Living Maya

The Maya did not vanish with the old cities. Maya people live today in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and many speak Mayan languages to verify. This page starts with the peoples met in study so far, in their words where a source gives them.

Lacandón (hach winik)

The Maya of the Chiapas rain forest call themselves hach winik, "real people." The name Lacandón comes from an old lowland place name, lacam tun (Palka, 1998/2015, p. 459). They live in small family settlements. In the 1800s these reached from Tikal south to the Pasión River. They descend from lowland peoples and Yucatec migrants who entered the forest from the 1500s on, not from the Classic cities themselves (Palka, 1998/2015, pp. 459–462).

Their gods live in the ruins. Lacandón (hach winik) accounts call the ruins houses of the divine. People go to them with incense, food, drink, and cigars, and ask for rain, crops, game, and health. They do not settle near ruins, because the gods tell them to keep away (Palka et al., 2026).

One god, Akyantho, rules foreigners, trade, and disease. He is light skinned and wears a cowboy hat and a pistol (Palka, 1998/2015, p. 468). Myths, songs, and chants from the northern Lacandón of Naha’ are gathered in Cook (2019).

Na Bolom and the Blom photographs

Na Bolom, in San Cristóbal de las Casas, was the house of Frans Blom and Gertrude Duby Blom. Trudi Blom, a Swiss-born journalist, photographed the Lacandón (hach winik) (Bürgi, 2011). Her exhibit prints at Duke name the people in them, among them Pepe Castillo at Monte Líbano in 1943, Vicente Bor at the Jataté River in 1950, and K’in García at Najá in 1958 (Duke University Libraries, n.d.). The same series shows the forest cut for mahogany and cleared for fields. Na Bolom’s photograph collections were surveyed in 2020 (Hernández Rochín, 2020).

Blom archives in Collections

Faith and celebration

This section returns in December.

Maya leaders today

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K’iche’ Maya woman born in 1959 in Chimel, Guatemala, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work for the rights of Indigenous peoples and for reconciliation between ethnic groups (Nobel Prize Outreach, n.d.).

The 48 Cantones of Totonicapán is an ancestral authority of the K’iche’ Maya, made of community governments whose leaders are elected each year in assembly. Its former president Luis Pacheco and former treasurer Héctor Chaclán led protests in 2023 in defense of that year’s election results. Charged in 2025 with terrorism and other crimes, they were released in August 2026 to face the rest of the case outside prison. Rights groups called the case political (Cultural Survival, 2026).

The K’iche’ and the Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh is the K’iche’ book of creation. In it the gods want people who will provide for them and nurture them, tzuqul and q’o’l (Chinchilla Mazariegos, 2017, p. 70). Q’eqchi’ and Mopan myths tell of poisonous creatures born from the blood of the moon (Chinchilla Mazariegos, 2017, p. 128).

Music and instruments

A start, from museum records. The National Museum of the American Indian keeps a drum and drumstick made by the Q’eqchi’ maker Francisco Caal (National Museum of the American Indian, n.d.). The National Museum of Natural History keeps a violin from Chamula, in highland Chiapas, received in 1885 (Smithsonian Institution, n.d.). The Walters Art Museum has a Maya slit drum from the Late Postclassic, AD 1350 to 1521 (Walters Art Museum, n.d.).

Sections to come

Each needs a source before it is written.

Sources

Every source the site uses is also on the Sources page. Links checked November 6, 2026.