Lacandon
From Free net encyclopedia
The Lacandon people are one of the indigenous Native American Maya peoples, who live mostly in the jungles of the Mexican state of Chiapas. Their homeland is sometimes known as La Selva Lacandona ("The Lacandon Jungle").
The Lacandon were the only Maya in New Spain never conquered by Spain. They escaped Spanish control throughout the colonial era by living in small communities in the jungles of Chiapas and Peten, avoiding contact with Europeans and Ladinos. Lacandon customs remained close to those of the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peasants. As recently as the late 19th century some bound the heads of infants, resulting in the distinctively shaped forehead seen in Classic Maya art. They continue to speak a Maya language closely related to Yucatec Maya.
Until the mid- 20th century they had very little contact with the outside world, and worshiped their own pantheon of gods and goddesses in small huts near their villages set aside for religious worship. They also made pilgrimages to ancient Mayan sites to pray and to remove stone pebbles for ritual purposes. They believe the Mayan ruins are places where their gods once lived on earth before moving to domains they constructed in the sky.
Some Lacandons continue their traditional religious practices, especially in the north; another part of the Lacandon people in the south were converted to a Baptist sect of Christianity in the late 20th century, especially by a missionary society known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics. This conversion was aided by a yellow fever epidemic that spread among the southern Lacondon in the early 1940s, causing not only illness but also a high degree of social disruption. But in the north a spiritual leader named Chan K'in, who lived to an advanced age and died in the 1990s, helped keep the ancient traditions alive. Chan K'in urged his people to keep a respectful distance from outside influences, taking from the modern world some things of value, but not allowing it to overwhelm the Lacandon way of life.
Traditional songs of the Lacandons, a cultural heritage threatened by Christianization, as mentioned above, were recorded in February 1968 by a group of Swedish students of musicology, in collaboration with the Casa Na Bolom in San Cristóbal de las Casas. A publication in CD form of those recordings is now planned.
Since the 1970s the government has paid the Lacandons for rights to log timber in their forests, which has resulted in them being ever more integrated into modern society.