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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses a series of land grabs that have unfolded around the construction of the touristic Mayan Train in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Engaging with perceptions of the environment, the paper asks how people perceive the surrounding rainforest at a time of unstoppable urbanization.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses a series of land grabs that have unfolded around the construction of the touristic Mayan Train in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Engaging with perceptions of the environment, the paper asks how people perceive the surrounding rainforest at a time in which the urbanization of the region has become unstoppable. I suggest that people's valorization of a mythical nature inevitably plagues their understanding of how urbanization processes are unfolding on the ground. While their narrative accounts of rapid urbanization express shame that the region around them is changing without their consent, I pay attention to how mythical understandings of both a pristine nature and an imagined modernity become intermingled in people's accounts of environmental change. I suggest that processes of urbanization should be understood through a non-linear approach in which there is no "before" and no "after." Corruption, as a key concept to understand narrations of urban change in Mexico, seems to have constructed an already de-naturalized past and to be in the process of shaping an unwanted urban future. My engagement with corruption and temporality in people's narrations of urban change attempts to de-naturalize mythical understandings of an imagined pristine past and a corrupted present and future. Dealing with Bakhtin's writings on the pastoral, I suggest that the Mayan Train and its aftermath should be comprehended through a logic that undoes the past/future divide in addition to the nature/culture divide.