Becoming Maya

"In Becoming Maya, Wolfgang Gabbert has interwoven history and ethnography to trace 500 years of Yucatec history, covering colonial politics, the rise of plantations, nineteenth-century caste wars, and modern reforms - always with an eye toward the complexities of ethnic categorization.

According to Gabbert, class has served as a self-defining category as much as ethnicity in Yucatan, and although we think of caste wars as struggles between Mayas and Mexicans, he shows that each side possessed a sufficiently complex ethnic makeup to rule out such pat observations."

"Grounded in field studies and archival research and boasting an exhaustive bibliography, Becoming Maya is the first English-language study that examines the roles played by ethnicity and social inequality in Yucatan history. By revealing the highly nuanced complexities that underlie common stereotypes, it offers new insights not only into Mesoamerican peoples but also into the nature of interethnic relations in general."--Jacket.