Felipe Carrillo Puerto

I took the second-class bus from Tulum because the first-class ADO had no direct service and I was not in a hurry. The second-class bus is slower and makes more stops and the seats are narrower and the television at the front plays regional music videos at a volume calibrated for people who are not bothered by volume. The road south from Tulum goes through flat jungle — the limestone plain of the Yucatán Peninsula, dense and uniform, broken occasionally by a small town with a Pemex station and a taquería with plastic chairs.

Felipe Carrillo Puerto appears as the bus enters a larger town with actual urban density — buildings, traffic, a proper central plaza. The bus terminal is a few blocks from the center. I got out and looked around and noted, within about five minutes, that nothing about this town was aimed at me.

The Capital of the Cruzob

The history of Felipe Carrillo Puerto is not well known outside Mexico, which is one of the more significant omissions in the popular understanding of Mexican history. The Caste War of Yucatán began in 1847 as an uprising of Maya people against the Yucatecan elite, and within a few years it had become something more unusual: a sustained territorial insurgency by the Cruzob — the People of the Cross — who established a functioning independent Maya polity in the eastern Yucatán Peninsula.

The Cruzob held their territory against the Mexican state, and then the Mexican army, for over fifty years. Their capital was Chan Santa Cruz, which is now Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Their spiritual and military organization centered on a cult of the Balam Na — the Cross — a “talking cross” that was believed to speak and give instructions to the faithful. This is not a metaphor. The cross spoke, in the voices of priests who stood behind it, and the words it spoke directed the defense of the Maya territory throughout the long war.

The Mexican army did not take Chan Santa Cruz until 1901. The resistance lasted longer than most European nations of the same era had been in their current form.

The Sanctuary and the Plaza

The Sanctuary of the Talking Cross — the Balam Na — is still the center of Felipe Carrillo Puerto. The church and plaza face each other across a square that is used daily for markets, gatherings, and the kind of low-key municipal life that happens in Mexican town plazas everywhere. The difference is that this plaza is also a place of active Maya ceremonial life: the cross cult has never ended, and the ceremonies that have taken place here continuously since the nineteenth century still take place.

I sat in the plaza for a while and watched what was happening. A market occupied one side of the square, selling fruit, vegetables, household goods, and the specific assortment of things that Mexican markets sell. Several older women were wearing the traditional Maya huipil — the white embroidered dress with colorful borders — which in many parts of the Yucatán is now worn primarily for photographs. Here it was just what some women wear.

Yucatec Maya is the first language of a substantial portion of the city’s population. I heard it in the market, in conversations on the street, in what sounded like an argument between two men near the bus stop. This is not preserved heritage. It is a living language in a living city.

The City That Resists Tourism

There are no resorts in Felipe Carrillo Puerto. There are no cenote tours, no jungle ziplines, no cocktail bars with hammocks. There are budget hotels used primarily by Mexican travelers passing through, and there are comedores serving regional food, and there are tiendas selling things people need for daily life, and that is essentially it.

I ate lunch at a comedor near the market — cochinita pibil, black beans, tortillas, habanero salsa — at a table next to two men who were discussing something with great seriousness in a mixture of Spanish and Yucatec Maya. The woman who brought my food was polite and efficient and showed no interest in where I was from or what I was doing there.

This is what I mean when I say the city had not oriented itself toward me. It is not unwelcoming — I encountered no hostility or difficulty. But the hospitality industry infrastructure that exists in Tulum or Playa del Carmen, the whole apparatus by which a city signals to foreign visitors that they are expected and their needs have been anticipated, is entirely absent in Felipe Carrillo Puerto. The city was here before tourism and will be here after it.

The cenotes in the surrounding jungle are accessible with local guides and a willingness to navigate logistics in Spanish. The road south continues to the Bacalar lagoon. But Felipe Carrillo Puerto itself is the reason to stop — for the history, for the Balam Na, and for the reminder that Quintana Roo was something other than beach resorts before it became famous for beach resorts.