The house you see today is the result of four intense weeks of palm leaf harvesting and roof repair by nine international volunteers from six different countries in December 2023 and then again in February 2024. Volunteers from England, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, France, and Taiwan came to work on this particular house with willing hands and open hearts, giving freely of themselves in the movement to preserve the few remaining traditional homes of Chicxulub Pueblo and the cultural traditions that take place under their roofs.
While the beautiful and nostalgic homes of the descendants of the original inhabitants of this continent are symbolic of the Mayan culture that has endured the great and small events of time, including the arrival of Europeans a little over 500 years ago, the roofs over these homes represent a traditional process of building and maintaining a home made primarily of natural materials sustainably harvested from the surrounding environment.
On the roof of Don Rafael and Doña Consuelo’s home, our volunteers, under the direction of Don Hector and the supervision of Don Juan “Triste” Dzul May, were able to patch two large sieves on the north face of the home, where storms tend to have the most erosive effect. In addition, Casa de Toj2 and its volunteers recently installed more than 40 meters of new “hiles” (the thin wooden branch material on which the palm leaves sit) in a remodeling project that added two new rows of leaves at the top of the house where gaps had opened up on either side of the zinc corrugated material, or “lamina” in Spanish. Meanwhile, the owners of the house took care of the food and drink for the volunteers.
All the palm leaves needed to maintain the house are usually harvested on the property where the thatched house is located. If there are not enough leaves for one’s own roof, the materials for maintenance must be harvested elsewhere. In fact, the huano palm is disappearing in this region and is now protected by law, so its leaves can only be harvested on private property. Thus, it is only through the generosity of neighbors that traditional homeowners are allowed to enter their property and harvest the leaves.
In the past, palm leaf harvesting was a respected profession that contributed to the longevity of local homes. But these days, the trade has all but disappeared. And, truth be told, they no longer have a need for the palm leaves, as their roofs have been converted to the more solid and cement construction that modernization has brought to the pueblos, and they are grateful for the pruning.