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Throughout the long history of the Maya, the powerful and wealthy city-states were built through the intense labor of the common workers. The cities thrived, and their people ate the maize and beans the farmers grew. But eventually, one by one, all of the great Maya cities and city-states collapsed and were abandoned. The farmers in many cases were forced to move to another location, mainly to be around a secure water source. In many of the Peten (Guatemala) regions, farming communities were either severely reduced by malnutrition and disease after the decline of the city-states, or the people simply moved away.

In the northern Yucatan lowlands, and in isolated areas throughout the Maya world, the rise and fall of the Maya city-states may not have had the same devastating impact on farmers' lives. Archeologists have found evidence some farming villages continued to exist in Peten long after the Classic era. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the mid-sixteenth century, many Maya villages were still leading the same lives and practicing the same traditions that had been in existence for many centuries.

The Spanish, in their enthusiasm to convert the Maya to Christianity and to incorporate them into the Spanish culture, caused great changes. The new economic and political systems exploited the native people and caused devastation among the Mayas. When Spanish control ended, the new governments were just as bad or worse. The Maya population and its culture, however, did not disappear. Their culture had been disrupted from outside, but the Maya found ways to live on.

In the early 2000s there were about six million Maya people living in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The largest group, the Yucatecs, number around three hundred thousand and live in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Two other large groups, the Tzotzil and the Tzeltal, numbering around two hundred thousand combined, live in the Mexican state of Chiapas. In Guatemala, Mayas make up about half of the population. About 40 percent of the Guatemalan population speaks an Amerindian language--mostly the Mayan languages--as their first or primary language. The modern Maya religion, however, has become a mix of Christianity and Maya spirituality and traditions.

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