A European woman with a papaya in her hands or a German woman travel book: Lilo Linke (1906-1963) and her vision of Yucatan

Abstract

When we open the book with the first thing we find, in the guards, it is a Mayan god who looks from the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan peninsula united to Central America, these allusions to a past and present Maya that, from the beginning we noticed, they will be an integral part of the ideas expressed in the document.
We consider that this book gives more than it promises: the smiling photograph of a Yucatecan mestiza that precedes the beginning of the text predicts it. Travel journalism is a facet that in a certain moment of history covered a function of diffusion of places and countries. The quality of certain works put in the minds of readers exotic places, ancestral customs, daily lives alien and interesting, led the reader to the enjoyment of the site on which it was written. Certain authors became, in doing their work and without pretending it, in ethnographers, with a deep, wide and critical view of the places they visited.