We must acknowledge the wounds of colonization to understand lack and abundance

What my Maya baptism taught me about frequency, vibration, and the way colonialism shapes my own moral frameworks.

While Chichen Itzá impressed with scale, Uxmal took my breath away. The pyramid is smaller, the ball court less imposing—but the detail in the stonework, the layout of the plazas, the rhythm of the architecture—all of it made it easier to imagine how life once flowed through this city. Uxmal flourished during the Late Classic period, and by the time the Spanish arrived, many major Maya cities had already been abandoned. The reasons remain debated: ecological strain, political fragmentation, and drought—all likely played a role. Some scholars suggest that widespread deforestation for agriculture may have disrupted rainfall patterns, triggering migration to the highlands of present-day Guatemala.

After visiting Uxmal, Hugo—a French traveler I met at the hostel—and I ride our powder-blue rental scooter back toward Mérida. Along the way, I feel inexplicably drawn to a small overlook I had seen on the map. Nothing fancy. One of those roadside stops you usually drive past without blinking. But something told me to stop. So I turned the scooter around.

Hugo isn’t impressed and decides to wait outside the compound. At the tiny visitors’ center, I meet José, the clerk—at least at first glance. A few minutes into our conversation, he tells me he is a Maya shaman. He says it feels like he has known me his whole life. Then he offers me a ritual cleansing on the spot, wafting smoke around my body and spraying my hands with perfumed water. “Come back tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll show you the hidden city. And give you a Maya baptism. Maybe you’re a shaman too.”

The next day, I take the bus back to Muna, where José lives. He picks me up on his motorbike and brings me to his family home: a modest compound with two rooms, hammocks, and an open fire where his wife and neighbours are cooking tamales and spaghetti for what, judging by the amounts, seemed like an entourage of a hundred guests. It is the birthday of two of their daughters, and instead of the ritualized baptism that I expected, I am thrown into what in hindsight seems like a much more authentic baptism-by-fire: José swirls an incense stick around me, shoves a microphone in my hands, and names me toastmaster for the night. No ceremonial bla bla bla—but rather the treatment as an equal among his neighbors, which I guess is what a baptism is really about.

In the back, a palapa—a thatched hut acting as a chicken pen—has been swept clean and set up with a hammock. José looked nervous. “I wish I had something better to offer,” he said. I clumsily reassure him that I’m a white boy who revels in the exotic, and this is beyond perfect. Still, I can’t help but feel humbled by the contrast between our lives, and my romanticization of precarity felt a little off.

We rise at first light (although the roosters have been gawking for hours) and set off into the forest on José’s motorbike. He stops at his milpa (field)—a small clearing where he plans to plant corn. Somewhere in the jungle beyond, he tells me, is a hidden Maya city. Much of the site has been fenced off by a private landowner, but we climb two small pyramids that remain accessible.

Standing atop the stone, José says he sometimes receives visions of what the city looked like when it was alive, when his ancestors walked its streets. He can sense where objects are buried, and occasionally unearths fragments of ceramic or stone masonry from the soil. My knee-jerk reaction is to want to stop him, concerned, instinctively, that he is disturbing an archaeological site. But the thought gives me pause. It strikes me how deep colonization runs, that my first response is to evaluate José’s actions through the lens of a legal framework imposed by the very state that once sought to erase his people’s history.

But there was also another, perhaps surprising way in which the wounds of imperialism became clear to me. For the last few months, my biggest fear has been how I’ll make it financially without the regular pay from my university job. I’ve been stuck in what spiritual teachers call “the vibration of lack”: I don’t have enough, I don’t feel safe, I won’t survive. It is, of course, primarily a mental state, even when it relates to a material reality or learned behavior—in my case, that the path to financial safety is through a job and that I’m now somehow failing for choosing a different path. I’ve learned this from my family. Sociologists would call it my class identity.

Listening to José talk about the material constraints his family experiences, I realize that while our situations are radically different—there are days when José and his wife skip their meals to feed their children—we can still share the same thoughts and fears. We can still experience the same mental state of scarcity.

In José’s case, the lack he experiences is inherited from centuries of colonization and dispossession. In mine, it relates to economic shifts that are rendering old recipes for material abundance obsolete. In both cases, the capitalist principle of scarcity—the idea that we live in a world of limited resources, a world where there’s not enough for everyone—is at the root of our perception of lack. Both José and I can shift our vibration, our mindset, by choosing where we direct our attention. But the currently fashionable recipe of embodying abundance is harder to apply for someone experiencing scarcity as a result of structural inequalities of colonization affirmed through generations.

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