Letras Itinerantes Brings Manuel Antonio Ay Youth to One of the Riviera Maya's Top Art Spaces

At the start of the workshop, some of them would not pick up the brush. By the end, they were holding up their paintings and explaining what each color meant.

On June 26, Letras Itinerantes brought 20 young people from the Maya community of Manuel Antonio Ay to SFER IK Uh May, a contemporary art museum and cultural space near Tulum. For many of them, it was the first time they had walked through a museum. What followed was a guided tour, a meditation, and a session with acrylic paint on paper that produced 20 entirely different works.

The day was organized as part of the ongoing programming Letras Itinerantes runs in Manuel Antonio Ay, a community where the foundation has worked for several years across reading, writing, art, and community development. This was not a one-off visit. It was the latest step in a process the foundation has been building with these young people for a long time.

Inside SFER IK, for the first time

SFER IK, in Uh May, sits at the intersection of architecture, nature, and contemporary art. The space is internationally recognized and draws visitors from across the world. It is not a place most young people from rural Maya communities in the Zona Maya would typically find their way into.

The guided tour came first. The group moved through the museum's proposals, encountering works and spatial configurations designed around the integration of art and the natural environment. For many in the group, the experience raised a question they had not considered before: what counts as art, and who gets to make it?

That question became the premise for everything that followed.

Paco Rocha opens the session with silence

Paco Rocha, founder of Equinoccio Art Gallery and a voluntary collaborator with Letras Itinerantes who leads the foundation's artistic projects in its communities, ran the afternoon workshop. He did not begin with a canvas or a technique. He began with a guided meditation.

With eyes closed, participants were invited to move through their own emotions, to surface colors, images, and memories without trying to organize them. The instruction that followed was simple: put what you found on paper.

The medium was acrylic paint. The approach was intuitive. Color, composition, and instinct replaced any formal method. The goal was not technical skill but something harder to teach: the experience of making something that is genuinely yours.

20 paintings, 20 interior worlds

Each participant produced a single piece. No two looked alike. The works reflected the range of what was in the room: different emotional registers, different visual languages, different ways of seeing and organizing the world. Some were bold with color. Others were careful and contained. All of them were specific to the person who made them.

The shift in the group across the course of the day was visible. Young people who had started the session quiet and reluctant ended it standing in front of their own work, naming what they had painted and why. That movement, from hesitation to ownership, is something Letras Itinerantes has seen before in its communities. It is also, according to the foundation, one of the harder things to manufacture through any other means.

What the foundation is building in Manuel Antonio Ay

Manuel Antonio Ay is one of the communities where Letras Itinerantes maintains active, continuous programming. The work there began years before this visit and covers multiple areas: literacy, creative expression, and the slower work of building relationships between the foundation and the families it serves.

The SFER IK day was designed as an extension of that existing work, not a standalone event. The creative process Paco Rocha ran in the museum drew on what he had already developed with the same group in the community. The visit gave that process a new physical context, one that carries a specific kind of message: that spaces like this exist for these young people too, and that they belong in them.

Letras Itinerantes describes the collaboration between SFER IK and Paco Rocha as an example of what becomes possible when cultural institutions, independent artists, and community organizations work toward the same objective. The foundation continues to run programs in two communities in Quintana Roo and one near Merida.

The photographs from the day were taken by Soul Photography, whose volunteer work made it possible to document the experience. You can follow her work on Instagram at @soul.photography.

Support Letras Itinerantes

Programs like this one depend on individual support. If you would like to help Letras Itinerantes bring more experiences like this to Maya communities across Quintana Roo, you can make a one-time or monthly donation through their website at fundacionletrasitinerantes.org or via bank transfer to the following account:

• Institution: Banamex
• Account holder: Letras Itinerantes A.C.
• RFC: LIT170926BIA
• Account number: 70117336725
• CLABE: 002180701173367253

For billing information or receipts, contact the foundation at fundacionletrasitinerantes@gmail.com or by phone at (555) 909 3426.

Have you ever seen a cultural collaboration open unexpected doors for a community? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes .