The Lacandon are one of the Maya peoples who live in the jungles of the Mexican state of Chiapas, near the southern border with Guatemala. Their homeland, the Lacandon Jungle, lies along the Mexican side of the Usumacinta River and its tributaries. The Lacandon are one of the most isolated and culturally conservative of Mexico's native peoples. Almost extinct in 1943, today their population has grown significantly, yet remains small, at approximately 650 speakers of the Lacandon language.
Culture
<!-- Deleted image removed: thumb|right|Eastern part of the Mexican state of Chiapas, where the Lacandon region is located. The green area is the [[Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, which roughly coincides with the area designated to the Lacandon Community in 1971]] -->
The Lacandon escaped Spanish control throughout the colonial era by living in small, remote farming communities in the jungles of what is now Chiapas and the Guatemalan department of El Petén, avoiding contact with whites and Ladinos. Lacandon customs remain close to those of their pre-Columbian Mesoamerican ancestors. As recently as the late 19th century some bound the heads of infants, resulting in the distinctively shaped foreheads seen in Classic Maya art. And well into the 20th century, they continued using bows and arrows and making arrowheads from flint they quarried in the rainforest. Today they sell versions of these to tourists.
Until the mid-20th century the Lacandon had little contact with the outside world. They worshiped their own pantheon of gods and goddesses in small huts set aside for religious worship at the edge of their villages. These sacred structures contain a shelf of clay incense burners, each decorated with the face of a Lacandon deity. The Lacandon also made pilgrimages to ancient Maya cities to pray and to remove stone pebbles from the ruins for ritual purposes. They believe that the Maya sites are places where their gods once dwelled before moving to new domains they constructed in the sky and below the earth. The Maya site of Bonampak, famous for its preserved temple murals, became known to the outside world when Lacandóns led American photographer Giles Healy there in 1946.
A few Lacandon continue their traditional religious practices today, especially in the north around Lakes Naja and Mensabok. In the south, a yellow fever epidemic in the 1940s took many lives and caused a high degree of social disruption. The southern group abandoned their pantheon of gods in the 1950s and were later Christianized through the efforts of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Southern Lacandon helped SIL missionaries translate the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament into their language. But in the north the spiritual leader Chan K'in, who lived to an advanced age and died in 1996, helped keep the ancient traditions alive. Chan K'in urged his people to maintain a respectful distance from the outside world, taking some things of value, but not allowing outside influences to overwhelm the Lacandon way of life.
Language
The Lacandon speak a Mayan language closely related to Yucatec Maya. In their own language they call themselves Hach Winik ("Real People", ) and they call their language Hach T'ana ("Real Language"). The Lacandón have long been traders with other Maya in the area and have adopted some words of Ch'ol and Tzeltal into their lexicon. They have also created their own unique styles of speaking Spanish in some cases.
Threats to cultural survival
Lacandon interaction with the outside world has accelerated over the past 30 years. In the 1970s, the Mexican government began paying them for rights to log timber in their forests, bringing them into closer contact with the national economy. At the same time, the government built roads into the area, establishing new villages of Tzeltal and Ch'ol Indians who were far more exposed to the outside world than the Lacandon. The roads helped expand farming and logging, and severe deforestation occurred. Then, in the early 1990s, the Lacandon witnessed acts of violence during the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. The Zapatistas issued a series of statements of their principles, each called a "Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle".
Casa Na Bolom in San Cristóbal de las Casas is devoted to helping the Lacandon cope with the changes imposed on them in recent decades. A scientific and cultural institute, it was founded in 1951 by archaeologist Frans Blom and his wife, photographer Gertrude "Trudi" Duby Blom. Casa Na Bolom ("House of the Jaguar") does advocacy work for the Lacandón, sponsors research on their history and culture, returns to them copies of photographs and other cultural documentation done by scholars over the years, and addresses environmental threats to the Lacandon Jungle, such as deforestation. Among its many projects, Casa Na Bolom has collaborated with a group of Swedish ethnomusicology students who recorded traditional Lacandón songs. A publication of those recordings in CD form is now planned.
Several linguists and anthropologists have done extensive studies of Lacandon language and culture, including Phillip Baer, a missionary linguist with Summer Institute of Linguistics who lived among the Lacandon for more than 50 years, Roberto Bruce an American linguist who devoted his life to studying Lacandon language and culture, and Christian Rätsch who spent three years living with the Lacandon while studying their spells and incantations.
