I’ve traveled to the Yucatán Peninsula a dozen times looking for “real” Mayan cuisine, driving through the center and up and down both (or is it all three?) coasts, but the food that’s at the soul of the Yucatán is not easily discovered. What you get as an outsider is feast food like cochinita pibil — a sometimes-wonderful chili-marinated pork buried and cooked in an earthen pit — which is not enough to have you rush down there and start eating.

This year I got lucky. I contacted a friend and, three or four degrees of separation later, found myself on the road to the interior town of José María Morelos (named after a priest and revolutionary from the early 19th century who has lent his name to towns all over the country) and from there to the market town of Peto and ultimately to Chikindzonot, a village of a couple of thousand people smack in the middle of the peninsula and an hour’s drive from Valladolid, a city of about 50,000. Though much of the culture is contemporary — a road came through town about 20 years ago, and there are modern conveniences like electricity, television and packaged hot dogs — virtually everyone in town is Mayan, and Spanish is spoken by only a few people.

It’s isolated enough that the farming and the food are largely pre-Columbian in character. This is not Cancún; life is quite traditional. There are many complicated reasons for this, but one reason is that people like it. They could be leaving here for Valladolid or even Mérida or Cancún, each of which is only a couple of hours away. Some do, of course, but most don’t. Many who stay continue to farm on a subsistence level, as people here have done for thousands of years. Fifty miles away, life is absolutely recognizable to a visitor from the United States; here, it’s difficult to imagine even after witnessing.