Identities

Global Studies in Culture and Power

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Grieving for mestizaje: alternative approaches to

Maya identity in Yucatan, Mexico

Beatriz Reyes-Foster

To cite this article: Beatriz Reyes-Foster (2012) Grieving for mestizaje: alternative approaches to
Maya identity in Yucatan, Mexico, Identities, 19:6, 657-672, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2012.734766

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.734766

Published online: 15 Oct 2012.

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 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Vol. 19, No. 6, November 2012, 657–672

Grieving for mestizaje: alternative approaches to Maya identity

in Yucatan, Mexico
Beatriz Reyes-Foster

(Received 6 April 2012)

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This article takes as its point of departure the highly contested theoretical
terrain of ‘Maya’ identity in Yucatan, Mexico. Set in the physical terrain of
a state psychiatric hospital, this article uses a framework of identity culled
from the narrative of a young woman, ‘Claudina’, committed to its wards, to
argue that being ‘in-between’ categories of ethnic identity, an experience she
characterises as a painful sense of ambiguous loss, can be fruitfully analysed
using an analytical framework of ethnic identity introduced by Claudina her-
self. Specifically, I argue that categories of identity culled from Claudina’s
story – mestizaje and elegancia – represent a valuable opportunity to think
about how power dynamics and relationships operate in situations of ambiva-
lent identities and social suffering. To this end, I use Claudina’s language as
a point of departure for understanding the lived experience of everyday life in
Yucatan today.
Keywords: Maya; Yucatan; lived lives; identity; culture; ethnicity

But there is an elegance that comes from being a professional, and another that
comes from mestizaje. My grandmother is a great wise woman, who has always
taught me how things should be done in order to do them well.

‘Claudina’, Hospital Psiquiátrico Yucatan, July 20081

Introduction
In 2005, the production of Mestiza Power by Yucatecan playwright and folklorist
Concepción León Mora premiered to critical acclaim and rapidly gathered inter-
national attention. The testimonial play about the lives of Yucatec Maya women
living in contemporary Yucatan has been presented nationally at the Instituto
Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico, and internationally at the New World Theatre
in Amherst and the Rasmuson Theatre of the Smithsonian Institution’s National
Museum of the American Indian (Underiner 2010). The women in the play rep-
resent an idealised version of the ultimate Maya Woman:2 dressed in huipiles
while occasionally donning Ray Ban sunglasses, speaking heavily Maya-accented
Spanish; they take on male oppression, poverty, racism, marriage and motherhood.

ISSN 1070-289X print/ISSN 1547-3384 online

© 2012 Taylor & Francis
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 658 B. Reyes-Foster
The play was written as a tribute to the strength, beauty and power of Maya
women. However, León Mora did not title her play Maya Power, or Mujer Maya
Power. She titled it Mestiza Power, and when she explains the origins of her script
she states:

I saw a mestiza wearing [a pair of] Ray Ban [sunglasses], and was impacted by that
image so I stopped and talked to her . . . because [I have] enormous admiration for
them (my grandmother was a mestiza) I wrote this play, which is only meant as an
homage to their dignity and our culture. (Underiner 2010, p.176)

Like all Yucatecos, León Mora uses the word ‘mestiza’ to refer to Yucatec Maya
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women. This article is not about a mestiza, but about a woman who, like León
Mora, is the granddaughter of a mestiza. Like León Mora, she expresses a pro-
found admiration for her own grandmother, whom she considers to be a ‘great
wise woman’. Unlike León Mora, who had training as a folklorist (León Mora
2010), Claudina lacks the symbolic and financial capital to celebrate her heritage:
she feels robbed of it. This article considers ethnic categories of identity in Yucatan
from the viewpoint of someone who, not fitting into any of these identities, finds
herself in a painful space of alterity.
This article is based on research collected in the context of a broader project
focused on suicide and suicide prevention conducted at Yucatan’s public psy-
chiatric hospital, Hospital Psiquiatrico Yucatan (HPY) during 2008. During this
time, I conducted ethnographic research within the Integral Attention to Suicide
Program (Programa Integral de Atención al Suicidio or PIAS) unit at HPY, a pro-
gramme specifically directed at addressing the needs of patients committed to
HPY following a suicide attempt. While I address the vicissitudes of suicide and
its construction as a public health crisis elsewhere (under review), in this article,
I present the narrative of one particular patient within the PIAS unit, Claudina,
who provided me with an analytical framework that, while not sidestepping tradi-
tional anthropological categories of ethnic identity, allows for the further iteration
of identity in Yucatan as a complex tapestry of locally mediated ideologies of
class, ethnicity and history. Specifically, I argue that categories of identity culled
from Claudina’s story – mestizaje and elegancia – represent a valuable opportu-
nity to think about how power dynamics and relationships operate in situations of
ambivalent identities and social suffering. Underlying this argument is the belief
that subject-generated categories of identity may provide scholars with useful ana-
lytical frameworks that might enhance, challenge, contradict or nuance our data in
ways that current theoretical frameworks might overlook.
The ‘lived lives’ approach to understand social suffering has been a hallmark
of critical medical anthropology for some time (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987,
Das 1996, 2007, Green 1998). This approach assumes that the best way to account
for social suffering is through a critical engagement with the phenomenologi-
cal experience of those who suffer, the lived experience of everyday, quotidian
life. In trying to comprehend the complex nature of identity in Yucatan, I follow
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 659
Lila Abu-Lughod’s call for ‘ethnographies of the particular’ (1990, p. 149),
interpreting this call to implicitly privilege individual biography as a means of
‘reconstructing people’s arguments about, justifications for, and interpretations of
what they and others are doing’ (153). Because all social phenomena are man-
ifested in the realm of the particular, Claudina’s story is remarkable only in its
elegance, poignancy and beauty. Her story presents an example of lived experi-
ence, but it shares familiar elements with the stories of many others I encountered
inside and out of the psychiatric hospital. In this article, I present Claudina’s story
as a narrative produced in a space of alterity (Corbey and Leerssen 1991, Taussig
1993) – the psychiatric ward – that unveils a subjectivity marked by an ambiguous
and profound sense of loss – an identity that is itself in a space of alterity. The loss
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in this narrative is a loss of identity, but it is an identity that is articulated using

