The bat that Camazotz represents was significant enough in Maya self-understanding that entire peoples took their name from it. The Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas derive their own name from the Mayan word sotz', meaning bat, an ethnonym still used by well over half a million speakers of the Tzotzil language today, and Maya oral and documentary tradition associates a bat emblem or patron with this lineage's origins.
The Popol Vuh itself, in its account of the founding lineages of the Kiche and related highland Maya peoples, names a group called the Zotzil among the tribes descended from the first created humans, tying a bat-associated lineage directly into the same foundational narrative that elsewhere features Camazotz as a monstrous underworld antagonist, so that the bat in highland Maya tradition carries both a fearsome, death-associated mythic charge through Camazotz and a proud lineage or clan identity through peoples and groups who claimed the bat as their own emblem rather than only as a monster to be feared. This dual character, dangerous underworld predator on one hand, respected ancestral emblem on the other, mirrors the real behavior of the vampire bats native to the region, animals that are genuinely dangerous to livestock and can transmit disease, yet also a familiar, integrated part of the nocturnal cave-dotted landscape in which highland and lowland Maya communities have always lived. The Tzotzil Maya remain a living people today, primarily in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and their name is a linguistic monument to how central the bat, in both its frightening and its emblematic aspects, has long been to Maya identity.