Mad Mel and the Maya

Excerpted from the Nation article by Earl Shorris:

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In the film Apocalypto, which Gibson claims will make the Maya
language "cool again," there are many major roles. The lead is a
lithe, handsome young man, a dancer from Oklahoma named Rudy
Youngblood. He has indigenous ancestors, but he is not Maya, and
like most of the other featured players he is not a professional
actor. None of the four other major parts went to Maya either.
According to Gibson, they are played by people from the United
States, and the other featured players are either from Mexico City
or Oaxaca. Yet every word spoken in the film is in Yucatecan Maya, a
difficult language to learn or even to mimic, because it is both
tonal and accented.

It is not as if Gibson had few Mayeros to choose from. There are
more than a million Maya in Mexico, and more than 100,000 of them
are monolingual Yucatecan Maya speakers. Yet Gibson chose not one
Maya for a featured role. In so doing, he has made a film that
reinforces the prejudice against the Maya, who have defended their
cultural autonomy as fiercely as any people on earth. Twice they
repulsed the Spaniard Francisco de Montejo, before he occupied part
of the peninsula in 1527. They continued to fight pitched battles
against European cultural and political dominance until the end of
the Caste War in the early twentieth century. And even now militant
organizations deep in the jungles of the state of Quintana Roo
practice ancient rituals and resist Occidental cultural and
political hegemony, including the Gregorian calendar. But the people
have never been attacked by Hollywood.

Like the owners of the resort hotels that line the beautiful beaches
of Cancún and Cozumel, Mel Gibson cast no Maya to work on his
project, except in the most minor roles. Maya nationalists think the
hotels and tourist packages that use the word "Maya" or "Mayaland"
(a translation of Mayab) should pay for what they appropriate for
their own use. The Maya patrimony, they say, is neither gold nor
silver nor vast stretches of rich farmland; they have only their
history, their culture, themselves. Like the hotel owners who bring
strangers to the Yucatán to do everything but labor in the laundries
and maintain the grounds, Gibson has brought in strangers to take
the good parts from the Maya. He said in an interview that he chose
people who "looked like you imagined they should," but I have seen
photographs of Rudy Youngblood, and he does not look like any Maya I
ever saw. One can only ascribe the choice of Youngblood and the
other non-Maya to stereotypes that Gibson has adopted.

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