The municipalities with the largest Tzotzil population are Chamula (48,500), San Cristóbal de las Casas (30,700), and Zinacantán (24,300), in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

[3][4] The Tzotzil language, like Tzeltal and Ch'ol, is descended from the proto-Ch'ol spoken in the late classic period at sites such as Palenque and Yaxchilan.

Traditional women's clothing is a blouse or long overdress (huipil), indigo dyed skirt (enredo), cotton sash, and shawl.

[8][9] Based on linguistic and archaeological data, scholars believe that the common ancestors of the contemporary Tzotzil and Tzeltal peoples entered Chiapas between 100 BCE and 300 CE.

In 1522, the Zinacantán lord Cuzcácuatl sought the Spaniards with an offer of allegiance, and his subjects afterwards helped Spanish commander Luis Marín to subdue neighboring tribes.

[3] The situation of the Tzoltzil worsened considerably in 1863, when laws enacted by Benito Juárez stripped the Indian towns of their corporate lands, forcing many Zinacantecos to become debt-indentured laborers on farms owned by the Ladinos.

The sense of national pride has become stronger among the Tzotzil since 1940, as natives have increasingly began to occupy local administrative posts and used their cultural identity for political purposes.

Recently, and increasingly, many Maya from the highlands of Chiapas have found migration to other parts of Mexico and Illegal immigration to the United States a way to break away from subsistence farming and abysmal wages.

A Spanish chronicler described Zinacantán as a people with "an infinite number of gods; they worshiped the sun and offered sacrifices to it, and to the full rivers, to the springs, to the trees of heavy foliage, and to the high hills they gave incense and gifts .. .

This cosmic model is reflected in the ceremonial circuits around houses and fields performed by priests, which proceed counterclockwise around the four corners and end in the center, where offerings are made to the gods.

A Tzotzil who uses any of those resources — water holes, trees, mud for his home, limestone for lime — is expected to compensate the Earth Lord with appropriate offerings in a ceremony.

These animal-spirit companions, consisting of jaguars, ocelots, coyotes, and smaller animals such as squirrels and opossums, are kept by the ancestral gods in four corrals inside the "Senior Large Mountain" in the east side of the world.

[2]: p.35, 94 In the centuries since the Spanish conquest, under the influence of Catholicism, the Tzotzil have come to associate the Sun with God the Father or Jesus Christ and the Moon with the Virgin Mary.