Weaving Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting with theories of transnationalism and modernity, M. Bianet Castellanos argues that the cultural and material shifts that accompany Maya migration for work in Cancún’s tourism industry enable negotiation, accommodation, and even resistance to Mexico’s neoliberal reforms. A Return to Servitude dismantles romantic representations of tourism and illustrates vividly how the Maya struggle to survive.

M. Bianet Castellanos introduces us to Mayas serving in the tourist meccas of the Yucatan where their ancestors built the temples and pyramids that draw people from all over the world. As they refashion their lives in the playgrounds of transnational tourists she reveals how they are acquiring new notions of personhood and gender, leaving behind the old markers of dress and language as they negotiate and sometimes resist neoliberal premises.

A Return to Servitude should be read widely and carefully by students, teachers and activists throughout disciplines, as it reveals an inspiring story of indigenous peoples struggling to combat marginalization in an increasingly globalized and capitalist economy.

This is a fine book, and the author (and I) would appreciate the irony of your taking it along with you on your next visit to the Yucatan. Perhaps to nibble on a bit between your next serving of shrimp and tequila there on the beach. With it, you'd know exactly how you are changing the lives of the unseen workers right there in front of your eyes.

The author weaves field observations and theory into a highly accessible text, which makes for engaging reading.

A Return to Servitude presents a carefully drawn ethnography of migration among indigenous residents of a Maya Yucatec village in Mexico who travel in search of employment to the Caribbean tourist mecca of Cancun. Castellanos has offered us an exemplary and engaging work on lives that have undergone dramatic change as a younger generation acquires new experience, skills, desires, and (frequently unrealized) dreams in the quintessential tourist town of Cancun.

A Return to Servitude is fully engaging from the very first pages.

Integrates classic themes in ethnography—kinship, household economic organization, indigenous communities, gender roles—with the most recent scholarship on state-led development agendas, transnational tourism, and rural–urban migration. The text’s theoretical arguments regarding modernity and the reconfiguration of social life under Mexico’s neoliberal reforms will prove insightful to advanced scholars and graduate students in anthropology, Latin American studies, and Native studies. The author’s clear, engaging prose and attention to ethnographic detail make this an ideal text for classroom teaching.