Translated from Spanish by Melissa D. Birkhofer and Paul M. Worley

Pedro was born in 1963 in the municipality of Buctzotz, Yucatán. He is a Maya Indigenous person, the child of monolingual Maya farmers. He is a founding member of the Assembly of Defends of Maya Land, Múuch Xíimbal. He writes in Maya, his mother tongue, for which he has won awards on a number of occasions for his work that straddles the boundaries between story and poetry. He has a degree in Educational Media from the Department of Social Sciences at the Normal Superior in Campeche. At present, he is a professor of Creative Writing in Maya Language at the State Center for Beaux Artes in Mérida, Yucatán.

The Yucatán Peninsula is Maya territory, where for millennia people have lived via agriculture. The milpa is a poli-cultivated area in which people originally planted more than sixty kinds of seeds, predominantly corn, the plant from which Maya People are derived according to what our ancestral book the Popol vuj tells us. This land that was originally called Yukalpeten is nurtured by cenotes, which are like large gourds for freshwater protected by caverns. There are also many cenotes that are at ground level. These are all interconnected underground among themselves and for us are spiritual spaces where we perform our ancestral rites in honor of the mothers who created us and the fathers who created us, such as Yuum Cháak (Yuum of the Rain), Yuum iik’ (Yuum of the Wind), y Yuum K’áax (Yuum of the forest)