This is the second entry in our 10th Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cRevolution.\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n By Vanessa Christman<\/p>\n I must have driven my husband insane when we first tuned into Apple TV\u2019s The Studio<\/em>. Instead of enjoying the comedic hijinks, I went heavy on the pause button to examine the fictional Continental Studios headquarters. A tour guide in the show calls it \u201ca Frank Lloyd Wright building, built in 1927, in his signature Mayan style,\u201d a \u201ctemple of cinema.\u201d1<\/sup> The building is a set, but a good enough one that architecture magazines ran pieces clarifying it is a television homage, not real.2<\/sup><\/p>\n That style has a name. Mayan Revival swept Los Angeles in the 1920s, lifting the iconography of ancient Maya sites and stripping it of its context. I grew up near Los Angeles and never passed one of these buildings without fuming, as a former archaeology undergrad would, about the conflation of Aztec and Maya. The most dilapidated of them, the Aztec Hotel out on old Route 66 in Monrovia, is where Robert Stacy-Judd, the architect who popularized the style, first plied his trade. The show\u2019s small joke, Wright and \u201cMayan\u201d and a studio \u201ctemple,\u201d compresses a whole history of who borrowed the Maya past, from whom, and to what end. Follow that thread far enough and it runs to a revolutionary socialist government in Yucat\u00e1n.<\/p>\n Los Angeles\u2019s Mayan Revival architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Stacy-Judd, drew from the headwaters of imperial discovery. In 1841 and 1843, the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens and the British artist Frederick Catherwood published their illustrated accounts of the Maya ruins and made a revolutionary claim for their moment: that the ancient cities were built by the ancestors of the living Maya, not by wandering Egyptians, lost Israelites, or refugees from Atlantis.3<\/sup> It was a real flip of the Eurocentric script, and an incomplete one. The living Maya appeared in their accounts as the help, and their ancestors\u2019 artifacts, even their bones, left the country as cargo.4<\/sup> Stephens and Catherwood divorced the living from their inheritance, founding Mesoamerican archaeology on a U.S. claim of possession: the Maya past belonged to whoever could document, cast, and possess it.<\/p>\n The plaster casts that carried those same politics into Los Angeles were made in Yucat\u00e1n by a man from Massachusetts. Edward Thompson, the U.S. consul at M\u00e9rida, prepared full-size casts of the great portal at Labn\u00e1 and three structures at Uxmal for Chicago\u2019s 1893 World\u2019s Columbian Exposition. The Peabody Museum staged them at the rear of the fairgrounds, in the section reserved for the customs and arts of native peoples, at a fair celebrating four hundred years of progress since pre-Columbian times.5<\/sup><\/p>\n Frank Lloyd Wright never saw the ruins in person. He said the ancient architecture of the Americas had stirred his wonder as a boy, while also insisting that no outside influence, foreign or native, had ever touched his work. What he had were Stephens and Catherwood\u2019s volumes, D\u00e9sir\u00e9 Charnay\u2019s photographs, and the casts themselves, which he visited repeatedly at the fair in 1893 while working on Chicago\u2019s Adler and Sullivan\u2019s Transportation Building. He carried them to Los Angeles thirty years later, metabolized into an abstract system he would cast in concrete at the Hollyhock (1921) and Ennis (1924) houses. 6<\/sup><\/p>\n Robert Stacy-Judd, a self-mythologizing British \u00e9migr\u00e9, also came to the style through Catherwood\u2019s etchings and performed the part, having himself photographed in both a pith helmet and a plumed \u201cMaya lord\u201d headdress. He later published Atlantis: Mother of Empires<\/em> (1939) and lectured on it for years, arguing that the ancient Maya were too accomplished to have been Indigenous and must have descended from Atlantis.7<\/sup> He had visited Yucat\u00e1n by then. It did not change his mind.<\/p>\n Stacy-Judd\u2019s Aztec Hotel opened on Route 66 in Monrovia in September 1925, and the name gives the game away. By his own account he arrived at the plan first and clothed it in Maya motifs afterward. He named it Aztec because he judged that the word Maya meant nothing to the layman, \u201calthough all the decorative motifs are Maya.\u201d8<\/sup> The Monrovia Chamber of Commerce got it built, raising nearly $140,000 from local residents who bought into the vision.9<\/sup><\/p>\n This is the distinction The Studio\u2019<\/em>s sight gag flattens. Popular memory collapses Wright and Stacy-Judd, \u201cMaya\u201d and \u201cAztec,\u201d into one exotic mishmash. But you cannot lift the mask of a Maya rain god and keep only its shape. What Stacy-Judd sold to Monrovia as decoration was a living people\u2019s system of meaning, taken without its name.<\/p>\n Some fifteen hundred miles south, the same borrowed motifs were made to do the opposite. M\u00e9rida\u2019s wealth came from henequen, the sisal fiber that bound the world\u2019s harvests before synthetic twine, grown on estates worked by Maya labor. The interconnected oligarchy that owned them became known as the Casta Divina, the Divine Caste, and they built their prestige on Spanish descent, which in their minds set them above the Maya and mestizo majority whose labor made their fortunes.10<\/sup> They built their houses to match, lining the Paseo de Montejo with French Beaux-Arts mansions raised from European blueprints and Carrara marble.11<\/sup><\/p>\n Arquitectura Neomaya went to Uxmal and Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1 directly, without the Western travelogues. It was aimed at the men on the Paseo de Montejo.