Poverty—It’s Complicated
A stone hearth was to my right and a straw roof above my head. I hunched over
a tiny table, sitting on an even tinier chair. Directly across from me a few gourds were
swinging carelessly from a sturdy pole, playing games with the few rays of sun that
filtered in from outside. Smiling faintly, the woman at my side—Doña Natividad was her
name—reached for a round, orange gourd and placed it gently in front of me.
“Yaan in pak’achtiko’on,” she said. After weeks of intense, twisting dialogues in an
obscure and exquisitely foreign tongue, it was a relief to hear such a grammatically
simple sentence. In Maaya t’aan, the language of people throughout the Yucatán
peninsula, Doña Natividad had just informed me that we were about to make tortillas—
which, incidentally, was one of my favorite things to do.
Maaya t’aan, or Yucatec Maya as it is known in English, is the language of around
800,000 people in Mexico and parts of Belize and Guatemala. An ancient, indigenous
language of Central America, its linguistic ancestor is attested by the famous Mayan
hieroglyphic writing system of pre-Columbian times. I spent six weeks, in June and July
of 2012, intensively studying this tongue, living in Valladolid, Mexico, and conducting
homestays in the nearby Maya village of Xocén. Doña Natividad was a native of Xocén,
and she and her husband, Don Eustolio, welcomed me into their house. By Western
standards, it was a modest dwelling—a thatched roof house with a stone hearth and a
few hammocks—but to them it was home.
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To anthropologists, Xocén is known as el pueblo en el centro del mundo, “the town
in the center of the world.” This speaks to the belief, pervasive throughout Mayanspeaking communities, that the Yucatán peninsula is situated at the midpoint of the
entire universe, thus the stars, the planets and the rest of the world rotate around it. To
geographers, of course, the peninsula is simply a tropical limestone slab jutting out into
the Caribbean Sea, north of the Equator and south of the Tropic of Cancer.
Who is right?
At first, the question seems silly. Maybe this is because geographers are not
actively telling these people that their conception of the world is wrong, and vice versa.
On a more profound level, these two worldviews—the indigenous, Maya perspective on
one hand and the scientific, Western view of the world on the other—continue to collide,
sometimes with dramatic consequences. During my stay in Mexico, I learned about
more than simply Yucatec Maya—I learned about the interactions between these
disparate worldviews in the Yucatán; the complex situation in the region that
Westerners would label “poverty;” and the implications of this for the Spartan Global
Development Fund in its mission to bring microfinance to economically neglected
populations around the world.
Since the 1500s, people from distinct parts of the world have migrated to Latin
America, most notably Spanish-speaking settlers from Europe following the trail of
conquistadores. As is commonly known today, conquistadores sought not only to
enhance the size and wealth of the Spanish political domain, but to dominate the lives
of their newly conquered indigenous subjects—changing their religion, language, and
social system. The Yucatán itself is an exemplary case study of this arrangement, as
the mix of Spanish culture and indigenous Maya culture is easily observable throughout
the peninsula today.
With the advent of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century—for example,
anthropology, sociology and archaeology—Western scholars flooded the Yucatán. This
trend continues today; it overlays the social system that the Spanish superimposed on
the indigenous peoples of the peninsula. In other words, contrasts between indigenous
Maya culture and non-Maya European cultures, Spanish or otherwise, are evident in
everyday life. These distinctions and their connections to the western understanding of
“poverty” provide the most tantalizing point for further reflection.
Perhaps the clearest contrast between Maya and non-Maya peoples is
economic. As the majority of opportunities for work in the area require an extensive
knowledge of Spanish, Yucatec Mayan is seen as the language of farmers—it is the
language of the field. This automatically denies monolingual Mayan speakers from
many opportunities for work in the bigger cities, which in turn severely hampers their
social and economic mobility. Of course, this situation has only been exacerbated by
the rise of tourism throughout the peninsula in the last thirty years, especially at places
like Cancún and Playa del Carmén. Working there often requires Spanish and English
knowledge—but no Mayan.
A Western visitor to Xocén would immediately notice this economic contrast—by
any Western measure, Xocén is “poor.” Don Eustolio and Doña Natividad, living in a
thatched roof hut, seem no exception to this. However, I challenge this understanding of
“poverty.” Keeping in mind the history of the peninsula as outlined above, it is important
first to remember that poverty has a variety of causes—often owing to the
idiosyncrasies of each region and its inhabitants—and that, moreover, “poverty” as we
most often understand it is in many ways an invention of the Western imagination. This
statement, of course, demands an explanation—an explanation which will get to the
heart of our mission at Spartan Global.
By “poverty” I refer to a perception, a set of understandings, common throughout
the Western world and utilized most often by conventional charities to garner money for
their causes. “Poverty” is talked about as a lamentably wretched condition, and “poor”
people are seen as helpless in their “poverty”, needing financial support. Emotional
catchphrases and infomercials implore people for donations to help “the helpless.” It is
this condition of “poverty” that I call simply a part of the imagination.
At Spartan Global, we believe that this understanding of “poverty” does not get at
the core of what it means to live in the developing world. Instead of seeing economically
downtrodden or socially neglected people as “helpless,” we try to understand their
situations and begin to work with them on their own terms. A short visit to the Yucatán
will show that the indigenous, “poor” Maya—despite the fact that their heritage and
language have been devalued and their economic and social mobilities have been
thoroughly limited—are indeed a vibrant group of people. It is both unfair and degrading
to characterize an entire segment of people as “helpless,” and in the end, pity and
appeals to emotion do not make much of a difference in these “helpless” people’s lives.
Microfinance, Spartan Global style, is one alternative to the traditional charities
that paint people as “helpless.” Seeing our clients as active participants in a complex
and ever-changing world, we reach out, build relationships, and financially support
people as they carve out their own path. We realize that—like the Yucatán and its
inhabitants—regions, states, cities and families have their own idiosyncratic histories.
Remaining cognizant of this, we happily navigate the course to financial betterment with
the people we help.
I am certain that I will return to the Yucatán; in addition to having a complex and
fascinating history, it provides intriguing cases for the examination of what we call
“poverty” and important lessons for how institutions like Spartan Global can continue its
work on a global scale.