Founded in 1975 by the American poet Ambar Past, the profit sharing collective prints Mayanlanguage books and accompanying Spanish and English translations.
But that's the extent of my unpleasant scrapes in a dozen visits that have taken me to home-stay language courses, traditional Mayan markets, mummy museums, cenotes (surreal limestone sinkholes in which you can swim) and even Zapatista zones in the south.
Twenty native speakers of Yucatec, Mexico's most widely spoken Mayan tongue, met last Thursday to help bring the language to Google, Mozilla and Wikimedia projects.