<\/p>\n Manuel Am\u00e1bilis went first, and he built for the state. He joined the freemasons and the revolutionary government in 1915, and in 1918 gave M\u00e9rida\u2019s Masonic Temple a Neo-Maya facade laid over a colonial chapel. The following year he persuaded the railway workers\u2019 union to put Neo-Maya finishes on the Sanatorio Rend\u00f3n Peniche, a hospital an American architect had already designed. Salvador Alvarado, the revolutionary general governing Yucat\u00e1n, had seized the oligarchy\u2019s railways and seated the union on the board. The hospital opened in 1920 for those workers: Maya forms, socialist medicine, and the planters\u2019 own confiscated infrastructure, in one building.12<\/sup><\/p>\n There is a complication. Am\u00e1bilis was a Paris-trained elite, and the revival he helped launch was, as Gilbert Joseph put it, a \u201crevolution from without\u201d: mestizo intellectuals deploying Maya symbolism on behalf of the Maya majority.13<\/sup> He also believed, as Stacy-Judd did, that the Maya had come from Atlantis, and published a book saying so.14<\/sup> Whether the Yucatecan revival was Indigenous reclamation or a state\u2019s use of Indigenous heritage is contested, and it should be.<\/p>\n The union that hired Am\u00e1bilis produced the next governor. Felipe Carrillo Puerto took office on February 1, 1922, at the head of what its historians call the first socialist government in the Americas. A shopkeeper\u2019s son who never claimed Maya ancestry, he was fluent in Peninsular Maya and delivered his inaugural address in it.15<\/sup> Then the land started moving. Every Thursday, land went out to Maya campesinos, taken from the henequen plantations that had enriched the Casta Divina: 311,241 hectares to 14,675 workers across 56 towns in the first seventeen months alone.16<\/sup> His government paved the road from M\u00e9rida to Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1, opening the ancient city to the people whose ancestors built it. He did not borrow the Maya past for spectacle. He was giving back the ground it stood on.<\/p>\n On January 3, 1924, a military faction aligned with the henequen oligarchy tried Carrillo Puerto before a court martial and shot him against a wall of M\u00e9rida\u2019s cemetery, along with three of his brothers and eight associates.17<\/sup> Carrillo Puerto\u2019s government was brief. Its architecture outlived it.<\/p>\n La Casa del Pueblo was completed in 1928, by which point the governorship had passed to \u00c1lvaro Torre D\u00edaz, an Alvarado aide who had argued in 1918 that Yucat\u00e1n\u2019s Maya majority could not be trusted to hold office until properly educated.18<\/sup> Am\u00e1bilis had laid the theoretical groundwork, but the design fell to an Italian immigrant, \u00c1ngel Bachini. Its style came from the same Uxmal and Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1 iconography Stacy-Judd sketched for his California hotel. Its purpose was a union hall and community meeting place, the institutional body of the movement Carrillo Puerto had died for. The same rain-god masks of Chaac that appeared as commercial kitsch in Monrovia here presided over the working life of the people whose ancestors carved them.<\/p>\n The building\u2019s address is itself an argument. La Casa del Pueblo went up on Calle 65, south of the Paseo de Montejo. M\u00e9rida\u2019s class geography ran then, and runs now, north-rich and south-poor.19<\/sup> The People\u2019s House and its massive Maya facade went up among the people the henequen fortunes were taken from.<\/p>\n The oligarchs looked to Madrid. The revolution looked to Uxmal.<\/p>\n La Casa del Pueblo still stands in southern M\u00e9rida, faded, and still in political hands: Carrillo Puerto\u2019s Socialist Party of the Southeast was gradually folded into the national revolutionary party system that became the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which holds the building today and has announced a restoration for the 2028 centenary.20<\/sup> Monrovia\u2019s Aztec Hotel closed within two years of opening and has been a revolving door of shutdowns since.21<\/sup> In 2025 it went on the market for fifteen million dollars, still padlocked, and remains closed as of this writing.22<\/sup><\/p>\n Each building became what it was made for. One was made to serve, and serves still. The other was made to sell, and waits to be sold yet again.<\/p>\n Vanessa Christman is an MA candidate in Archaeology and Heritage at the University of Leicester and a Principal Librarian at the California State Library, where she oversees the Witkin State Law Library and Government Publications. She is currently writing a dissertation on awe as an epistemic force in archaeological interpretation.<\/strong><\/p>\n Featured image (at top): The lobby of the Aztec Hotel, Monrovia, California, from Robert Stacy-Judd\u2019s own promotional portfolio, 1929. Robert Stacy-Judd Collection, Box 2511, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento. Photo by the author.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the second entry in our 10th Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest,\u00a0\u201cRevolution.\u201d By Vanessa Christman I must have driven my husband insane when we first tuned into Apple TV\u2019s The Studio. Instead of enjoying the comedic hijinks, I went heavy on the pause button to examine the fictional Continental Studios headquarters. A tour guide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7063060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[10275,42927,17618,38833,717],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7063059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-god","tag-merida","tag-metropole","tag-monrovia","tag-rain"],"yoast_head":"\nImperial Discovery, Commercial Form<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Neo-Maya in Revolutionary M\u00e9rida<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The Address of the People<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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