When I arrived in the Yucatán in November, just weeks before the opening of the Tren Maya, the first thing I saw was a floor-to-ceiling image of an ultramodern white, teal and gold train speeding through a jungle. A strange cross between an Indiana Jones film poster and a commuter advert, the image also showed a dazzling Maya temple rising from the tree canopy, with the hashtag #TodosSomosTrenMaya (We’re All the Maya Train) above it. I’d come to walk the Camino del Mayab – a new long-distance trail for hikers and bikers to explore Yucatán’s cenotes, archaeological sites and Maya villages with minimum environmental impact – and hadn’t planned to stick around for the train’s opening. But the poster got me thinking: what did Mexicans think of their newest train line?
Everywhere I went that month, from villages in the Yucatán to cities in Oaxaca and Michoacan, opinions were split. Some, like my taxi driver in Mérida, Yucatán’s capital city, who worked 14 hours a day to provide for his family, thought that “anything that brings money into the state is a good thing”. When I pressed him to explain further, he responded: “We’ve been ignored by the government for too long. Poverty here is a problem. If that’s ever going to change, we need investment.”
Others, however, were deeply concerned about the effects on the environment and the disregard for Indigenous communities whose land had been bulldozed to make way for the train. In the Maya villages I walked through on the Camino del Mayab, many were mistrustful of the Tren Maya project, citing instances of families losing their land for lack of appropriate legal documents or being tricked into selling their properties for less than their worth.
“Not only has the train been built over cenotes, which could collapse at any time, it’s also displaced many Maya communities,” said Paulina Rios, a young marine biologist from Mexico City. “Maya people have had to move from their homes, where they have lived for hundreds of generations, for a train that they will probably never be able to ride [because it’s too expensive]. It doesn’t make any sense.”