the language of mestizaje and elegancia, terms that are more directly relevant in
Claudina’s life than ‘indigenous’ or ‘Maya’.
As such, mestizaje and elegancia became the analytical tools I needed to anal-
yse Claudina’s discourse and the often unspoken realities of her experience. In her
discourse, mestizaje (used in other parts of Latin America to refer to people of
mixed indigenous and Spanish descent) refers to the wearing of huipil and the
speaking of Yucatec Maya; more importantly, mestizaje indexes an identity rich
in symbolic capital associated with a particular kind of knowledge of the world
that Claudina calls elegancia. Elegancia can be read as what Pierre Bourdieu calls
habitus, ‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past
experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations,
and actions’ (1972, P. 83). Elegancia is an affect of belonging that Claudina herself
does not possess but perceives in others.
This article has a twofold aim: firstly, to contribute to the field of Maya stud-
ies a conceptual framework for understanding identity in contemporary Yucatan
in a way that engages familiar conversations using an unfamiliar vocabulary. This
framework is meant to add further texture and nuance to current anthropological
understandings of racial and ethnic identity in Yucatan. Secondly, this article is an
example of how subject-generated theory – in this case, the concepts of mestizaje
and elegancia – may provide anthropologists with useful analytical frameworks
that might enhance, challenge, contradict or nuance our data in ways that current
theoretical frameworks might overlook. Combining Bourdieu’s analytical frame-
work with a locally produced vocabulary of everyday life, I try to push the limits
of some of our anthropological frameworks in an attempt to produce a ‘critical
unveiling’ (cf Bourdieu 2000) of my own. This article, then, is as much about
method in an analytical sense as it is about lived experience in Yucatan today.

Critical approaches to Maya identity

Many volumes exist on Maya identity in Mesoamerica and beyond. Maya studies
span two countries, twenty-nine Mayan languages and at least three distinct
historical and ethnological trajectories. Rather than presenting an exhaustive
 660 B. Reyes-Foster
review of this literature, the following focuses primarily on recent literature on
Yucatan’s unique modality of Maya identity. The limitations of the Maya category
of identity become evident when we try to define who ‘counts’ as a Maya person
in Yucatan: is it someone who speaks Maya? If so, if this person’s children do not
speak Maya, are they then no longer Maya? Do Maya people need to live in rural
communities? Dress a certain way? Possess certain knowledge? Have certain sur-
names? Who decides what ‘Maya’ means? If identity is, as an early reviewer of this
piece suggested, a complex interplay between self-ascription and identification by
others, where do we find the boundaries of ‘Maya’ as a category of ethnic iden-
tity in both how Maya people self-ascribe (or not) and how others identify them
(or not)?
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Much of the debate surrounding ‘Maya’ as a category of ethnic identity in

