Cuetzalan, MexicoThe first time Jacinta Teresa prepared to launch herself from the towering pole, 34 years ago, it felt as though the entire world was shifting beneath her feet. At more than 150 feet above ground, the wind whipped hard and fast against her face.

“The trees were moving with me, the church too,” Teresa, now 50, says of the experience. As the pole swayed, she thought she might slip. “I felt like I didn’t have enough hands to keep me holding on.”

Teresa had been put up to the task by her uncle, himself a volador (a flyer) who’d spent the past year or so encouraging her to join the danza de los voladores (Dance of the Flyers) an Indigenous ritual in which four