I was with a bunch of pre-med students from california that were doing a free clinic down there, and a few of them had parents from the area, and spoke spanish.
We were on a bus tour back from tikal, driven by a couple of Mayan tour guides from Lake atitlan, and they started telling ghost stores in spanish while one of the pre-med students was translating for everyone else.
They told this story of a backpacker who had brought a ouija board with them to their town and how they had accidentally opened up some kind of portal and let spirits loose that cursed the town or something like that, and then eventually some old woman in the town discovered that it had been the ouija board that was the source of it, so the town all went to the backpacker's hostel and burned him.
Or at least that was how it was translated and then after everyone in the car was like "WHAAAA" they clarified that "lo" meant "it" and not "him" and that they had burned the ouija board-- gender in spanish can be a little confusing.
Everyone spoke Spanish for tourists, but for the most part it was not the primary language people spoke.
I was quite surprised at how completely Mayan the culture was. I had expected it to have been completely subsumed by Spanish Catholicism over the centuries, but there is a substrate of the old religion and rituals everywhere, even in supposedly catholic festivals.
The impression you have from casual knowledge of the history is that Mayans used to be in Central America and then the Spanish came and they all died out, but that is far from the case. It’s a culture that is very much still alive.
If this interests you, I highly recommend visiting Guatemala. Book a flight to Guatemala City, take a bus to Antigua and from there you can find buses that go all throughout the Mayan highlands — lake atitlan, xela, Tikal. It’s a beautiful country with beautiful people and not at all what you would expect from the way people talk about it.