Holes, subterranean exploration and affect in the Yucatan Peninsula

Abstract

Underlying Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is one of the world's most extensive flooded cave systems. Humans and non-humans can enter this aquifer via water-sinkholes - known locally as cenotes. Cenotes for the Maya of the Peninsula are the entrances to the Xibalba, a mythological underworld. Fostered by technological innovations since the 20th century, this underworld has become a site of explorative calculation. Cave divers travel to the Peninsula for a chance to explore the region's subterranean frontier, to potentially ‘find’ a place where no human has been before. However, it is not just about the destination; for many cave divers, it is about the affect of the watery subterranean; an experience that defies most basic (physical and social) human functions: breathing underwater, timeless space, total darkness, no natural orientation, floating, and no talking (efficiently). As one cave diver noted “once you have swum, snorkelled or dived in a cenote, you have been infected by thrill and curiosity”. In this paper, drawing from interviews with cave divers as well as land and cenote owners, I analyse how caving explorations contributed to processes that socially construct and physically modified the Yucatan Peninsula's subterranean. In particular, I analyse how the embodied conditions of being a cave diving ‘explorer’ have become commodified into an experience that is sold into the region's booming tourism industry. Cenotes have been transformed into a tourism product through the entanglement of diving technologies, emotive exploration narratives and a sacred Maya underworld.