Yucatan has fluctuated between an ‘acculturation’ viewpoint that sees the disap-
pearance of ethnic categories in the migration of Maya people from villages to the
city (Mossbrucker 1992, Redfield and Villa Rojas 1933) and a post-colonialist
approach that emphasises the ongoing oppression and structural violence to
which Maya people are continually subjected (Barabas 1979, 2003). Scholars like
Gabbert (2004a) and Castañeda (1996, 2004) have built on earlier literature of
ethnicity in Yucatan by introducing models of ethnicity that account for change
over time as well as structures of power that maintain a social hierarchy based on
ethnic discrimination. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, literature in
Maya studies began to call into question academic understandings of ‘Maya’ as
an analytical category. Quetzil Castañeda, in his introduction to a special issue of
The Journal of Latin American Anthropology focusing on Yucatec Maya identity,
notes, ‘the term “Maya” is itself an embattled zone of contestation of belonging,
identity, and differentiation’ (2004, p. 41).
While studies of the Pan-Maya movement in Guatemala (Warren 1998, Nelson
1999) and the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas (Nash 2001) exemplify how ‘Maya’
has taken on a highly contested and politicised meaning in Guatemala and Chiapas,
Castañeda asks why the Maya of Yucatan, unlike the Maya of Chiapas and
Guatemala, ‘didn’t . . . have a globally transnational, media-attended identity poli-
tics movement on a par with those of their neighbors?’ (2004, p. 38). His answer is
that people called Maya in Yucatan not only have another set of politics with a his-
torical trajectory different from their Guatemalan and Chiapaneco counterparts,
but also another modality of identity. By using the term ‘modality of identity’,
Castañeda challenges the reader to think beyond traditional binary understandings
of ethnicity and race towards a more inclusive understanding of Yucatan’s Maya
culture.3
Perhaps the single most critical take on ‘Maya’ as an analytical category in
the Yucatecan context comes from the work of self-described ‘post-Maya’ intel-
lectual Castillo Cocom (2005). Castillo Cocom contextualises the epistemology of
the term ‘Maya’ as an academic and political construct, articulating it in terms
of the K’ichee creation myth in the Popol Vuh. Basing his argument on the
K’ichee Quincunx of Creation, Castillo Cocom models what he refers to as the
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 661
fifth creation of the Maya, where new deities – anthropologists, archaeologists,
sociologists, linguists, business people, the tourist industry, the state and politi-
cians – have created the Maya on the axes of anthropology, history, linguistics and
archaeology (2005, P. 134). Not without a sense of irony, Castillo Cocom uses the
K’ichee creation myth to criticise the essentialising process to which the people
created by the academic Quincunx – ‘The Maya’ – are subjected. Castillo Cocom’s
criticism of the Maya as an analytical category concludes, ‘the essential quincunx
is an invention that oppresses the subaltern’ (2005, p. 140).
It is hardly surprising that Castillo Cocom, who grew up in the village of
Xocenpich, Yucatan, would find the Maya analytical construct essentialising and
oppressive. Implicit in his critique of how the Maya concept was subsumed by
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Yucatecan popular culture and government is the reality of a large number of peo-
ple who are excluded from the ‘Maya’ category and rendered invisible in the public
eye because they do not speak the right language or wear the right clothing. In this
sense, Claudina could be considered an acculturated (in Mossbrucker’s sense of
the word) Maya woman who not only faces a prejudiced postcolonial social struc-
ture, but also, in her own lived experience, undergoes a painful awareness of loss
of her ethnic identity. This article contributes to the literature outlined above by
introducing the language used by Claudina as a way to critically engage with our
research subjects, thus adding another layer of nuance to the complex tapestry
formed by the racial, ethnic and class identities of Yucatan.

Critical unveilings
The first time I met Claudina and introduced myself as an anthropologist she
immediately understood the nature of my work. During our first session, she talked
about ‘the book I was writing’ and about how my studies ‘were about how and
why people do the things they do’. I was surprised because during my stay in
Yucatan, most of my interlocutors did not really understand what I did or what
an anthropologist was. Claudina was from a village and had migrated to Merida
as a child. She had fulfilled her minimum educational requirements and dropped
out of high school, but she was very well read, often citing authors such as Vargas
Llosa during sessions. On 14 July 2008, the date of the session I analyse in this
article, Claudina had already been hospitalised for two weeks following a hang-
ing attempt. That day, she listened intently to the other three patients participating
in the session and offered her advice. When her turn to speak came, she had just
heard another patient’s story of his struggles with alcoholism.
I reproduce a large portion of the transcript here in order to better convey the
flow, style and language of this nuanced narrative.

