In 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa conducted an auto-da-fe at Mani in Yucatan, destroying Maya religious objects and manuscripts. The burning of codices obliterated irreplaceable records of astronomy, ritual, genealogy, and story. It remains one of the most infamous acts of cultural suppression in the early colonial Americas.

The destruction of Maya books created a silence that later Indigenous writers and poets have had to confront imaginatively. Modern Maya and Latin American poets often write against this archival wound, using fragments, oral memory, and bilingual forms to restore cultural continuity.