The Transnational Construction of Mayanness: Reading Modern Mesoamerica through US Archives ed. by Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Ben Fallaw (review)

Reviewed by: The Transnational Construction of Mayanness: Reading Modern Mesoamerica through US Archives ed. by Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Ben Fallaw Shannan Mattiace The Transnational Construction of Mayanness: Reading Modern Mesoamerica through US Archives. Edited by Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Ben Fallaw. Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2023, p. 242, 30. 95. The Maya region of Mexico and Central America has long held a fascination for US adventurers, scholars, cultural elite, and tourists. Many Mexican elites from the Yucatán peninsula, in turn, have been drawn to the US. Indeed, the Yucatán state tried to join the US on two occasions in the nineteenth century. Scores of archeologists, anthropologists, and historians have dedicated decades to the deep study of the Maya world, largely within the confines of their separate disciplines. This book adds to the voluminous literature on the Maya world. In their introductory chapter, the editors note that "research on Mayan peoples has tended to figure more in regionally grounded anthropological and historical scholarship" (13). One of the contributions of this volume is the authors' attempts to break out of these disciplinary grooves to examine, in a transnational and multisited project, the distinct paths that the "intervention of US capital, diplomacy, and military power have created…where 'close encounters' between Mayan people and US American officials, scientists businesspeople, and tourists take place" (11). The authors in each of the eight chapters that comprise this volume focus largely on two themes: 1) they discuss how Mexican, Central American, and US elites (and non-elites to a lesser extent) constructed "Mayanness" over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through transnational exchanges; 2) they make US-based archives accessible to a broader international audience and explore alternative archives in research on the Maya region. This volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in the Maya region in anthropology and archeology, history, Latin American studies, and sociology. Individual authors are mostly based in the US academy. Academic studies of the Maya world of Mexico and Central America have privileged on-site field work; there has been much less focus on the ways in which this research has shaped US actors, institutions, and archives. Privileging field work in the Maya region has provided legitimacy and authenticity to US scholars; one result of this type of work is that US institutions and foundations hold extensive archeological and historical artifacts and archives from the region, due to US hegemony and very lax collection standards (to say the least) until relatively recently. The authors draw on extensive and varied archival materials in the US, Mexico, and Guatemala found in universities, museums, governmental agencies, and corporations, as well as less conventional archival sources, such as tourist guidebooks and architectural design artifacts. Research at US-based End Page 303 archives predominates, given the authors' attempt to make these archives more accessible to a broader audience. In their introductory chapter, Fallaw and Armstrong-Fumero note that the chapters in this volume focus on "specific sites and moments of transcultural interaction marked by struggles and negotiations over resources, territory, and prestige" (4). They argue that these points of contact between Mayan people and US officials, scientists, businesspeople, and tourists resulted in deep and evolving relationships with the diverse societies of Mexico and Central America, which "pervaded the production of knowledge and cultural representations that range from industrial techniques and notions of public health to archaeology and tourism" (4). While US hegemony paved the way for many of these encounters, several chapters underscore the agency exercised by non-US actors. For example, in "Bad Spanish and Worse Maya: On the Performance of Grin-gohood during the 'Carnegie Age, " Armstrong-Fumero describes the extensive collaboration of US anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Mexican counterpart and most frequent collaborator, Alfonso Villa Rojas. In "American Idols: Bartolomé García Correa, US Americans, and the Transnational Construction of Mayanism, 1925-1935, " Fallaw explores how Yucatecan politician Bartolomé García Correa and his intellectual allies collaborated with US researchers at the Carnegie Institution of Washington to craft a distinct regional variant of revolutionary Mexican indigenism that Fallaw refers to as "Mayanist" (76). Matthew Watson, in "Funding Values in. . .