When my father drank, he would tell us we were whores, or that we were poor, or that
we were good-for-nothings. That made my self-esteem very low. I had a boyfriend,
and he would take me anywhere. And he would take me there in his car. And I say it
this way because it is not worth anything, it’s just bread. ‘You want to eat, Claudina?
 662 B. Reyes-Foster
Let’s go eat something good’. But he didn’t care about me. He didn’t love me. What
he wanted was sexual satisfaction. And what happened was that I was in awe of
what he had. . .I grew up in a very humble home. And when I say humble, I don’t
mean that I only ate tortillas and beans, or that I only ate tomato and chile like my
grandmother does. But with him, I started to see new things. I saw people that go into
Costco. People that go into Walmart. People that buy their things at Plaza Altabrisa.
And this made me sad. [her voice breaks] You know why? Because I cannot go to
those places. I can only go look at the things they have, but I cannot buy anything.
I’m used to buying second-hand clothes. My underwear, I buy it at the tianguis4 and I
wear it. I’m not ashamed to say it because I am used to poverty. But then I read a letter
that my boyfriend had written to another woman, where he said all kinds of beautiful
things. But me, he just told me I was dumb, or that I was useless. Or that I was an
india. “You say you read?” [he would say] “What do you read? Look how fat you’ve
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gotten.” And because he told me I was fat, I joined a gym. What I didn’t understand
was that he didn’t want that, he wanted something else. He wanted someone with an
intellect. And you know who he loved? You know who he cared about, with a deep
love? A doctor. And now, every time I see a car I think that it’s him, and I feel panicky
and scared. Scared that he will see how sad I am. That he will see how I have nothing
. . . He made fun of me because I wanted to read Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
He said I was not going to understand it. But when I read it I found that Melville
used a language that was not exactly difficult. It was explicit. It was elegant. I am
always drawn to things which are elegant. But there is an elegance that comes from
being a professional, and another that comes from mestizaje.5 My grandmother is a
great wise woman, who has always taught me how things should be done in order to
do them well.

Claudina’s parents had discovered her hanging herself from a showerhead, inter-
vened and rushed her to the hospital. When she recovered from the physical
injuries, she was committed to HPY for nearly a month before she was diag-
nosed with bipolar disorder and released. Prior to her suicide attempt, she had gone
through long periods of what she described as profound sadness. She also previ-
ously engaged in acts of self-mutilation and attempted to starve herself. This article
is neither about the ways in which her behaviour was interpreted and ultimately
categorised and disciplined into the orderly chaos of the ICD 10 (the World Health
Organisation international diagnostic guide), the most commonly used diagnostic
tool at HPY, nor about the multiple meanings of her self-destructive behaviour.
This article is about the often unspoken social reality of suffering articulated in
Claudina’s discourse.

