Mayas and tourists in the Maya world

In 1992, an agreement was signed by the governments of five Latin American countries: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, to join forces in the promotion of international tourism in the Maya zone. This elaborate and costly project, called the Maya World, promises the visitor "something for all tastes" in the way of cultural experiences and leisure pursuits. Such large-scale tourist projects raise many questions concerning the underlying motivations for the development and the impact that they will have on the peoples and environments of thr regions. Essentially, the Maya World tourist project can be seen as a newly constructed cultural landscape, based on design features from the existing cultural landscapes of the 29 Maya cultures of the region, imbued with new meanings that make them significant to a target market, the international tourist. This paper examines the construction of the Maya landscape in a Yucatec Maya town in Mexico and compares aspects of this Maya world to that developed for the tourism initiative. Changes in the meanings of landscape features for the local Maya, brought about by the appropriation and commoditization of their "world," will have serious implications for the cultural survival of this indigenous group.