Visiting Indigenous Communities in the Yucatan Peninsula

“Asi,” said the little girl with enormous eyes and a bow in her hair in her best patient voice. 

She guided my fingers to demonstrate “like this,” as I attempted a stitch she had just taught me. Afraid of making a mistake and ruining the floral embroidery she held in her hands, I raised my head to check with her before I put the needle into the mesh each time, proceeding if she nodded or letting her take the lead if she shook her head.

Along with other travel professionals, I was visiting the artisan cooperative of Lol-Chuy in the community of X-Pichil. X-Pichil is part of Maya Ka’an, a tourism destination in the Yucatan Peninsula made up of Indigenous communities that offers a more rustic and culturally rich alternative to nearby resort towns such as Cancun or Tulum. 

Magali Pech, a member of Lol-Chuy, spoke about the cooperative and its award-winning textiles while standing in front of the group of men, women and children who were hunched over their work. 

“Each of our pieces is unique because they are all hand-embroidered,” she said in Spanish as she walked around proudly with a traditional Mayan huipil (tunic) for us to admire. “It is not just a piece, but a piece that contains a lot of history, that contains feeling, because in it, we express our joys and our sorrows.” 

I got goosebumps as she spoke — her enthusiasm was infectious. 

The Importance of Community-Based Tourism

This was the last of a five-day fam trip put on by Caminos Sagrados, during which we had visited eight different communities and participated in a number of outdoor and cultural activities. The tour had begun with a boat ride through narrow channels between mangroves in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and cooking Caribbean spiny lobster soup with the fishermen’s wives of Punta Allen while learning about the small town’s sustainable fishing initiatives. 

Now, we are a living Maya culture. We are alive. And we are putting our hearts and souls into this.

In the following days, we had gone on nature walks to identify medicinal plants, swum in a cenote in the rain — where I saw one of the most beautiful double rainbows of my life — observed Maya ceremonies, learned about beekeeping and other traditional practices, made tamales from scratch and baked them in ovens we had dug in the ground and used an ancient device to extract sugarcane juice to make mojitos. 

Unlike some Indigenous tourism experiences, which “folklorize” (put on display or stage) a culture while glossing over its oppression, this tour felt like a chance to participate in Indigenous empowerment. There was a sense that the communities we were visiting were reclaiming their ancestral traditions and choosing to share them with visitors to keep these traditions alive while also creating an income stream. 

The people we met also didn’t skip over the more painful parts of their history; on multiple occasions, we had the chance to learn about the Caste War that took place at the turn of the 20th century, when the Maya people in the Yucatan Peninsula revolted against colonial rule. 

This five-day tour was more than a community-based tourism experience — it was what might be called a community-led tourism experience, in which members of the community are involved at every level of the planning and execution processes. 

The trip also incorporated elements of ecotourism. At our lunch stop one day, I found information about the importance of using biodegradable sunblock written in English and Spanish on a wall by the bathroom, and there were parts of the tour when we were asked not to wear sunscreen at all to protect the fragile marine ecosystems. Creating and enforcing such rules helps the communities preserve the natural wonders they rely on for their livelihoods.

The History and Future of Maya Ka’an

Now in its 11th year, Maya Ka’an consists of 78 different communities and 17 community-based tourism organizations throughout the state of Quintana Roo, and there are plans to expand. Zendy Celeste Euan Chan, our tour guide throughout the experience, emphasized that this kind of tourism is like a catena (chain), as the communities’ work is linked to form a collection of diverse tourism offerings that shine in combination with one another. 

Some of the more rural communities in Maya Ka’an are working toward offering additional amenities to help them become more appealing overnight destinations; in the meantime, many are accessible as day trips from bigger towns. Throughout my experience, I was impressed not only by the variety of activities on offer, but also the way these activities fostered cultural exchange while making a positive impact on communities that have overcome challenges to uphold their ancestral traditions. 

As Euan Chan put it when talking about Maya Ka’an: “Now, we are a living Maya culture. We are alive. And we are putting our hearts and souls into this.”