Word: yucatan
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...America, which she explores in the tradition of truth through squalor, using a Mexican slum as a base camp. Despite occasional lapses into over- studied eloquence, she is a fascinating guide, with an eye for the brutal, the garish, the silly and bizarre. At a Mayan market in the Yucatan, Morris is tempted by giant beetles being sold as pets. "They were dressed as cowboys with small hats, boots on their legs, soldiers in camouflage, and women of the night, with long eyelashes and pink satiny skirts . . . I had no idea what I'd do with a pet beetle...
...celebrates or serves gods, priests and lords, some of the lively figurines found on the island of Jaina mirror the life of ordinary folk. One peasant woman jauntily waving a big conical hat will look strikingly familiar to anyone who has visited the wretchedly poor Maya villages in modern Yucatan...
...counterpoise to these exquisitely delicate objects is the 1,000-year-old, 1,200-lb. limestone Chacmool, the ceremonial figure that is the very emblem of Maya civilization in its later phases. Found at the most celebrated of all Maya sites, Chichen Itza in Yucatan, the semireclining statue is a splendid example of the Chacmools found guarding the entrances of temples. Typically, the male figure leans back on his elbows, pulls up his knees and turns a forbidding gaze on intruders at the sacred gates. A flat plate poised on his belly is believed to have been a receptacle...
...money we brought down here for two weeks could last half a year." At the delightful little Hotel Montejo in Mérida, Ted Mills and Jill Heizman of Santa Cruz, Calif., paid only $5.50 a night, about the average price they encountered during a month-long tour of Yucatan. Such bargains are all the more remarkable considering that this is the peak of the Mexican tourist season...
...Portillo too was an optimist. When he took power in 1976, inflation was 30%, and Mexico already owed some $20 billion to foreign banks. But geologists were discovering that in vast fields located in Chiapas and Tabasco states, as well as off the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico possessed proven oil and gas reserves that are now estimated to total 72 billion bbl., second only to Saudi Arabia. The fields were quickly exploited, and by 1981 Mexico was pumping 2.5 million bbl. per day, making it the world's fourth largest oil producer. Mexico earned $14 billion from its wells...