Mexico: most people know that this beautiful country is a destination where you can immerse yourself in the ancient Mayan culture. I have experienced this country both as a tourist and heritage scholar and during an environmental journalist residency facilitated by Ninth Wave Global. The organization is based in Campeche, works around environmental, community and social projects generating local change. In February 2023, I attended a conference organized by the organization, named “Undevelopment”. The aim for this conference was to give voice to the ‘underdeveloped’ Mayan cultures and see them as the inspiration for positive change and local-led, grass-roots development. They believe that the western culture is underdeveloped instead of indigenous cultures. Main figures on the conference were Pedro Uc Be – a Mayan land rights defender, writer, translator, teacher and promoter of Mayan culture and the protector of its land; Julio, traditional Mayan medicinist, who both dedicate their energy to the preservation of Mayan practice and original thought; and the organizer of the conference, Jon Biofligo, journalist and Latin-America correspondent based in Campeche.

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Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is a vast coastal region brimming with tropical beaches, spectacular wildlife, outdoor adventure activities and last but not least: ancient Mayan ruins – archaeological zones are considered a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The Mayans are groups of indigenous people in Mexico and Central America and have fascinated generations of people since their ‘discovery’ in the 1800s. Mayan people seemed to be incredibly advanced in their metaphysical understanding and societal practices. But the main touristic “asset” is the fact that their civilization is considered one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the ancient world. For decades, scholars debated on the reasons why Mayan cities emptied, its civilization “collapsed” and the million of its people “disappeared” in a course of roughly hundred years around 900 B.C. That is why their ‘lost’ cities in the depths of the jungles of Mexico and Central America, filled with strange pyramids, appeal to many tourists.

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Seemingly alien yet familiar to them, Mayans intricate architecture, cuisine, language, and symbols inspire countless curious minds to visit Mayan tourist sites and therefore one of the most ‘bucket-list’ worthy places for the modern tourist with a well-intended interest in culture. The tourist looks at the world as if it is a work of art – a way of seeing that is hard for the tourist to do at home. When we are in awe of otherworldly, mysterious places, we feel alive. We seem to live for moments of sublimity where the world seems to speak to us, instead of the other way around, expanding our iPhone photo albums with ever more snaps of ancient, otherworldly touristic sites.

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Let’s not turn it around here. As a tourist, you pay an important price. That is the price of dependency. The tourist needs space and time to go to, to make that transition from commonness to appreciation. Adventure within a safe space and a scalable time so it fits travel agendas. Appreciation level goes from zero to a hundred right after you arrive at the destination. That is how a ruin of bricks in the Yucatan jungle mentally turns into a sacred place where admiration of culture that is passed can take place. Sites like Tulum, Coba, Chichen Itza and other ruins are now Mexico’s top tourist destination, with more than eight million visitors arriving each year to enjoy its archaeological sites.

What a few tourists get to know during their time in Mexico is that there’s nothing ancient about the Mayans.

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"The culture, its people, and cultural heritage are still here. It never really died. There are millions of people who identify as Mayan and speak Mayan languages and despite the turmoil that was created by the Spanish conquest, many of them have carried on traditions that have existed for over a thousand years. They live on lands we now refer to as Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas in Mexico and southward through Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras."

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Tourists think they honor Mayan traditions when visiting the sites, but it is actually the tourist narrative taking a bit of a dark and ironic turn here. It is dark because Mayan descendants are often forced to work on those popular heritage sites, while only a tiny fraction of the industry’s earnings is left with the environmental impact of tourism. Nobody seems to talk about the living Mayans, just the dead ones. Lots of them living around the historic sites are drawn into a situation where symbols of Mayan culture are exploited to make a living. One method of survival for the hundreds of Mayan groups is to manufacture and sell their traditional, brightly-colored woven goods to tourists – hand-made blankets, bracelets, shirts, and pants, as well as running “typical” Mayan restaurants and other touristic facilitations.

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It is ironic because to Many people, there’s nothing really special about those pyramids, simply because their view upon the world is different. Let’s explore that thought. Tourists are selective in their appreciation. Where tourists see division between what is mystical and ancient and what not, Mayans see significance mirrored in all things. Tourists can only appreciate things in a specific place, while the Mayan worldview accepts that all things located on earth and in the sky are living things that are “spirited”. Physical reality is just the symbol that translates that spirit.

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This, of course, needs more explanation. There are many worlds in one, that is what Mayan medicinist Julio explained to me during the conference. On day one of the conference, we walked in Julio’s beautiful garden that he created and maintained himself with local resources and vegetation. Julio invited us to walk through his garden with the thought that everything holds life. The rocks that formed the walls around the garden, the grains of sand on the ground that altogether formed our path to walk on, and so on. A table with a character, a roof with personality.

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What spoke to me was the commonness of his explanations. Julio did not guide us through his garden with those cues for the sake of giving meaning, to prove a certain type of sacredness, a specialness. There was no glorification as what happens with ancient Mayan temples – this place was not more special than other places. It was a logical consequence of one of his basic understanding as a human being: everything is alive. Our minds are too limited to comprehend the whole process of that – we only see a fraction of those worlds. And I felt that this concept was also not really meant to be comprehended or understood – but just to be accepted.

