Dzitya, a town famous for its wood and stone vessels as well as its carving works, and obviously for its annual artisan fair, is currently facing the closure of many stone workshops, due to complaints by local residents.
An estimated 80 percent of the population of Dzityá depends, directly or indirectly, on the sale of handicrafts. However, he area also has seen an influx of upscale housing projects, which owners are apparently the ones complaining about the stone work related activities in town.
“The workshops were closed due to complaints from residents who live in the new and exclusive housing areas recently established in Dzityá, because they say that the artisans contaminate with dust and noise,” a Dzitya resident stated anonymously.
Dzityá Commissioner (Comisario Ejidal) Josué Alfredo Cua Pool said that the situation has obviously outraged artisans, local families and other people sympathetic with the Dzityá residents who lost their jobs.
Artisans of Dzityá say that the workshops in which they labor were closed in an irregular manner, since the legal representatives of the businesses were not previously notified. They are asking the authorities to carry out the procedures on a regular basis, since they have spent over a week without work and, therefore, have been forced to delayed projects and most important, they have not been able to collect their salaries.
The mayor of Mérida, Renán Barrera Concha declared that the City Council will intervene, and act in accordance with the norm, and he stressed that they are open to discuss and resolve this conflict.
The municipal president said that “no attempt is being made to suspend” any artisan activity in Dzitya, and that the commune will promote actions to improve any “particular circumstance that may be modified and/or improved” in the workshops to avoid conflicts among the residents of the area.
The Yucatan Times Newsroom
1 comment
What bothers me about this situation, is that the “new residents” in the area went to live there knowing the artisan shops were there, and all of the sudden those shops are a bother. Sounds like the conquest, where you leave a peaceful life, strangers encroach your lives, and then those same strangers removed you from your life because, well, they know better, and you bother them. I wonder how many of those residents are foreign people to Yucatan.