Belize and Yucatan through Travel Stories: Two Centuries of Overlapping Scenarios. Dialogues about the Emptiness

Abstract

The Yucatan peninsula and the territory now known as Belize are two spaces that have been described and narrated from different perspectives, one of which is absence and emptiness. In this respect, the eastern part of the Yucatec peninsula and the area to the north of the young state of Belize were painted in a negative perspective by foreign travelers and military emissaries of the Spanish crown, where the “what is not there” was underlined in direct contrast to other scenarios in which the exercising of administrative power was visible. Consequently, despite the high geostrategic value of these territories within the continental Caribbean and the Central American Isthmus, their territorial unity as well as their specificity as a region grew out of what was not said or from what was gradually disappearing from the discourse of those who travelled through them with either artistic, scientific or economic motivations. The present text seeks to investigate the strategies that allowed this scenario, at the narrative level, to be successively emptied with the aim of being possessed anew.