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Contribution short abstract:

This paper examines ethnographic work conducted with activists in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo amidst the construction of the touristic Mayan Train. I ask how activists are interpreting advancing urbanization in what used to be pristine tropical rainforest under a form of cynical disbelief.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper examines ethnographic work conducted with activists in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo amidst the construction of the touristic Mayan Train. Reviewing the reactions to sensationalizing images of socio-ecological catastrophe—such as run-over jaguars, a tapir walking on train tracks, and rusting iron pillars underwater—my work asks how activists are interpreting advancing urbanization in what used to be pristine tropical rainforest as the unravelling of business as usual. Because activists are no longer shocked by what the Mexican state is capable of doing, their understanding of illegal deforestation, land grabs, and death threats does not show their surprise vis-à-vis what they consider condemnable conduct. Rather, their reaction portrays a cynical reading of what development is capable of doing. Even as people walked the tracks of the Mayan Train, stopped construction machines, launched drones to take aerial photographs, and went underwater to document cement contamination, their reactions never expressed surprise that the Mexican state could do something like this. Their linkages with international media outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, and National Geographic Magazine centered on publicizing the loss of things that were considered of inestimable value—such as Mayan temples from the post-Classical period, jaguars and ocelots, and underground cave systems that are hundreds of miles long. This loss, however, was not something that they considered unavoidable. My work sees these activists as participating in a form of cynical disbelief in which “progress” is conceived teleologically as that which will inevitably come.