Alex hands me a couple more marshmallows, and as I pierce them in the skewer, he goes back in time. At around age six or seven, while playing soccer in his small Mayan village, someone kicked the ball far into the jungle. He ventured into the woods to find it and soon realized he was lost. As the canopies closed in, blocking the sunlight, a two-foot-tall goblin approached him. “I was instantly paralyzed in fear,” he remembers. The creature had four fingers in each hand, and his feet faced backward. “When it was just 20 feet away from me, I passed out,” Alex flashes back, his eyebrows arched high towards his forehead.

“What else lives around here?” I ask with curiosity. “La Llorona,” they say.