When Mayan poet Pedro Uc Be stepped onto the stage at the Feria Internacional del Libro last month to receive a recognition for his trajectory as a Mayan poet, the moment carried far more weight than a literary honor. It was a recognition not only of a body of poetry written in the Maya language, but of a life’s work rooted in territorial defense, environmental justice, and the survival of Indigenous ways of being.
Uc Be used his moment in the spotlight to speak about why he came to poetry — not through romantic longing, but through grief and resistance. His writing, he told the audience, was born out of what he has witnessed across the Yucatán Peninsula as megaprojects have transformed forests, poisoned water, and dispossessed Maya communities.
“I didn’t come to poetry thinking about love, but thinking about the pain that all of this caused us,” he said, describing how Mennonite agribusinesses cleared hundreds of hectares of jungle, how transgenic soy monocultures spread and wiped out the local bee populations, and how industrial pig farms were built over cenotes, dumping waste back into the groundwater.
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