Mestizaje, Elegancia and Humildad

Claudina’s narrative reveals the complex tapestry of an identity constituted
through her own upbringing and her experience of alterity. At the outset of her
story, Claudina notes that ‘When my father drank, he would tell us we were
whores, or that we were poor, or that we were good-for-nothings’. Class, race
and power dynamics are intrinsically connected: Claudina’s father would accuse
her, her mother and her sisters of being ‘poor’ alongside of being whores or
good-for-nothing. Claudina points out that the abuse hurt her self-esteem, but
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 663
she does not perceive a disconnect between the insult of being ‘poor’ and that
of being a prostitute or useless: all three are equally hurtful and offensive. Her
father, too, did not seem to see a conflict in insulting his wife and daughters by
calling them poor.
Why is poverty itself an insult? The distinction between rich and poor, as well
as the stigma of poverty, is a part of both Mexican national culture and local
Yucatecan ideologies. It is a common trope in Mexican telenovelas (avidly con-
sumed in Yucatan), in which the motif of a beautiful, poor girl who falls in love
with a wealthy, handsome man frequently recurs. The young man’s family and
friends humiliate her for her poverty and sabotage the relationship, which at the
end always prevails. While she is never attacked for being an india, the heroine
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of the soap opera is referred to by her enemies as a pobre diabla (poor devil,
a common derogatory term for the poor), salvage (savage), mosca muerta (dead
fly, another derogatory term that carries similar meaning to the English ‘gold-
digger’) and verdulera (literally, ‘vegetable seller’, referring to the occupation of
selling vegetables at a local market). Likewise, the classic film Nosotros los Pobres
(1948), starring Pedro Infante, is the tragic story of a poor family struggling to sur-
vive in a world that despises it for its poverty. While both films such as this and
telenovelas such as Rosa Salvaje (1987), Simplemente Maria (1989), Maria la del
Barrio (1995), Maria Jose (1995), Rubí (1998), Amor Real (2003) and a myriad
of others convey a moral lesson against the discrimination of people based on their
poverty, the currency of the message conveyed and the recurrence of this trope in
the genre speaks to the salience and continuing relevance of discrimination on the
basis of socioeconomic status.6
The motif of the stereotypical telenovela is relevant to Claudina’s own rela-
tionship, which she perceives as one of profound socioeconomic difference: ‘I
had a boyfriend, and he would take me anywhere. And he would take me there in
his car. And I say it this way because it is not worth anything, it is just bread’.
Claudina emphasised two words in her story, anywhere and car. The freedom to
go anywhere, as we see later in the passage, meant the introduction of Claudina
to a new world. Previously unknown places to her, markers of prosperity such as
Costco, Walmart and the new, gleaming, exclusive, Alta Brisa shopping mall, cre-
ated a contrast to the life she had known before this relationship. Furthermore, car
ownership carries tremendous status in rural Yucatan. The fact that not only could
her boyfriend take her into places she would never ordinarily enter on her own, but
that he drove her there in his own car, and the emphasis that Claudina uses when
she shares this information in her narrative is deeply significant and indicative of
the enormous socioeconomic gap she perceives between her and her boyfriend.7
As the narrative progresses, Claudina analyses her own state of mind: ‘And
what happened was that I was in awe of what he had . . .’ she says, because
she ‘grew up in a very humble home. And when I say humble, I don’t mean
that I only ate tortillas and beans, or that I only ate tomato and chile like my
grandmother does’. This recognition of being ‘humble’ is marked by a negative
clarification of identity: although she is poor, she is not truly ‘poor’ in the way
 664 B. Reyes-Foster
that her grandmother is poor. Claudina’s grandmother is ‘poor’ in a different way
than Claudina because she eats things that are markers of ‘indigenous identity’:
tortillas, beans, tomatoes and chiles. As such, Claudina’s poverty is qualitatively
different than her grandmother’s.
It is important to note the contrast between the word pobre, which is used by
her father to insult her and her own use of humilde. These two words present
two simultaneous narratives about poverty in Mexico: one portrays poverty as
a source of discrimination and, in the other, it is a source of divinity. The for-
mer narrative has been outlined above. As for the latter, the presence of word
‘humilde’ in Yucatecan discourse has roots in Spanish colonialism (Farriss 1984,
p. 91), but also repeatedly surfaces in contemporary Catholic discourse in Yucatan
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and is closely associated with the concept of the ‘preferential option for the poor’
and Liberation Theology (Arrupe 1968, Paul 1991, Pontifical Council for Justice
and 2004). Claudina, who is a practising Catholic and an avid reader of the Bible
(among many other things), is using humilde deliberately, placing herself within
a category that may be stigmatised within a larger social structure but is seen as
closer to the sacred within the powerful sphere of influence of local Catholicism.
Claudina’s earlier statement about her poverty, which she qualifies with the
word humilde, drew a distinction between her grandmother’s poverty (who only
eats tortillas and chiles) and her own. In his analysis of Maya identity in Yucatan,
Quetzil Castañeda notes that ‘humilde’ is one of several self-identific terms used
by people scholars refer to as ‘Maya’ (2004, p. 53). As Claudina continues to speak
about her grandmother, we learn that the primary point of difference between
Claudina and her grandmother lies in her grandmother’s mestizaje, which makes
her a great wise woman. Later, we come to see that Claudina understands this dis-
tinction as a painful divide where she stands in profound disadvantage. This divide
is embedded within broader local discourses of race and ethnicity, even when she
does not explicitly engage with them.
Although Claudina does not explicitly acknowledge her own engagement with
broader local narratives of race, the reality of Yucatecan racism bubbles beneath
the surface of her narrative, occasionally breaking through to the surface. ‘But me,
he just told me I was dumb, or that I was useless. Or that I was an india. ‘You
say you read “What do you read? Look how fat you’ve gotten”. . . . He wanted
someone with an intellect’. The fact that Claudina’s boyfriend calls her an india
further illustrates the insurmountable social distance between them. The distance
solidifies when Claudina recognises that she is in competition with a woman who
she sees as her own antithesis: an educated doctor. The boyfriend’s accusation of
indian-ness, followed immediately by his mocking her desire to read Melville’s
Moby Dick, conveys the still powerful association of label indio with ignorance
and backwardness.
The stigma of the word ‘indio’ is bound within colonialism and post-
colonialism (Farriss 1984, Rugeley 1996, Clendinnen 2003, Gabbert 2004b).
However, in living memory, its most recent iteration can be located in the
ideological shift brought to Yucatan by Lázaro Cardenas’ agrarian reform of 1937,
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 665
one of the most important legacies of the Mexican Revolution. Although imperfect
and not resulting in the complete transformation of social hierarchy promised, the
agrarian revolution of 1937 did change how peasants related to their land (Fallaw
2001). Boasian anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s social programme of indigenismo
promoted the values of communal land ownership and praised those markers of
indigenous culture that were perceived as most useful to the ‘forging of a new
nation’ (Gamio 2010[1916]). However, Gamio’s indigenismo, while praising cer-
tain aspects of ‘indigenous’ culture, had a primary goal of building of a new
Mexican identity based on the ideal of racial and cultural mixing. Mexicans, in
Gamio’s view, inherited the best of both their Spaniard and Indian forefathers.
As such, he positioned indigenous people in Mexico as ‘contemporary objects of
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paternalistic reform’ (Smith 2010, p. 82).8 By the end of the twentieth century,
the word ‘indio’ in Yucatan had become a racial epithet as powerful as the word
‘nigger’ in the United States.
Claudina ends her narrative reflecting on herself by drawing a parallel between
the woman her boyfriend left her for and her grandmother, who appears to be an
influential figure in her life:

I am always drawn to things which are elegant. But there is an elegance that comes
from being a professional, and another that comes from mestizaje. My grandmother
is a great wise woman, who has always taught me how things should be done in order
to do them well.

