Lacandon people
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
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. 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 and they call their language Hach T'ana. 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. Details of the language of the northern group of Lacandon can be found at the Lacandon Cultural Heritage website.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 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”. They thought that these native people were pure Maya untouched by the outside world. But in recent years researchers have revealed a more complex history for the Lacandon.Scholars have now shown that the Lacandon are the result of a coming together of various lowland Mayan refugee groups during the period of Spanish colonial rule. Their “language, clothing, and customs derive from several different Colonial Era Mayan ethnic groups”. It appears that the Lacandon possess multiple origins and that their culture arose as different lowland Mayan groups escaped Spanish rule and fled into the forest. There was a blending of cultural elements as some traits of varied origin were retained while others were lost. The Lacandon seem to have arisen as a distinct ethnic group as late as the 18th century, meaning that they “cannot be the direct descendants of the ancient Maya since their culture did not exist before it was generated through inter-indigenous interaction”. In particular, Eric Thompson argued that they originated from Kejache refugees intermarrying with the Lakandon Chʼol. The Kejache language was close to Yucatec, thus explaining why the Lacandon language also belongs to the Yucatecan branch.
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 sought metal tools, salt, cloth, and other European goods”. Outsiders, for their part, also desired goods from the forest, such as timber, animal skins, and fruits. Although trade was slow and infrequent, it did take place and it allowed for an intermingling of culture and material goods.
In the 19th century, outsiders looked toward the forest for valuable timber and new lands for farming. As the 19th century progressed, farmers and ranchers invaded the area, and the Lacandon withdrew farther into the forest, losing more and more land on the periphery of their territory. The Lacandon survived outright conquest, though, by adopting a flexible strategy that led them to accept, resist, or retreat from the imposing foreign culture depending on the circumstances.
By the late 20th century, though, the Lacandon were in frequent contact with outsiders within the area that had been their heartland. This resulted in territorial shifts, disease, and new powerful cultural influences. As logging began on a massive scale, the Lacandon came into contact often with forest workers, which resulted in wage work for some and an overall transformation of their culture, a process that continues to the present time. As development in the area took place, the Catholic Church established mission churches which converted many Lacandon. The Lacandon were drawn into the revolt of Indigenous peoples that took place in the area in the 1980s and 1990s. They endured the pressure of cultural change as never before in their history. Their strategy of many generations to withdraw into the forest to preserve their traditional way of life now failed them.
In 1971 a Mexican presidential order turned 614,000 hectares over to the Lacandon Community, thereby recognizing the land rights of this relatively small group of Indigenous forest dwellers over the more numerous settlers, who had been encouraged to colonize the Lacandon Forest under previous government policies. But this did not put an end to the Lacandons' troubles. Ironically, this effort to save Lacandon culture resulted in enduring tensions between the Lacandon and their neighbors.