Creating lasting cross-cultural relationships
How can a small liberal arts college remain small but seem so large at the same time? You make friends, share the work, and build alliances. COA has spent the last 50 years building alliances in and outside of Maine that benefit the entire COA and Mount Desert Island communities. We are small but we are not isolated. Since our founding, COA has hosted everything from the Maine Poets Festival to the International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology. Some COA students travel all over the world pursuing their educational goals while others take advantage of opportunities closer to home. The spirit of human ecology animates and connects all things at COA, and with each new incoming class the dynamic impact of new faces, new work, and new alliances grows exponentially.
Molly Donlan in the village of Cuch Holoch, weaving jipijapa (toquilla palm) leaves for hats.
By Gaelen Hall ’21
I sat onstage in a spacious auditorium in Mérida, Yucatán with a group of fellow College of the Atlantic students, each of us presenting a small piece of of our three-month immersion program in Yucatán: the art of weaving hammocks by hand, traditional healing practices, artwork carved out of coconuts, an in-depth study of Mayan architecture. From the foot of the stage to the back of the theater, the faces of our friends, Yucatecan families, and many other community members were softly illuminated as we shared our stories. As my friend Jackson Day ’21 stood in the spotlight, speaking easily in Spanish about his new understanding of traditional farming and what it means to be a family, I could not help but sit beaming as I remembered us in a classroom at COA just months before, stumbling over our own words in Spanish, gesticulating, laughing, unprepared but nervously excited to participate in Programas de Inmersión Cultural en Yucatán (PICY), aka: the Yucatán Program.
PICY brings together COA students and Yucatecan families and communities, transcending the boundaries of race, class, and religion through intercultural exchange. The program began 26 years ago as a cultural exchange between COA faculty Gray Cox, Douglas Barkey, Rich Borden, and their colleagues at the Autonomous University of Yucatán. From the beginning, the program was founded on the idea of co-mentorship and an ongoing relationship of mutual exchange and interest where professors and students from both places could collaborate and teach each other about their respective cultures and academic pursuits. However, as the program evolved, it became clear that COA students needed advanced Spanish language skills to enter into and experience the culture of Yucatán. In 1998, Karla Peña, a Yucatecan native and professional Spanish teacher, began teaching Spanish at COA each fall to prepare students for their winter term immersion in Mérida. Under her supervision, the Yucatán program began to take further shape, not just as a collaboration between universities but as a professional Spanish language learning program, a sophisticated intercultural ambassadorship training, and a long-term alliance between COA and many small communities across the Yucatán peninsula.
I was lucky enough to participate in this program as a student, starting with Karla’s 10-week Spanish course at COA’s home campus in Maine. Soon we would travel to Mérida, Yucatán, a city of squat concrete buildings packed hip to hip, hidden backyards full of broad-leafed tropical plants, colonial haciendas behind wrought-iron gates, and parks full of artisans selling clothes, and street vendors selling tacos, tortas, and elotes. Tucked in among the neighboring buildings in the center of Mérida, PICY has grown into a sister campus to COA, with an academic building where students take classes, participate in workshops, and do independent work such as senior projects or residencies. The program has also grown to include long-term staff and faculty and relationships with all manner of professionals who give workshops in dance, Mayan gastronomy, astrology, history, traditional medicine, and more. Karla and her staff work hard before students arrive to prepare for orientation, connect students with their host families, and ready the PICY Center for upcoming Spanish and Mayan Anthropology courses.
Thomas Witten with his “father,” professor Don Crisanto Kumul, in the community of Sisbichen.
My peers and I stepped off the plane at midnight into Mérida’s warm, heavy, humid air and piled into the van that Karla rented. As we left the airport for the city center, the streets flashed by; we saw plastic laminated signs strung on house gates advertising Cochinita los Domingos; a moped carrying a young man and a grandmother dressed in her finest huipil and laden with shopping bags; the roar and huff of commuter buses skirting inches from the sidewalk. We wandered around the hotel and adjoining square that night, drinking in the sights, sounds, and smells we didn’t quite know how to interpret. Those first few weeks were a true plunge into a whole new world that slowly took on more meaning with each day. Fernando, Gaby, and Mikey—my new papá, mamá, and hermanito—supported and oriented me, and, most importantly, brought me everywhere. And, despite the rush of unfamiliar references, traditions, and rhythms, I was slowly able to adapt to my new life in my new family—all this thanks to the constant support and training that Karla and the other teachers provided, as well as the unrelenting support from our host families.
