Undoing Modernity: Linguistics, Higher Education, and Indigeneity in Yucatan

An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness.

On the Yucatan Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are cre...