In this final utterance, Claudina foregrounds the concepts that form the central
axis of this article: mestizaje as a positive identity marker and elegancia as an
embodied disposition containing symbolic capital. Mestiza is the feminine form of
the word mestizo, which in Yucatan refers specifically to speakers of Yucatec Maya
who wear the traditional embroidered dress called huipil. Contrary to ethnic labels
of convenience used in anthropological writing on Latin America to differentiate
between indigenous (indian) and non-indigenous (mestizo) people, in Claudina’s
discourse, the words mestiza and india take on inverted meanings: a mestiza is an
authentic being with knowledge and ownership of her place in the world.

Mayas and Gente bien: Mestizaje as symbolic capital

One day, during a different session, Claudina once again brought up the impor-
tance of elegancia in her life. She explained to us that elegance was very important
in her line of work as a hair stylist and for this reason she made sure to conceal
evidence of her self-mutilation.

See, I let the ants sting my feet, because I was punishing myself for my bad thoughts.
But, I’m intelligent. I wanted to punish myself, but why didn’t I let the ants sting my
hands instead? Because I work as a stylist, and my clients won’t like it if their stylist
has hands covered with insect bites. Looks are very important to me, and my clients
want to look elegant.
 666 B. Reyes-Foster
While I do not intend to enter into a detailed analysis of Claudina’s act of self-
mutilation, I cannot help but notice the prominence of the language of embodiment
in her discourse. Elegance is embodied, not simply in bodily motions but in bod-
ily appearance – Claudina herself has the ability to bestow a certain degree of
elegance upon her clients, but at the same time she recognises that she does not
have the kind of elegance that her rival, the doctor – a woman who Claudina per-
ceives belong to a class of people I call gente bien – possesses. Like mestizaje, the
identity that Claudina describes as ser un profesionista (being a professional) is
expressed through the set of embodied dispositions she calls elegancia. As such,
elegancia is not exclusively associated with being either mestiza or profesionista:
Claudina notes that both profesionistas and mestizas possess elegancia, but these
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are two different types. Elegancia operationalises the symbolic capital of both ‘pro-
fesionista’, a class-based category of identity, and ‘mestiza’, which can be more
closely understood to be an ethnic category of identity.
Mestizaje as symbolic capital is an unusual reading of Bourdieu. For Bourdieu,
symbolic capital is linked to social structure in a broader sense; thus, symbolic
capital is usually accompanied by economic capital. However, the symbolic cap-
ital concept is very useful in thinking through the phenomena I encountered in
my research, which Claudina’s narrative so poignantly verbalised: where conven-
tional wisdom may assume that indigenous people are the most disadvantaged in
regional Yucatecan society due to the fact that they occupy the lowest rungs of the
socioeconomic scale (INEGI 2010), in Claudina’s world, indigenous people have
an advantage over her because they possess symbolic capital that she can never
aspire to. As I thought about the concept of symbolic capital, I came to Bourdieu’s
take on the unequal distribution of symbolic capital in his Pascalian Meditations:
‘one of the most unequal of all distributions, and probably, in any case, the most
cruel, is the distribution of symbolic capital, that is, of social importance and
of reasons for living [emphasis added]’ (2000, p. 241). I wondered if Claudina
ever felt bereft of reasons for living as she intuitively perceived the cruelty of this
distribution of symbolic capital before she verbalised it in the therapy room.
Claudina’s feelings of inferiority are closely tied to her poverty and ethnic-
ity: the loss of her mestiza identity – her grandmother’s identity – leaves her in a
limbo from which she cannot escape: she is too india to belong to her boyfriend’s
social class, but not humilde enough to be a mestiza and aspire to the greatness and
elegancia of her grandmother. Claudina does not call herself an india, though she
has been labelled as such. In fact, she does not call herself anything. Claudina’s
discourse is one of absence and mourning. In her narrative, she conveys a sense
of loss, not only of a person she held dear, her boyfriend, but of herself. Here is
an identity of alterity mediated by grief – understanding herself as an ‘other’, she
defines herself not by what or who she is, but by what she is not and what she
has lost. Claudina’s narrative has some interesting implications for an anthropo-
logical understanding of the relationships between identity, ethnicity and class in
Yucatan. While not sidestepping the Maya–non-Maya binary opposition, it adds
nuance to it in potentially productive ways. Her story crystalises how social class,
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 667
poverty and inequality converge with ethnicity and produce a conflicted subject
who understands herself to be in a disadvantaged position in society despite –
indeed, because of – the fact that she is not a mestiza
The ‘Maya versus non-Maya’ ethnic identity binary juxtaposes two different
categories of identity. On the one side is the category of ‘Maya’ identity, which
I have described at length. On the other side is a group of people who in vari-
ous works have been called ‘whites’, mestizos and ladinos. Of course, just like
‘Maya’ does not refer to a homogenous group of people, these oppositional cate-
gories index a diverse population of varying ethnicities, classes and socioeconomic
status. In this article, I briefly describe Yucatan’s elite because of their presence
within Claudina’s narrative. Although Claudina uses the term ‘profesionista’, I
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have chosen the label ‘gente bien’, for two reasons. First, gente bien is frequently
used for self-ascription by local elites.9 Second, the label, as it is deployed on the
ground, encompasses categories of entitlement, class and socioeconomic status
that are not as readily apparent using the term ‘profesionista’. It is important to
note that while ‘Maya’ indexes ethnicity, ‘gente bien’ can be read as an index of
class with underlying implications regarding ethnicity (the vast majority of ‘gente
bien’ are phenotypically white and have Spanish or Lebanese surnames).
Anthropological studies of Yucatan’s elite are scarce (Folan 1967, Margolies
1969, Joseph 1979, Wells 1982, Joseph and Wells 1986, Rivero 1999, Loewe
2007). The people academics refer to as ‘Maya’ live in a world inhabited and
often constructed by the gente bien and vice versa. La gente bien live in a world
at once present and removed from Claudina’s universe. Its ranks are made up of
old and new wealthy Yucatecan families, the newer wealth reflecting the influx
of Maronite Christian Lebanese immigrants who flooded the area during World
War I. Originally scorned as los turcos by established Yucatecan society, these
Lebanese–Yucatecan families now represent much of the upper class (Baklanoff
2010). Mérida’s thriving economy is evidence to the prosperity of the gente bien:
this city of one million successfully sustains Mercedes-Benz, Land Rover and
BMW dealerships. Its sparkling new malls house high-end designer stores such
as Nine West, Bershka and Sfera. The coffee chain Starbucks and its Mexican
competitor, The Italian Coffee Company, are thriving.
For Claudina, the crux of her encounter with the gente bien centres on con-
trast: when she sees the luxury mall ‘Altabrisa’, she feels she will never be able
to purchase anything from its stores. She is a spectator of a world she physically
occupies – vividly aware of her ‘otherness’. On the other hand, she does not speak
Maya, she does not wear the huipil and she does not live in a village. For Claudina,
the words ‘mestizaje’ and ‘elegancia’ are much more relevant to her identity than
‘Maya’ or ‘non-Maya’. However, she still understands herself to be in a grey zone
marked by suffering and a lack of symbolic capital: although she perceives a binary
opposition of identity, she finds that she fits into neither side. She is trapped in an
identity of alterity, of being not one clearly defined category of identity or the
other.
 668 B. Reyes-Foster
Elements from Claudina’s story are expressed in less overtly by many people
in Yucatan, particularly the sense of loss by young people of the mestizo identity
and an affect of despair at the abject unfairness of two vastly different socioeco-
nomic worlds occupying the same physical space. One may wonder if the fact that
Claudina is a psychiatric patient in a state mental institution holds particular sig-
nificance to what she is expressing. It is possible that the clarity of ideas expressed
in her story could only have emerged inside the space of alterity represented by
the psychiatric hospital itself. While inequality, poverty and something very akin
to Durkheimian anomie surfaced in many of my conversations with interlocutors
over years of fieldwork, the way in which Claudina’s discourse crystalises these
phenomena and presents them as different aspects of a single, painful existence is
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unique. Claudina’s discourse is subversive in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the word.