It was an eye-opening experience to walk the same streets and ride the same buses back and forth from my house to PICY and notice new details every day. New discoveries began to take on meaning; the rhythms of the abuelitos enjoying the night air in lawn chairs became more predictable. I was quickly learning what it meant to be a member of my family, what their family-run restaurant of Yucatecan food meant to them, and how the Spanish language joined all of it together, the culture of Yucatán hidden in the bones of the language itself. In this way, as my grasp of the language improved, I was gaining fluency not just in Spanish but in the subtle tones of a particular place, people, and history. And every day at lunchtime—my family’s main meal—the smiles and laughter abounded as I reflected back my wonder, appreciation, and learning.
The first months flew by, with daily classes, independent projects, workshops, theater visits, dinners with relatives, and all of the holiday celebrations of Christmas and the New Year, filled with fireworks, piñatas, carnes asada, karaoke, salsa dancing, and endless chatter and laughter. And suddenly it was time to say goodbye to my family in Mérida and head off to nearby Xocén, a small, traditional Mayan community, where I would carry out the culmination of the PICY curriculum: a three-week independent project with a new family in a small town. My peers also began their independent projects, scattering across the peninsula to meet new families in small communities where they would pursue their own individual interests. During this time, it quickly became apparent that PICY had done something very few study abroad programs are able to do: establish a relationship of trust and good faith with hundreds of families across scores of small communities throughout the peninsula. Even with the dominant tourism economy that revolves around outsiders paying for access to cenotes and hotels, Karla and her team have stayed close to their vision of reciprocity and co-mentorship, trusting that people from such distinct contexts can share some innate human connection. Nothing is more human ecological than that.
A student enjoying a swim at Cenote X’canché.
As students we felt prepared to go off into these small towns alone. During our time in Mérida, we had practiced stepping outside ourselves and learning about new and different ways to live. We were ready to begin this final chapter without the immediate support of Karla and the PICY staff. We had the cultural and linguistic tools to dig deep into the individual projects that brought us to these towns and communities, and we were more than ready to enter into the new relationships our host families graciously offered. In these small Mayan towns we became sons, daughters, students, hammock makers, farmers, confidants, cousins, and soccer players—and we were accepted as family rather than tourists.
In the blink of an eye, the three weeks were over and we found ourselves sitting in that semi-circle on stage in the auditorium, beginning the forum that marked the end of the program. It was an opportunity to gather together for an evening and share brief presentations on our projects and how we had changed during our three months in Yucatán. After the presentations, many of our Yucatecan family members in the audience stood up and shared how grateful they were for this group of young people who came from countries far and wide to value so earnestly and completely the culture of Yucatán, a culture which the Yucatecans themselves sometimes take for granted.
Cenote X’canché in the municipality of Hunucú.
For me, those three months with PICY keep unfolding into an ever deepening connection, not just to Spanish, but to the culture and community in Yucatán, and the importance of other young people being immersed in cultures unfamiliar to them. The impacts of these kinds of programs ripple out far beyond a single person studying intercultural education and spending time in a unique place. I think of my fellow students Iain Cooley ’21, Zeya Lorio Zeya ’22, and Jackson Day ’21, and how they move differently through the world after their time with PICY. And I think of Jorge, a young man I met recently while walking on the beach in Puerto Morelos. He assumed I was a tourist and asked if I wanted a boat ride. I answered him in Spanish and we ended up talking about the coasts of Maine and Yucatán, sargassum, species diversity, the warming oceans, and our lives as two young men using ocean tourism to make a living. The sun went down and we began to walk back into town. When we parted, Jorge asked me if I knew where I was going and I smiled and said, No, but I can figure it out just fine.
As a recent graduate of COA, Gaelen Hall ’21 plans to further his studies on topics of language learning, cultural exchange, and how human beings connect across cultural differences. He’ll be working in both Spanish and English, acting as an ambassador to help more people connect with programs like PICY. COA is currently at work to endow Programas de Inmersión Cultural en Yucatán in order to secure it in perpetuity as a just, sustainable, resilient showcase of international human ecology, language study, and cultural immersion. Please consider supporting these efforts.
