En tu idioma / In your own language

Eduardo del Buey
Foto: Fabrizio León Díez
La Jornada Maya

Martes 13 de diciembre, 2016


This month the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico celebrates its fourth anniversary, and what a celebration it will be.

Events and activities will focus on the Maya past and present, and will celebrate this unique culture with music, theater, film, and conferences on topics of interest. It will bring together Mexican and foreign experts to explore the realities of this civilization and its current status in Mexico’s cultural mosaic.

The museum itself is a cultural landmark in a beautiful city, with its central core reminiscent of the mystical Ceiba tree of Mayan lore. The tree itself represents the three levels of life: heaven, earth, and the netherworld, and is emblematic of the Mayan cosmovision. With its ultramodern wide-screen theater, its interactive audio-visual exhibits, and excellent sound and light show, the Museum invites the visitor to explore this ancient culture in a contemporary setting.

This celebrates the past – the great Mayan civilization that built magnificent cities in the Mesoamerican jungles – with a uniquely modern twist, underscoring the fact that Mayan culture, art, and literature continue to thrive in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras in a globalized world.

The museum itself is trilingual, with all signage in English, Spanish and Mayan. The use of the Mayan language underscores the vitality of this culture and puts it on the same level as contemporary non-indigenous cultures. Thus foreigners as well as Mexicans of all backgrounds can enjoy the magnificent exhibitions that depict three thousand years of Mayan history and beyond, as well as an excellent depiction of the crash of the asteroid in Chicxulub, Yucatan, that wiped out the dinosaurs many millennia ago.

Rather than relegate the Maya to the past, the use of the Mayan language throughout the museum and the exhibits that describe contemporary Mayan life celebrate the ongoing widespread presence of the language and culture in modern Mesoamerica. The modern Mayan can visit the Museum with a renewed sense of pride, identifying with past achievements but not being trapped in their amber.

The Museum has taken a novel approach to its guided tours with short thematic tours that concentrate on one or more aspects of Mayan history and life. Visitors can explore Jaina culture, architectural marvels of the Mayan world, the Mayan uprising of the nineteenth century, conquest and colonization, destruction, and “mestizaje” (the mixing of the races), language and imagination, and the major touristic zones of the Yucatan peninsula.

Each tour lasts about thirty minutes, allowing the visitor to explore different facets of Mayan history and life in short bites, while allowing them also to explore the museum at their own pace if they so wish.

Non-Mayan and Mayan children explore the Museum and its many and varied interactive displays, and emerge with a much stronger understanding of each other than have previous generations.

This melding of ideas with technology is precisely the pedagogical tool needed to bridge what hitherto have been two solitudes. The use of modern communications technology as well underscores the Mayan use of glyphs rather than a linear alphabet, much as modern communications depend on graphic user interphases rather than the typewritten word. From pre-Guttenberg to post-Jobs, technology allows both the Mayan and non- Mayan cultures to meld in a new exploration of life and the cosmos that uses the communications tools of both.

The Museum is a public-private partnership. This is a new model for Mexico, in which the state does not make a massive monetary outlay at the beginning of the project, but in which the costs of construction and maintenance are amortized over a fixed period. This model allows the state to create massive cultural projects without the significant outlay of cash all at once, and also builds in the costs of maintenance so often lacking in many public projects around the world.

The Museum is a tribute to a modern yet ancient civilization, and is a perfect introduction to Mexico and the Yucatan. Congratulations on bringing the riches of the Maya to our lives for the past four years! Here’s to many more to come!

Mérida, Yucatán

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