Writing on subversion, Bourdieu notes that

the political action of subversion aims to liberate the potential capacity for refusal
which is neutralized by misrecognition, by performing, aided by a crisis, a critical
unveiling of the founding violence that is masked by the adjustment between the
order of things and the order of bodies. (2000, p. 188)

In Bourdieu’s view, the political action of subversion and ‘critical unveiling’

is carried out by people he terms ‘professional practitioners of the work of making
explicit’ (2000, p. 188). Here, Bourdieu clearly refers to the role of academics and
public intellectuals in political subversion. For Bourdieu, political subversion is
always led by intellectuals (in the rare instances when subversion is actually pos-
sible), because they are more able to bring elements from the realm of doxa into
public discourse. Thus, my reading of Bourdieu through Claudina’s narrative may
appear somewhat unusual because Claudina is not an academic or a public intel-
lectual, lacking the symbolic capital necessary to engage in subversion. I would
argue, however, that the adjustment of Claudina’s body by the order of things –
her removal from society – and her habitus, the product of a complex life history
not unlike that of many young Yucatecans today, converged into a critical unveil-
ing that allowed Claudina to articulate what had until now remained unspoken for
her. In her bodily limitations, as she is ‘ordered’ by a medical establishment that
is itself disordered, Claudina found a space for the articulation of an affect long
present in herself. Claudina grieves for her lost mestizaje. Trapped in a grey hell
where she is an india but not a mestiza, pobre but not humilde, Claudina feels and
perhaps is invisible to everyone except herself.

