A Return to Servitude ─ Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancun

Weaving Avery Gordon's notion of haunting with theories of transnationalism and modernity, M. Bianet Castellanos argues that the cultural and material shifts that accompany Maya migration for work in Cancun's tourism industry enable negotiation, accommodation, and even resistance to Mexico's neoliberal reforms. A Return to Servitude dismantles romantic representations of tourism and illustrates vividly how the Maya struggle to survive."---Patricia Zavella, UC Santa Cruz

"M. Bianet Castellanos introduces us to Mayas serving in the tourist meccas of the Yucatan where their ancestors built the temples and pyramids that draw people from all over the world. As they refashion their lives in the playgrounds of transnational tourists she reveals how they are acquiring new notions of personhood and gender, leaving behind the old markers of dress and language as they negotiate and sometimes resist neoliberal premises."---June Nash, author of Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization

A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatan Peninsula, M. Bianet Castellanos examines how Cancun came to be equated with modernity, how this city has shaped the political economy of the peninsula, and how indigenous communities engage with this vision of contemporary life. More broadly, she demonstrates how indigenous communities experience, resist, and accommodate themselves to transnational capitalism.

M. Bianet Castellanos is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.