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In the late hours of April 8th, I decided to ask my mother, Elda Brunnemann, if I could interview her. She is 48 years old, yet looks like if she’s in her mid-thirties, of normal weight and pale skin. Yet she is of great strength and a very distinct and direct person. I asked her to describe or tell me a personal story or situation in her life, she is a very traditional and secretive person, so she insisted to tell me something as simple as her trip to Chichen Itza. Yet she went to great lengths on her summary to tell me about her trip as she seemed to mention many things extensively such as the natives which she described to be “Very bright and intelligent peoples”, as she told me they knew many languages including English, French, German, Italian and of course Spanish, in order to communicate with the tourists to conduct trade with them. As other websites and sources mentioned, such as the NationalGeographic.com they described the terrain around Chichen Itza as a “sophisticated urban center, of their empire’, which of course refers to the past where the Mayans had dominion over Yucatan during the 700s to 1200s A.D. Chichen Itza truly proved to be a wonder in my mother’s eyes. Elda admired the extensive and unique architecture that the Mayans had beautifully crafted and shown through the massive stone temple of Chichen Itza, a true wonder of the world. The climate as well proved to be an enigma creating a plains terrain around the temple and In short distance a jungle in which the Yucatan peninsula harbors and to the other side hill ranges through which is very hard to navigate through. Yet out of all these pleasures that the eye can behold through the trip to the Mayan temples. What caught Elda’s eye the most is the local natives surrounding the Mayan temples. Living in government reservations, these people have maintained a conservative way of living, and have preserved many cultural aspects
that the Mayans had once held, of course excluding any human ritual sacrifices that they might have practiced before. Yet the most impressive accomplishment that they hold to date is they’re ability to adapt and to take the best of their current situation. They sell their wares to people in local stores which they build in close range to the temples, and they know how to sell rather well, as they know an extensive amount of languages in order to interact with the tourists and to communicate with them. My mother told me she decided to go to the Mexican state of Yucatan for very personal reasons, our ancestors came in the late 1700’s from Italy, and were the founders of a very important Hacienda, a Hacienda that is named “San Jacinto” that is located in Yucatan, which is now abandoned and owned by the state. Yet one can visit still visit it today. In those years our ancestors that resided in the hacienda happened to own slaves which worked the land surrounding the hacienda. Elda is a very spiritual person so she had a sense of guilt because of the ownership of people that my ancestors used to have and how they were put to work around the Hacienda, her family belonged to the “Casta Divina”, so our ancestors believed that they’re actions were fully justified by God to have slaves and to be served by them. Since my mother considers herself a humans rights advocate she took this history very hard. So she also went to the family cemetery and asked God for forgiveness to her ancestors. She took the experience very badly, in fact sometimes when she faces difficult moments in her life, she jokes that it’s a punishment for what her ancestors had done in the past, yet it’s difficult to know whether she’s joking or not. While she was there, she saw that the graves of her ancestors were made from marble that had actually been brought all the way from Italy at the time a specialty for
Page 1: Yucatan A traveler’s story Time C
Page 5: My mother had more than 20 cousins

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