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Everything lives. Let that sink in. Truly getting into this way of thinking turns your experience totally upside down. And also answers my question on “why many western people travel to ancient sites and seek a form of meaning that is not even close to the Mayan way of experiencing space and time”, according to Julio. His facial expression turns serious as he starts to explain how we – not as ‘Mayan’ or ‘western’ people but as human beings – want to see worlds within worlds. We are made to see connections. It is our nature to move away from an ecocentric mindset and to fit ourselves within a bigger picture, whether that is a family structure, an organization, a nation or a religion.

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Pedro, the other wise teacher I was privileged to spend time with during the conference, elaborated on Julio’s answer.

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He explained that Western culture is efficient in how to organize life, but poor in how to give meaning to it. There is a natural desire for religiousness, a form of something mystical and invisible that widens narrow minds. We need a bigger picture that adds meaning and coherence.

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Because as soon as human beings understand how things fit together. A set of values to live by, reasons for existence, the reminder that there’s more to life than just our own lifetime, that type of stuff. That is why we search for meaning in different cultures because we can’t find it on our own.

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As a heritage scholar, I feel a tendency to call this “exotism”. Some heritage scholars in my field take this a step further and understand exotism as a form of colonization that strengthens the dominance relations between the northern and global southern countries. But this is a whole other topic in itself – let’s just stick with Pedro’s angle of religion here. You might get the chills by only reading the word ‘religion’ because there is this resistance to it in the west. Don’t worry: Pedro did not mean religion as a restrictive and authoritative institution – he meant religiousness as a bigger picture for existence, a symbolic sense of things. There was a time that western countries saw worlds within worlds in the western part of our earth too. We had many symbols too, though more narrated around people and places then actual natural forces, as within Mayan culture. But we got rid of them about 200 years ago, because we thought we were too smart for religiousness. In fact, many Western people today reject all religions as outdated and irrelevant.

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That’s both a good and a bad thing at the same time. Ever hear of the expression: “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?” During the rise of scientific thought, we started to see earth as a machine and our worldly understanding changed. It was believed that once we understood the function and rules of every individual part, we would be masters of the whole – of everything. It seemed that we did no longer need any form of religion anymore to navigate through life. Yet many, many years later we feel a spiritual hunger – a longing to understand the subtleties of existence, according to Julio. The desire to see the world less machine-minded and more alive. Perhaps you can relate – perhaps that is why you’re curious about mystical cultures that you don’t understand, like me?

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There’s a heaviness to the search for aliveness within the realm of far-away mysticism. And exactly this is what was being dismantled during my time in Mexico and while having conversations with Mayan descendants. It is about inclusiveness within Mayan tradition. The understanding of how we are connected with the world and each other is common sense. There’s no quest to look for it when one honors the life that is in all things. That isn’t really ‘magic’ and it is not ancient either, according to Julio. It is a grounded way of thinking that is the basis of forming meaningful relationships with daily life objects and things where we never truly pay attention to.

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I’m going to just let my imagination embody this perspective. For example, at the very moment that you are reading and I am writing this text, do you truly feel that the chair you’re sitting on is alive? What if the chair has invisible energetic roots that are connected to the vast ground carrying the chair? And what if the walls of the room you are in are mystical and ancient, what if they are holding many stories from the events from the past and yours is also added to it? It is not to be found in a specific place as we know it from dominant religious traditions in the west. If mysticism is normal, then the dramatic or emotional attitude about chasing it can be dropped. We don’t have to put candles on your chair and worship it every time you want to sit on it. No need to write about it, travel to it, pray for it, it is just there, under your butt.

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Does this mean we have to stop traveling and stay home sitting on our chairs? Do we have to stop seeking more aliveness? I hope not. Because I do believe the feeling of curiosity is also something very human, one might call it even ancient. From the invention of the wheel to the first heart transplant, and the publication of the Big Bang Theory or the development of the internet, the ingredient that leads to the next breakthrough is the same – understanding driven by the question if there is more to this world. Desiring more aliveness and new perspectives run through all the ages of human development. We should never abandon our nature, our desire to explore.

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Whether and how to give shape to this human desire to explore remains an important matter. But Pedro and Julio made it very clear: preferably not in my backyard. Both men expressed their sorrows on how tourism will further destroy their heritage and traditions – especially with the Tren Maya being finished at the end of the year. Tren Maya is an intercity railway line stretching 1525 kilometers around the Yucatan Peninsula, designed in service to the tourism industry but threatening both the local life in little Mayan pueblos as well as the biodiversity of the second-largest tropical rainforest in Latin America. From a scholarly perspective and within the mainstream discourse of ideas around tourism, I cannot help but share the worries about their culture. With this, I mean the worry of tourism producing again a foreign financial dependency, polarization, environmental destruction, cultural alienation, and the loss of social control and identity among Mayan communities that don’t have a voice in this whole process at all.

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But I’m not only a scholar. There are more perspectives and I will just take the freedom to borrow one here from Mayan culture. A perspective given by Pedro, but then within another conversational context when visiting an ancient site at <name of place where we went>. And that is the human perspective. We as humans are not born human, just like plants do not born like plants, even though we look like it in physical form. We are born as essence in bones and flesh that “grow into being a human”. It takes time to realize what kind of care we need for our growth, just like how we got to learn how to treat plants so they grow in their optimal and unique forms complementing the rest of the space. And it will take time to grow into a human that realizes how to honor fellow living things in ways we cannot even imagine at this point in time.