ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 26
Dissenting Voices
Telling this story is Uc’s great-grandson, Pedro Uc Be, on an unsurprisingly steamy day in late
summer, 3 in the sparse reception room of his house in Buctzotz.
Buctzotz sits in the central plain of the Yucatan peninsula, roughly halfway between the
uncontrolled tourist infrastructure of Cancun, its ever-growing hinterlands to the east, and
the colonial city and new economic developments of Merida to the west. It is exactly the sort
of small town which still harbors what remains of the Maya, their people, language and
traditions.
Which is not to say that this enclave of what remains of the lived Mayan universe is islanded
- far from it - in order to service the needs of these two limitless urban sprawls, investors
have turned inwards on the region - one which developers regard as a Terra Nullius 4 - a noman’s land. On this land corporations feel able to freely generate vast infrastructure projects
such as limitless wind parks 5 and pig farms. 6 Additionally, water tables are continually being
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lowered through corporate overuse , all of which adds up to one of the greatest ironies of our
earth crisis times, that in general, it is those living most sustainably and/or who are having
the least environmental impact in rural spaces, who are most imperiled by the crisis that
they have the least responsibility in causing.8
Of course, in the not-so-long history of man on earth, the hinterlands have always been
placed in service of the city; the enlightened center, which - so goes the orthodoxy - is the
orb of government, knowledge, education and ideas around which everything else spins.
In a further irony not lost on indigenous communities the world over, it also happens to be the
center that teaches the history and culture of the regions back to the regions themselves. “It’s
a manipulation, evidently,” says Uc Be. “Gathering knowledge is just another form of
colonialist extractivism. It exoticizes material which is then taken and sealed away, detaching
it from the origins of the land, making it impersonal and untethered from those it belongs to.
Plus none of it makes fundamental sense unless you have that visceral link to the ground
beneath your feet. You can’t theorize about the land unless you know the land, unless you
work the land.”
Uc Be doesn’t say it directly, but also evident in the fact is that these captured narratives, held
in the service of occidental academia, relegate Mayan knowledge and astrological
understanding to the dusty shelves of anthropological research, no doubt associated with
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