TRAMPATRENMAYA

The so-called “Tren Maya” is considered one of Mexico’s largest infrastructure and tourism projects. It is being built across the Yucatán Peninsula, a territory where the indigenous Maya have lived for millennia – many of whom are now being forced to fight against expropriation, militarization, and the ongoing destruction of their livelihoods.

RESHAPING. REPRESSION. DIVISION. VIOLATION. EXPULSION. In TRAMPATRENMAYA, these terms emerge like inscriptions in a territory that is having neocolonial reorganization forced on it, under the promise of “progress and development.” For her experimental documentary, between 2022 and 2025 Nikki Schuster traveled along the “Tren Maya” through Yucatán, speaking with activists, researchers, and people from the affected indigenous communities.

Using her simple compact camera, often only centimeters from her subject, in stop-motion animation she works her way through the textures of nature – its leaves, stones, light, and the surfaces of the landscape. The objects that Schuster discovers in collaboration with the local people are used to generate the animations: these things transform the surrounding territory into the material of the film.

TRAMPATRENMAYA is told entirely through the recorded statements of the local population, and their stories are full of fear and uncertainty. In the film, we see how the social justice promised to the people living along the railway lines crumbles away, frame by frame. Forests are cleared; the trains pass far outside the villages; and thousands of concrete pillars drill through the cenotes, the sacred belowground pools of water called “ts’ono’ot” in the Yucatec Mayan language.

The way that indigenous culture is folklorized and exploited for tourism is especially painful, as the very way of life that arose out of it is being driven out. And, as in so many places around the world, we face the question: What is left of self-determination and autonomy when a government disposes of indigenous territories as though they were uninhabited? (Eleni Darias)

Translation: John Wojtowicz