Maya cosmopolitans: Everyday life at the interface of archaeology, heritage, and tourism development

The village of Ek'Balam is located approximately 300 meters from the ceremonial center of the archaeological zone by the same name. The ruins at Ek'Balam are some of the most impressive pre-Columbian stuccoes found in the Maya World. In 1994, the archaeological zone opened to the public, and since then this village of around 350 residents has experienced numerous changes. While residents have always had ties to the regional economy, the opening of the archaeological zone represented their first extended engagement with the tourism industry. A major agent of change in Ek'Balam is a community-based tourism project, funded primarily by an agency of the Mexican government. In 2001, they began searching Mexico for good locations to implement community-based development projects. Ek'Balam became their pilot project, and since then proyectos (projects) have come and gone as quickly and as often as tourists.;This is a study of how a group of people negotiates and maneuvers through a web of social programs, tourists, and the like to live their daily lives. In this milieu, potentials for development are everywhere. On the backdrop of the constant rotation of state and federal programs implemented to aid Mexico's poor, indigenous, rural citizen…its peasants…tourism arrives as the new "proyecto" (project). With this arrival comes a shift in the way that mundane aspects of life are viewed and carried out. It is at this interface that transnational ideologies of ecological conservation and sustainable economic development complicate the local level conflict between tourism and tradition. Given these conflicts, can community-based tourism be a viable avenue to sustainable development? This dissertation presents a discussion of the strategies employed by residents to negotiate the design and management of a CBT project in the midst of everyday life.