Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]. Bay City News [BCN].
Like millions of other young adults, Cindy and Kenny Dzib Tuz had moved back in with their parents to serve their quarantine during the pandemic.
Kenny, 21, had been attending film school at Cal State Los Angeles and his older sister Cindy, 27, was working in communications. The Dzib Tuz grew up in the Mission District of San Francisco. Their parents, Rafael and Rita, immigrated from Oxkutzcab, Yucatan, Mexico, in the late 1980s and arrived in San Francisco just before the Loma Prieta earthquake.
The entire family identifies as indigenous Mayans, but even in a place as diverse as the Bay Area, they did not always feel represented, even within their neighborhood.
"It's something you don't notice as you grow up," Kenny says from his home in the Mission, "but even within our own community, even though we identify ourselves as Mexican Americans, we don't always feel like Mexicans.
About 15 percent of Mexico's population identifies itself as indigenous, with Mayan being the second most widely spoken indigenous language in the country after Nahuatl.
Rafael Dzib Canul left his municipality in the late 1980s, when many other members of his community were driven to leave in part by Mexico's participation in NAFTA, which led to land reforms that hurt small farmers and the henequen fiber industry, which is fundamental to the state's economy.
San Francisco has become home to thousands of Maya people since Rafael arrived. UC Berkeley researchers estimated that about 25,000 Yucatecan immigrants lived in the Bay Area in 2018, but there is still no indication of how the pandemic has impacted these numbers.
Despite its historical legacy, one of the most prominent physical symbols recognizing the Maya in San Francisco was erected only a few years ago: a new park called "In Chan Kaajal" - "Mi Pueblo" or "Mi Pueblito" - which opened in 2017. Murals and public art with Mayan images now appear in San Francisco's Mission District, and annual celebrations such as Carnaval have space for their artists.
"I felt identified; I felt recognized," says Cindy. "You can see how the community is changing. It's like when you go to Chinatown and you see those names.
Cindy and Kenny wanted to help spread the word. During the summer, they began discussing a possible project for National Hispanic Heritage Month, an institution they believe is still missing the presentation and the indigenous nuance. That's when they started "Mundo Maya", a documentary series on YouTube that mixes anthropology, linguistics, personal and family testimonies to preserve the personal stories of San Francisco's Mayan community.
They've released five episodes of the seven planned, with characters like Don Jaime, whose serene tale tells how he left Mexico when his young daughter became ill and finally got a job at the Cliff House.
Elvia Guadalupe López Cano had to sell her pig to buy her first bicycle, with the purpose of getting on a bike someday. She came to the United States at age 19 to save for a hot rod to transport her home, but then fell in love, married and raised her family in the Bay Area.
When Gonzalo Dzay Ix arrived in San Francisco in 1979, he says he was afraid to leave and be detained by the immigration police before he received his residency. After 25 years as a bus driver, he now wants to return to his homeland and his immediate family.
All episodes are subtitled in English and Spanish. Cindy and Kenny are not fluent in Mayan, so their father needs simultaneous interpretation, a topic of conversation within his own family.
"This was an idea I had in mind, to explore my own roots. I've always lived between these two or three worlds," says Cindy about reconciling her American education with her Mexican heritage, and her Mayan heritage within both. Many others like Cindy feel the weight of living between worlds shaped by culture, language, and geography. "We do this to elevate that identity, and it may not be there anymore. The goal of our content is to initiate debate in viewers' homes. How does identity change in the U.S. versus Mexico? It's a complex thing."
And it is. In the series, they all come from Oxkutzcab, but they live very different lives. Ignacio Maldonado, the youngest of the group and the only subject who has so far conducted his interview in English, speaks very frankly about how his identity is represented by a Venn diagram.
He arrived in San Francisco as a teenager and therefore attended school, which exposed him to a spectrum of Latino identities and one of his lifelong passions: capoeira. Like Kenny, he has not always felt that he belongs with his peers.
"I identify myself as Mexican," Maldonado says in the video, "but when I'm around other Mexicans I feel that I'm not Mexican, I'm more of a Yucatecan," whether because of their humor, their dialect or their cultural norms.
So far, the reception of the "Mundo Maya" series has been overwhelmingly positive.
"I was very nervous about premiering the first episode," says Kenny. "I was very worried about the non-Latinos: Would they care to hear these stories? That definitely surprised me. The opportunity to uplift my own community is always a goal of mine, and you don't have to be Mexican to relate to these issues.
Most of the argument is based on the people Cindy and Kenny interacted with as children: nannies or family friends whose stories are now coming back to life. As the introduction to the series says, "We're still here... we're still here.
