Learn about the Lacandons: the indigenous people who have lived for hundreds of years in the Lacandon rain forest in Chiapas, Mexico, and who refer to themselves as the Hach Winik, meaning "True People."
 Anthropologists believe that the Lacandons are direct descendants of the classical civilizations of Palenque, Yaxchilan and Bonampak, and that their ancestors came to the jungle of southeastern Chiapas to escape Spanish colonial domination during the 17th and 18th centuries Numbering approximately 500 inhabitants today, they have had to face unprecedented changes in the wake of the massive frontier settlement and deforestation of the Lacandon rain forest since the 1950s.
The few 400 Lacandons which survives in the forests of Chiapas were regarded a long time as the direct descendants of the Mayas of the traditional time, but many ethnohistoric works show that Lacandons of today result in fact from the Yucatec peninsula.
Mexican tourist brochures usually have at least one picture of a brown-skinned man with very long, black hair, wearing something like a white, knee-length cotton tunic. Probably the man holds a bow and some arrows, for this picture is of a Lacandon Indian, an inhabitant of the Selva Lacandón, or Lacandon Jungle, of the lowlands of northeastern Chiapas. Lacandons are considered to be the most "primitive" of all of Mexico's indigenous peoples. |