History
The first definite contact with the Lacandons occurred in the last decades of the 18th century. When scholars first investigated in the early 20th century, they thought that the Lacandon were the direct descendants of ancient Classic Maya people who fled into the rainforest at the time of the Spanish Conquest and remained linguistically and culturally pristine ever since. They made that assumption because the Lacandons' physical appearance and dress is so similar to the way the ancient Maya portrayed themselves in their murals and relief carvings. Scholars were also impressed by the fact that “the Lacandon resided near the remote ruins of ancient Mayan cities, had the knowledge to survive in the tropical jungle, and were neither Christian nor modernized”.
The Lacandon seem to have originated in the Campeche and Petén regions of what is now Mexico and Guatemala and moved into the Lacandon rainforest at the end of the 18th century, a thousand years after the Classic Maya civilization collapsed. Unlike other Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica, though, they were not strongly affected by outside forces until the 19th century. While other Indians were living under the control of the Spanish, the Lacandon lived independently deep in the tropical forest. Their independence allowed them to manage their contact with the outside world in a controlled way. Preserving their ethnic identity was not as effortless, though. The Lacandon deliberately remained in small, isolated groups in order to resist change. They used their inaccessibility and dispersed settlement pattern to protect their traditions.
Outsiders avoided the Lacandon region for centuries due to frightening legends about the dense tropical forest. The Spanish—and later the Mexicans, after they gained their independence—sometimes made efforts to settle the region, but failed due to the lack of financial and political support. For generations the only connections the Lacandon had to the outside world came through trade. The Lacandon “often initiated [trade and] sought metal tools, salt, cloth, and other European goods”.). Lacandon who reside in the southern part of the Chiapas jungle have been more exposed to outsiders, are more aggressive than their highland counterparts, have slightly different dress, and adopted the Christian faith more quickly.
Gods
Lacandon deities include K’akoch, the god responsible for the creation of earth, sun, and other gods (who came from the flower of the bak nikte' Plumeria rubra); K’akoch does not interact with humans. Sukunkyum is held to be the first god to come from the bak nikte' and is reportedly in charge of the underworld and judging people's souls; Sukunkyum tends to the sun (when it disappears into the west) and the moon (during the day). Hachäkyum is the younger brother of Sukunkyum; he is the most important deity because he created the jungle, animals, and man and woman (with the help of his wife). Ultimately, there is not a great understanding of the exact meaning of the anthropomorphic rubber figures though the symbolism appears to be representative of human sacrifice.
The southern Maya lowlands which are home to the Lacandón are characterized by rugged karstic topography and sub-tropical rainforest, known as the Selva Lacandona, or the Lacandon Forest. Several rivers feed into the eastern Chiapas region, such as the Pasión, San Pedro Martir, Lacantún, Jataté, Usumacinta, and Chixoy. The rivers, along with many lakes, swamps and shorelines, contribute to the diversity of the Lacandón lands. The availability of various types of flora and fauna which inhabit these aquatic and terrestrial areas have allowed the Lacandón to thrive in a geographical setting which at first glance appears to be hostile to humans. In order to take full advantage of their resources, the Lacandón have used specific agricultural, hunting and gathering techniques which have been designed to be conservative of the land and ecozone as a whole, which allows for sustainable use and therefore continued yield in the future. 20% of the approximately 700 Lacandón people living today continue to use such techniques.
James Nations recognizes four zones which the Lacandón utilize to maintain a diverse food supply and healthy diet. The primary or old growth forest consists of small portions of tropical rain forest and lower mountainous rain forest, which constitutes the majority of the forest ecosystem. and map at). The primary growth forest provides hunting for the Lacandón, as deer, peccary, agouti, and monkeys inhabit the area. This zone is also very important for the maintenance of rich and stable soil, of which the Lacandón take advantage in their milpa systems, the second zone.
The milpa, or farmed field, is crucial to the survival of the Lacandón people. Here, they utilize sustainable slash and burn techniques to ensure the continued richness of the soils of the milpa and health of the region in general. The Lacandón people engage in swidden agriculture on a primary or secondary growth forest in January, February or March, and allow the remains to dry until April. During this time, fire breaks are also put into place so as to keep the coming burn from catching other parts of the forest on fire. The firing occurs in April and planting begins soon thereafter. Different crops are grown together in the milpa amongst each other, such that plants of a single crop are separated from one another and surrounded by different crops. Also, tree species (bananas, plantains, etc.) are interspersed amongst maize and vine plants such as squash and chiles, In addition, the shells from this organism provide great nutritional value, as they provide calcium and lime when burned. The lime is then added to maize to release amino acids such as tryptophan and lysine and the vitamin niacin, which would otherwise be unavailable from the maize (unable to be metabolized) if the lime were not added.