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 complete their quarantine during the pandemic.
Kenny, 21, had been attending film school at Cal State Los Angeles and his older sister Cindy, 27, worked in communications. The Dzib Tuz's grew up in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood; their parents, Rafael and Rita, emigrated 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 Mayan, 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 growing up," Kenny says from his home in the Mission, "but even within our own community, even though we identify as Mexican American, we don't always feel like Mexicans."
About 15 percent of Mexico's population identifies itself as indigenous, with Mayan being the second most spoken indigenous language in the country after Nahuatl.
Rafael Dzib Canul left his municipality in the late 1980s, a time when many other members of his community were driven to abandon it in part by Mexico's participation in NAFTA, which resulted in agrarian reforms that hurt small farmers and the henequen fiber industry, fundamental to the state's economy.
San Francisco has become home to thousands of Mayan people since Rafael arrived. UC Berkeley researchers estimated that about 25,000 Yucatecan immigrants were living in the Bay Area in 2018, but there is no indication yet 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 Maya imagery now appear in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood, and annual celebrations such as Carnaval have space for its artists.
"I identified; I felt recognized," Cindy says. "You can see how the community is changing. It's like when you go to Chinatown and see those names."
Cindy and Kenny wanted to contribute to their outreach. Over the summer, they began discussing a possible project for National Hispanic Heritage Month, an institution they believe still lacks indigenous presentation and nuance. That's when they started "Mundo Maya," a YouTube documentary series that blends anthropology, linguistics, personal and family testimonies to preserve the personal narratives of San Francisco's Maya community.
They have released five episodes of the seven planned, with characters such as Don Jaime, whose serene story tells how he left Mexico when his young daughter became ill and finally got a job at the Cliff House.
Elvia Guadalupe Lopez Cano had to sell her pig to buy her first bicycle, with the intention of one day riding a motorcycle. She came to the United States at 19 to save up 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 of leaving and being detained by 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 has been an idea I've had in the back of my mind, to explore my own roots. I've always lived between these two or three worlds," Cindy says of reconciling her American upbringing 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 no longer be there. The goal of our content is to start the debate in viewer's 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 live very different lives. Ignacio Maldonado, the youngest of the group and the only subject so far to conduct his interview in English, speaks very candidly about how his identity is represented by a Venn diagram.
He arrived in San Francisco as a teenager and thus attended school, which exposed him to a spectrum of Latino identities and one of his lifelong passions: capoeira. Like Kenny, he hasn't always felt like he belongs with his peers.
"I identify myself as Mexican," Maldonado says in the video, "but when I'm around other Mexicans I feel like I'm not Mexican, I'm more Yucatecan," whether it's because of their humor, dialect or cultural norms.
So far, the reception of the "Mundo Maya" series has been overwhelmingly positive.
"I was very nervous about releasing the first episode," Kenny says. "I was very worried about 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 storyline is based on the people Cindy and Kenny interacted with as children: babysitters or family friends whose stories are now coming back into relevance. As the series' introduction says, "We're still here...we're still here."
