I’ve actually stayed with a Mayan family in Guatemala for a month or so while I was taking Spanish classes and the ‘maya secret’ is mostly that they’re really poor, there’s no concept of upward mobility and their entire extended family lives near by and they’re going to do what their parents and their parents parents and their parents parents did for a living.
I’m not downing them— they’ve been the victims of a huge amount of discrimination and their country’s economy is a basket case, so they do as well as they can giving their circumstances.
But I guarantee that if the Mayan family moved to the us or even Guatemala City, that life style would disappear in a generation.
There’s actually a lot to be said for that way of life. There’s a real sense of community that I don’t think I’ve ever felt anywhere in the us. I thought about moving there, but as with everything there’s good and bad aspects of it.