Maya Marriage Analysis

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| Four Generations of Maya Marriages: What's Love Got To Do With It? Juarez, Ana Maria. Frontiers. Boulder: 2001. Vol. 22, Iss. 2; pg. 131 Abstract (Summary) After the ritualized marriage arrangements, the most notable aspect of the eldest and second-eldest generations' marriages was the advice, or consejo, given to the couple. When I first embarked on predissertation fieldwork in Tulum, I was engaged to be married, and my fiancé joined me for a short time. Later, when I returned to the field, my friends all wanted to know whether we had indeed gotten married and what the wedding itself was like. The foremost things Mexican and Yucatec immigrants asked about were the clothes and reception. But Maya's first question was, "What prayers did…show more content…
The man Doña Demetria chose to marry was a "worldly" man, having worked during his youth in Valladolid and other parts of Yucatán, but had settled in Tulum to grow corn, gather gum, and follow the day-migrant labor work stream of the 1940s. Although he asked for her in the customary way, with the required marital arrangements, visits, and bride-gifts for the bride and her family, the couple had only about three months of happy marriage. After that, her husband began drinking and physically abusing her. Nearly everyone I spoke to, including Doña Demetria herself, commented on Don Narciso's remarkable jealousy and violence. Her father was the nohoch tatich, or patron of Tulum's sacred cross, and during my fieldwork she was the most important woman in Tulum's Iglesia Maya. Still, Don Narciso, a nohoch maakoob, did not allow her to go to church during much of her married life because he did not trust her and so restricted her activities. On the other hand, he once tried to bring a second wife home, although Doña Demetria soon managed to get rid of
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