The small trees themselves are mostly leafless now, so the greenness in that picture is provided by other trees. If this yellow-flowered tree were planted alone in a park, it'd draw an audience, but here it's just a weed tree struggling for space. Once its flowers are dropped, it'll become just another nondescript tree. Up close, the blossoms, about the size of a US 25-cent piece, reveal the family the tree belongs to, as seen below:

And if that doesn't ring a bell, maybe the tree's twice-compound, or "bipinnate," leaf -- a little reminiscent of a Honeylocust leaf -- will, as shown below:

If you see a flower with five petals arranged with bilateral symmetry, with ten stamens united at their bases into a cylinder around a slender ovary and stigma-tipped style, and the plant bears compound leaves like this, you just have to think "Bean Family," and that's the case here. Honeylocust and Redbud trees also are in the Bean Family, so it all hangs together.

Our yellow-blossomed tree is a member of the genus Caesalpinia, probably CAESALPINIA GAUMERI, which is called Peccary Wood by the Creole speakers over in Belize, and Kitinché by the Maya folk here in the Yucatán.

We've run into several trees that burst into lavis yellowness like this, but they were usually Cassias, also Bean Family members and also with five-petaled, bilaterally symmetrical flowers. However, Cassia leaves are only once compound, or pinnate, as opposed to bipinnately, compound. If you can't visualize these leaf differences you might check out our leaf page at http://www.backyardnature.net/lf_confg.htm.

In the diagram at that page's top, Leaf A is a classic pinnately (once-pinnate) compound leaf. Leaf G, like our Caesalpinia leaf, is bipinnate.