Conclusions
I opened this article with a brief commentary on Yucatecan playwright Concepcion
León Mora’s 2005 play Mestiza Power. Written with the goal of ‘giving a
testimony of life and dignity to contemporary Maya women’ (León Mora
2010), Mestiza Power acknowledges the obstacles faced by mestizas living in
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 669
contemporary Yucatan: poverty, gender inequality, domestic violence and racism.
More importantly, the play highlights how being mestiza empowers women to rise
above these challenges and find joy and dignity through the stories of three women
living in contemporary neoliberal Yucatan: a domestic employee, a street vendor
and a traditional healer. I never had the opportunity to ask Claudina if she had ever
seen Mestiza Power, but I suspect the message conveyed by the play – that mesti-
zas are their own best resource in overcoming the challenges faced – would ring
true. I also suspect she would be the first to tell me that Mestiza Power does not
represent women like her, who face all the same obstacles and challenges faced
by mestizas without the ability to rely on their rich linguistic and cultural heritage.
Perhaps she might say that mestizas derive their power from their elegancia.
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In the preceding pages, I suggested that Claudina’s narrative represents an

identity of alterity: she recognises herself as not fitting within the particular cul-
tural boundaries of mestizaje or (for lack of a better word) ‘dominant’ society. For
her, the experience of being an ‘other’ is characterised by an ambiguous process
of grieving for an identity she feels she has lost and a frustrated, ambivalent desire
for one she can never possess. Unlike writers like Anzaldúa (1999) who celebrate
living on the borderlands of identity, Claudina derives no empowerment from her
‘otherness’.
In the end, Claudina’s narrative contains language that may add further nuance
to our understanding of Maya and non-Maya identities in contemporary Yucatan.
Yucatecan mestizaje – in Claudina’s sense of the word – may be a concept that
deserves further scrutiny. In this article, I argued that the term used in conjunction
with elegancia as a form of habitus has some uses as an analytical framework that
enhances our present understandings of identity in Yucatan. Moreover, Claudina’s
story presents a ‘lived lives’ example of the experiences of people like her, who
can be rendered invisible in scholarly literature because they don’t fit into existing
categories of identity. As I have stated earlier, if we can understand identity as a
complex tapestry woven from the threads of class, ethnicity, history and personal
experience, Claudina’s story and the concepts culled from it add a richer texture
to the weave.

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Deanna Barenboim, Theresa MacPhail and Joanna Mishtal for
their helpful comments and close readings of earlier versions of this article.

Notes
1. This research was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research
Abroad grant and approved by the University of California Berkeley Office for the
Protection of Human Subjects Institutional Review Board (OPHS-IRB). All names of
living people in this article are pseudonymous.
2. A gendered analysis of mestiza as a category of ethnic identity is crucial to fully
understand it. Due to space constraints, this analysis is beyond the purview of this
article and may be pursued in a different publication.
 670 B. Reyes-Foster
3. In parallel fashion to Castañeda’s efforts to problematise the identity of Yucatan, a
similar veering away from reductionist understandings of identity based on binary
oppositions of ethnic identity has also taken place in Guatemala (Hendrickson 1995,
Little 2004, Hale 2006).
4. Tianguis refers to a street market where one is able to purchase used clothing and goods
at low prices.
5. Mestizaje is used in national and academic discourses to refer to the mixing of
European and indigenous bloodlines. However, this is not how Claudina is using this
word. Claudina’s use of mestizaje is further developed later on in this article.
6. Estill (2000) suggests that Mexican telenovelas function as tropes of Mexican national-
ism. From this perspective, the motif of inter-class romance and the frequent portrayal
of the poor as noble protagonists struggling against the oppression of the wealthy
speaks to Mexican revolutionary rhetoric.
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7. For a relevant folkloric representation of social class boundaries in the city of Merida,
see the YouTube video ‘Ciudadano Meridano’ uploaded to YouTube on March 3, 2012
(“juanpelusas” 2012).
8. It is very important to note that assuming that Yucatan is ‘Mexican’ is highly prob-
lematic. The historical and contemporary aspects of this phenomenon are beautifully
explored in Steffan Ayora-Diaz’ (2012) Foodscapes, Foodfields and Identities in
Yucatan. The stigma attached to the word ‘indio’, however, is as salient in Yucatan
as it is elsewhere in Mexico.
9. ‘Gente bien’ is an identity marker not exclusive to the Yucatecan elite. More research
on the term’s origin is necessary, though I suspect the term travelled to Yucatan through
national mass media. In 2008, the popular local magazine, ‘Gente Bien’, also published
local versions in Jalisco and Coatzacualcos, Mexico.

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BEATRIZ M. REYES-FOSTER is Assistant Professor in the Department of

Anthropology at the University of Central Florida.
ADDRESS: Department of Anthropology, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central
Florida Blvd, Howard Phillips Hall 409 I, Orlando, FL, 32816-1361, USA.
Email: beatriz.reyes-foster@ucf.edu