Qui sont les mayas de Tulum ? Identité locale plurielle et jeux de rôles identitaires en situation touristique (Quintana Roo, Mexique)

Tulum is a small tourist town on the Caribbean coast of Mexico. Former stronghold for the Cast War rebels, Tulum is mainly populated by national and international migrants, and became the subject of heritage policies that aim to inscribe it within the tourist geography of the « Mayan world ». Yet, the efforts undertaken by the authorities to provide the city with a Mayan identity in line with the nationalist imagination face a cosmopolitan version of local identity, which prevails among the population. Besides, while the heritage imagination about the Mayan excludes most of the Mayan inhabitants from this category, it allows some New Age spirituality lovers to gain access to it, benefiting thus from social recognition in the local tourist setting. Based on ethnographic fieldworks carried out between 2010 and 2015, this paper analyses the way public policies interact with the popular debates about Tulum local identity, and with its inhabitants’ multiple, innovative and nonexclusive modes of identity construction, which reveal rivalries as well as they potentially lay the foundations for a common identity.