This ethnographic film was shot entirely on location at the archaeological and tourism site of Chichén Itzá and the nearby Maya Indian community of Pisté, Yucatán, México, during the spring equinox of 1995 and 1997.
The film was shot during the equinox event at Chichen Itza and includes interviews and footage with New Age Spiritualists, State archaeology authorities, secular tourists, artisans, venders, local political leaders.
Beginning in 1984 the State Government of Yucatán, Mexico, in collaboration with the federal National Institute of Anthropology and History, began to develop a tourist ritual celebration that included traditional Yucatec dance called Jarana, reconstructed pre-columbian dances and music, classical Yucatec guitar trios and an explanation of the equinox phenomenon according to the most prevalent and dominant archaeoastronomical interpretation.
As more than 40,000 New Age spiritualists and secular tourists from the United States and Mexico converge to witness this solar phenomenon, the video depicts the surrounding social event as a complicated entanglement of expected dualisms concerning tourism.
This video also asks what kind of fieldwork is possible at such a spectacle and it questions the status of ethnographic authority as people from the various groups converging on the event, including the anthropologist-videomakers, ironically trade positions as well as compete to speak about the Maya.
(See L. Vivanco, "Performative Pilgrims and the Shifting Grounds of Anthropological Documentary" In Representing Religion in World Cinema (2003) edited by S. Brent Plate and published by Palgrave MacMillan, pgs.