The social categories « Maya » and « mestizo » habe been applied to denote the Yucatec Mayan people in Mexico. The A. examines the cluster of perceived attributes (schemata) evoked by the terms and how they relate to each other. He shows that there is an incongruency between them along the lines of local and academic categorization, which is an implication of the different social spaces in which they arise. In spite of the incongruency and the cultural plurality evoked by their usage, the A. argues that the people of Yucatec share a single culture.