When the Spanish crashed into the Mayan reality, the great cities of the classical age were ruins in the jungle for over 700 years.
Mayan Urban Civilization had been re-established in the Yucatan. The Mayans resisted the world-as-we-know well into the 20th Century. The Zapatista struggle is a continuance of this resistence. But starting in the 18th Century the ancestors of the Lacondon Jungle Mayans fled the Yucatan and returned to the jungle that covered the ruins of the classical age.
They reconsecrated the holy places, they created a sustainable, thriving agriculture in the jungle, they had unmediated experience of the great mystery, they became in all ways Gnostics. They dressed in white robes and lived their vision of divinity in the human. They made a world of nothing but n-b-a-u.
But then in the 1950's they ran out of jungle to seperate themselves from the b-a-u world. In the 1970's five Lacondon Mayan pueblos were established. In 2006 two of these pueblos have been over-run by lunatic evangelical protestan churches and Communidad Laconja is on the verge of being over run.
I am staying at the Tucan Verde, the campground of Ishmael who is the most visible resistance.
The evangelicos consciously or unconsciously teach that God's grace is demonstrated by material wealth. But Ishmael is the most successful campground owner and guide to the jungle and its ruins. And he is very visibly not an evangelico.
He is the son of a shaman. His mother's present husband is Chyuum, one of the last remaining shamans in Laconja. But his mother is an evangelico, as is his brother and many other members of his family.
He is not a traditionalist. He doesn't wear the white tunic, he cuts his hair. He is intregating the Gnostic experiencing of his ancestors with the post-modern world
The evangelico protestanism in Laconja is pure unadulterated lunacy. There is much ranting and raving about repetence, the end of the world, the need to give all to the church because tomorrow the world ends.
The Lacondon Maya never surrundered to the Spanish, the Mexicans, to b-a-u. But I arrived in their land to observe what could be their final struggle at the end of their world.