"That which is everybody's is nobody's," according to a Spanish aphorism, and nowhere are rights of ownership over the public domain more hotly contested than in the increasingly fraught debates over the preservation and privatization of cultural and artistic heritage around the globe. Far from being an issue exclusive to natural resources (such as water or energy) or social programs (including education and pensions), the deregulation and divestiture of state-owned enterprises has now reached the realm of culture. Shrinking state coffers have left even some of the most privileged houses of cultural and artistic treasures in precarious financial conditions. More tentative still is the fate of hundreds of thousands of archaeological and historic monuments, many of which remain undocumented and unprotected. After decades of highly centralized control over key heritage resources—whether monuments, museums, or archaeological zones—governments are demanding accountability, efficiency, and profit from their cultural institutions.

In turn, citizens have become disillusioned, fed up, and even incensed as states move to divest cultural properties. Public debates over privatization of national patrimonies have intensified in the past few years in countries around the world. Recently, for example, cultural workers from across Italy demonstrated in front of the Colosseum bearing "No to Privatization" signs following Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's approval of plans to grant concessions for heritage properties to the private sector. In China, infrastructural development aimed at linking heritage sites with high-volume tourism networks is proceeding at a pace alarming to conservationists, academics, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Visitors to the Taj Mahal were almost left in the dark as a direct result of the Indian government's outsourcing of maintenance responsibilities to a private firm. Meanwhile, in Mexico, local Maya working at the archaeological site of Chichén Itzá revealed their uncertainty toward a guaranteed constitutional protection of national cultural patrimony by half-expecting the construction of a McDonald's at the top of the Castillo. As neoliberalism becomes the order of the day, citizens, national agencies, and international organizations each, in turn, wonder about the fate of "their" cultural heritage. The public-good guarantees of modern nations are quickly becoming merely artifactual. The ambivalence of "that which is everybody's is nobody's" produces a seemingly irresolvable tension between a state that needs to sell off its patrimony to be in line with global circulations of capital, and its citizenry, which heavily invests in the monuments and symbols of national patrimony as a way of defining its social identities and place in the global landscape.

For communities around the world residing in landscapes of ruins, the stuff of contemporary everyday life continually trespasses upon privileged sites of ancient civilization. Yet, monuments are not isolated in time or space from the social and political lives of citizens. Nor are the monuments immune from changing economic agendas affecting the global marketplace. While privatization programs—especially those implicating symbolically rich resources—make splashy international headlines, it is nearly impossible to discern sentiments toward ownership, custodianship, stewardship, or other forms of possession of cultural heritage on the ground. Most notably absent are the views and opinions of local communities as they go about their workaday lives in the midst and shadows of some of the most famous and fabulous instances of heritage spaces in the world.

I offer this study as an ethnographic foray into the intimate politics of monumental heritage and the contingencies of claiming cultural patrimony in Yucatán, Mexico. Perhaps this project resonates with contradiction. After all, the very notion of monumentality suggests—and perhaps even requires—the univocalization and ossification of meaning in material cultural icons. Through archaeological science and the project of nation building, what is commonly understood as Mexican heritage signals a "glaciation of the past" (Foucault 1967/1986). Thus, the invocation of monumentality, it would seem, necessarily effaces the subtle, personal, contingent practices, expressions, and claims enacted in negotiating both the meaning and content of the stuff of heritage. Yet as Knapp and Ashmore (1999, 1-2) suggest, "We know from modern peoples that meaning in a landscape is not directly related to how obtrusively it has been marked in material, archaeologically detectable ways." Indeed, monumentality strives to erase—and thus assumes the erasure of—ambivalence. But once we begin to look for the fissures in monumentality, we find that ambivalence abounds.