When I was a child, my mother would take me to bathe in a spring near my village. By the water there were palm trees, and in them papanes, birds found in the lush forests of the gulf coast in the Mexican state of Veracruz, where I live. They would break into song as we’d approach the spring, and other animals would flee.

My town, Escolín, is an Indigenous community that sits between Papantla, a tourist city named for the birds, and Poza Rica, an oil town whose name means “rich well.” Many of the wells that supply oil to Poza Rica are near Escolín. When the sun goes down, nearby gas flares paint the night red.

I was born under these blood-tinted skies; they always seemed natural to me. But I’ve wondered what my forebears must have thought the first time the night sky turned red, when commercial oil extraction began in the area over a century ago. Maybe that hell was coming out of the earth.

In 1928 the Shell-owned company El Águila struck oil just west of Poza Rica — the first major oil discovery in the Indigenous region of Totonacapan, which spans the states of Veracruz and Puebla. So began, for my people, the white man’s exploitation of ixchalatiyat, Totonac for “the oil extracted from the heart of the earth.”

In the decades that followed, the region was invaded. Peasants had gained rights to use land as members of ejidos, or communal farms, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. But amid growing interest in the area’s oil deposits, Pemex, the state-owned oil and gas company, snatched much of the territory by expropriating swaths of forest under federal law.