Tourism and change in the Lacandon territory, Chiapas, Mexico

This article contemplates part of the results of the current research project analysing the socio-cultural impacts of tourism on the Lacandon Jungle in the Mexican State of Chiapas. The findings reveal the strategies that the native Lacandon people use through their cultural and natural resources in order to enhance tourism-oriented local development. The changes analysed are due to a new way of exploiting the natural resources related to an idealised view of the ancestral jungle. With respect to the socio-cultural resources, the native people are reinventing their tradition and developing new social relationships dominated by generational change-over and changes in gender roles..