I was staying in a fishing hamlet on the coastal edge of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico when Covid-19 stopped the world in its tracks. Lif...
I was staying in a fishing hamlet on the coastal edge of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico when Covid-19 stopped the world in its tracks. Life came to a grinding halt and the whole state was placed under lockdown. Shops, bars, cafes and restaurants were shut down and de facto martial law was imposed on the region.
The magnificent Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Ek Balam and Coba that I was in the process of documenting for an ethnographic survey were closed to the public for an indefinite period. The locals who depended on tourism for their livelihood, many of them of Mayan ancestry, scrambled to gather their meager resources to wait out the pandemic.
It was an unprecedented event with global ramifications, and like everyone, I was completely stumped.
I stocked up on essential provisions and steeled myself for the unforeseen and the unpredictable. Life in my small hamlet was tolerable compared to the big urban centres as one could still walk the streets during the days without being sent home by patrol cops. By some miracle, the solitary liquor store in my neighbourhood remained open for a couple of hours each day and I was able to buy my weekly quota of...
