rather of a formal nature at the beginning. I visited Yaxcabá for the first time in 2012 to introduce myself and the research proposal to the municipal president (see chapter 4.1.1) and I returned there in April 2013 to conduct my fieldwork.

Upon my arrival in April 2013, I notified my return to the municipal authorities and looked for housing to establish myself in the community. This time, the “localized dwelling” (Clifford 1992:98) – an essential part of ethnographic fieldwork – was enabled through renting a room in Yaxcabá. It meant that “the ethnographer’s tent” in my case was one of the three compartments of a concrete house that was constructed by a well-off family to rent it out to non-native workers, mainly the staff of educational and medical facilities in the community. In this way, I somehow managed to settle down at the place, but still I hardly knew anybody in Yaxcabá to begin with the research. However, it was ultimately this particular condition of “localized dwelling” that significantly influenced the course of my fieldwork in Yaxcabá. My first intensive contact with local residents was indeed with neighbors living in a thatched house on the opposite side of the street, when the young mother inhabiting it with her husband and two children approached me

while I was leaving my rented room. Her openness and curiosity were partly owing to the extraordinarily positive experience that the family had with a foreign fieldworker who had occupied the room in the past. Therefore, in this case, it can be said that I did not “just arrive” there, but rather my fieldwork encounter was significantly conditioned by “connections” already established thorough preceding work of other researchers (cf. chapter 2.2.1). Farbiola176 soon invited me to her home and introduced her husband and children to me. At that time, her husband was cultivating corn on his own milpa and working additionally on others’

milpas in Yaxcabá to obtain cash income. However, he had also been a laborer in various cities

including Mérida and Cancún, as a construction worker in the widest sense. Since the couple and I were all of a similar age, we soon formed a close friendship with each other. As a result, I spent a significant part of my day at their place during the fieldwork, having almost every meal together with them, washing my clothes in their patio and conversing with them about anything and everything. In this way, apart from the emotional support that it provided to me, Farbiola’s home was also an important site for my professional socialization, where I became acquainted with the milpa mode of production from cultivation, processing to final consumption (cf. Re Cruz 2003:495). Participating in their everyday family life revealed a great deal about the daily concerns of the young family living on milpa(s) and gave me an idea about what it implies to continue traditional agriculture in Yucatan today. The circumstances that made the subsistence farming increasingly difficult are similarly experienced in many households of rural Yucatan (see chapter 3.1.1.1). Spending time with Farbiola’s family demonstrated how these conditions influence everyday practices at home, including the way in which cultural values are transmitted to the next generation. Given that home is the primary site of children’s socialization, participant observation of the family life proved a suited method to investigate the link between external conditions and cultural reproduction across generations.

Moreover, Farbiola and her family not only shared their knowledge and experience with me

but also provided practical support during the fieldwork, helping me to make contact and localize interview partners. In this way, it can be stated that my view on everyday life in Yaxcabá is significantly shaped through the network that extended from Farbiola’s house as a focal point.

Tiholop

In the case of Tiholop, both arriving and dwelling in the field were enabled through my rapport with don Efraín and his kin, which had been established beforehand (see chapter 4.1.1). Accordingly, even in comparison to my experience in Yaxcabá, the fieldwork in Tiholop was more centered on one extended family. This particular access to the field not only shaped my view on the locality but also my interest in a particular research topic.

Since I stayed with don Efraín’s family during the whole research period, I spent a considerable amount of time at their home. Besides the original focus on migrants’ language behavior, an intensive participant observation of their everyday family life drew my attention to the patterns of language socialization and intergenerational communication in the household. Tiholop is characterized by a high vitality of Yucatec Maya (see chapter 3.2.1.2). Moreover, in the family of don Efraín, Maya was almost the only language used for communication among the adults and adolescents. Only small children were often addressed in Spanish by elder family members. As result of this language socialization practice, children – especially those who do not live with their grandparents – were being brought up as Spanish speakers without actively using Maya. On the the other hand, the generation of grandparents felt much more comfortable with Maya, being less fluent in the Spanish language. At least in the eyes of a stranger, this disparity in their favored languages seemed like a break that could cause communication gaps among the generations within the same family. In view of the situation, I began to ask how the difference in language competence and behavior in three generations is perceived by Maya speakers, and perhaps in the first place whether it is considered a significant change at all.

While an intensive observation of intergenerational communication was only made in one particular household, a similar pattern of language socialization could also be observed in other families in Tiholop, with parents more fluent in Maya addressing their small children in Spanish. Retrospectively, it can be stated that the research’s special emphasis on perception of change and continuity in language shift (see chapter 5.3.2.2) was the outcome of my particular access to Tiholop, characterized by its specific language situation at the time of my fieldwork.