The porous state: Female mayors performing the state in Yucatecan Maya municipalities

Abstract

This article analyses how female indigenous mayors manoeuvre, exhibit and transgress gendered, racial and ethnic performances of the state in Yucatán, Mexico. This article asks: How do female mayors' gendered, racial and ethnic performances affect their decision making? Indigenous subjects in Latin America have historically not been recognised as part of the state (Hale, 2002).Female mayors are positioned between two places. First, they are the state as they have been democratically elected. Second, they are categorised as female indigenous bodies. This interchange of power relations influences female mayors' decision-making. It will be argued that while some female mayors transform gender and racial norms in their municipalities, others reaffirm them. Whilst some mayors reproduce hierarchical racial-ethnic relations, others have found ways of confronting and utilising existing multicultural policies to create new relations between state and constituents such as incorporating the Maya language and customs in official municipal acts. These actions defy common multicultural practices of toleration and aim to counter the racism constituents have experienced in the past.

Culturas de Responsabilização em Educação Infantil no México

“…Although Maya instruction was not present in the regular discourse nor curriculum of the school, it manifested as a feature that identified the uniqueness of the school during bureaucratic events (Loyola-Hernández, 2018). Even though these performances were repeated from year to year, the supervisor did not hold the teacher or the school accountable for teaching Maya.…”

Qualitative methods III: On different ways of describing our work

“…This focused on how authors saw the purpose of their data collection activities because we think that all of the above findings are connected to that. We observed geographers asking their empirical material to do a great variety of things – from ‘providing accounts’ (Bunnell et al, 2018) and solving ‘empirical puzzles’ (İşleyen, 2018), to ‘shedding light’ on an issue (Loyola-Hernández, 2018) or telling stories of lived experience (Lahiri-Dutt and Chowdhury, 2018; Kölbel, 2018). The results of qualitative studies were also used to ‘teach us’ about particular contexts (Gordillo, 2018) or to ‘complicate’ the pre-existing understandings that we may have (Naylor, 2018).…”