Rescripting Multiculturalism Into Points of Departure: Creating Multiple Futures Through Critical Interculturality by Students in a Maya-Spanish Bilingual Bachelor's Program in Yucatán

Abstract

This article examines the experiences and narratives of students in the Licenciatura en Lingüística y Cultura Maya (“Maya Linguistics and Culture”—LyCM) at the Universidad de Oriente (UNO), a Yucatecan public university that is neither federal nor an autonomous intercultural university. Deans and officials determine the dress and logistics of the events in which students stage “Maya culture,” and students are cast as “cultural ambassadors” whose identities are folklorized as objects of display. Nonetheless, I argue that students do not merely absorb such folklorization. As the actors and creators of those performances, they transform them into myriad opportunities to build their own academic journeys, thereby making the LyCM a hub where critical interculturality flourishes. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted throughout 2023 and in the summer of 2024, and on interviews with students and non-students currently or formerly affiliated with UNO, I explain the institutional staging of “Maya culture” as an object for evaluation, and the everyday sociality in which students remake it on their own terms. Thus, critical interculturality at the LyCM becomes something students create through their experiences and narratives.