The latest Steven Spielberg movie "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", is located in a Mayan city in the past.
It has has been very aggressively promoted with one of the biggest marketing campaigns in Hollywood History, it has done well at the box offices.
The reviews are mixed, that was to be expected. This is an adventure story, everything goes, and that is ok. It is based on the discovery of a Mayan city dated 700-900 a.C. in the south of Belize. They should have located the story in Guatemala of course, but Hollywood needs to be politically correct. Belize is a politically correct place.
Mel Gibson film "Apocalypso" in 2006, told the story of the declining Mayan kingdom. Rulers insisting that the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices and a young hero saves his family and manages to flee.
Apocalypso is a wonderful movie, accurate and very well researched. Some Guatemalans got very upset about the violent depiction of the Mayas. Well, it is absolutely correct according to leading Guatemalan Mayan Archeologists. Any empire in history follows these patterns (literally or figuratively). It is a mystery to me why Apocalypso was so underrated in Hollywood and the world.
Hollywood is going Maya.
Good, because Costa Rica, our main rival in tourism in Central America has no Mayas, although they are desperately trying to find any remote link. Everything that is dug out of the earth is presented as most possible, most probable, most likely to be the remains of their Indian ancestors.
This is a big change for Costa Rica, I remember in the late eighties and nineties when the public health officials of Costa Rica at international conferences always were annoyed that "these little ......#$%"()&&.... Indian groups" tainted their health statistics. They had the best health indicators of the region, almost. But the little pockets of indigenous population dragged them down. The Costa Rican's irritation was endless.
Now Indians have become an asset for the tourism industry of Costa Rica. They have become politically correct.
In Guatemala, the Mayan have been used by the tourism industry forever. The racism and classism is open in Guatemala, no hypocrisy. Guatemalans have not learned to be politically correct. The hope we nourish is that the tourism industry might provide better employment opportunities and stimulate local enterprises for the indigenous Mayan and ladino population in urban and rural areas.
We need to create jobs in this country, with decent wages, to provide a life with dignity for everybody.
Illustration: Paramount Pictures International
Trackback(0)
TrackBack URI for this entryComments (0)
