ANTH 3311 Mexico: From Conquest to Cancun

Andrew Roth-Seneff

El Colegio de Michoacán

Robert V. Kemper

Southern Methodist University

Ethnonyms: Michuguaca, Phorhépicha, Phurhépecha, Purepecha, Purépecha, Tarascos

During the last seven centuries the Phurhépecha or Tarascans have inhabited and defined a territorial homeland. This territory corresponds roughly to the physiographic region known as the Tarascan Subprovince in the Neovolcanic Axis of West Central Mexico. It is now a cultural mosaic of Tarascan-Mexican and Hispano-Mexican (mestizo) towns although a Tarascan ethnic core is still predominant in three contiguous subareas of the zone -- the island and shoreline communities of Lake Pátzcuaro, the highland forests to the west of Lake Pátzcuaro called the Sierra Phurhépecha or Meseta Tarasca, and a small valley of the Duero River to the north of the Sierra Phurhépecha (called La Cañada de los Once Pueblos in Spanish and Eráxamani in Phurhépecha).

The term "Phurhépecha" referred to "the commoners" in Tarascan ancient society and is a counterpart to the Aztec term macehualli. The term "Tarascan," in contrast, probably entered into use during contact with the first Spanish soldiers in the XVI century, displacing the Aztec term, michoaque (michua - "possessor of fish" + pl.), which in the locative form was the Aztec name for the ancient Tarascan empire. Michoacán (aztec, Michi - "fish" + atl - "water" + kan locative) continues as the name of the state where the Tarascan homeland is situated.

It is still commonplace for older adult generations, especially in peasant villages, to use the terms "tarasco" or "tarasca" (Tarascan) or forego any identification beyond the name of the central Tarascan town of their township to refer to themselves. In contrast, the younger adult generations, especially young professionals who live or have resided in regional or national urban centers, use the term "Phurhépecha." The entire population shares a common reference for significant others (especially their "mestizo," Hispano-Mexican, neighbors) who are called turísïcha.

The Tarascan Subprovince of the Neovolcanic Axis is located within 19° 20’ to 19° 55' N. latitude and 101° and 103° W. longitude. The Neovolcanic Axis is a unique east-west range of volcanos in Central Mexico. It forms a central to west-central belt of highland plateaus and forests of great climatological and ecological diversity that drain precious water into a stairway of lake basins which branch to the northwest along the Lerma-Santiago riverway and due west to the Balsas river basin. This belt is often referred to as the "Tarascan-Aztec System," a label that refers to the two prehispanic state empires controlling the Central Volcanic belt and surrounding areas during the two centuries prior to the Spanish Conquest.

The inhabited areas of the Tarascan Subprovince are between 1,700 and 2,400 meters above sea level. During the rainy season (May or June to October or November) moist air rising from the Pacific precipitates on this volcanic mountain range and filters through the porous rock into the Duero river basin on the north and northwest, Lake Pátzcuaro on the east, and into the region of Uruapan and the Tecaltecatepec river basin in the south.

The Tarascans are for the most part highlanders. Approximately 70% of the Tarascan speaking population lives between 1,700 and 2,300 meters above sea level. Climate in this area is extremely variable, with days ranging between temperate (February to November, 10° to 22° C.) and cold (December and January, 0° to 8° C.) and with nights becoming increasingly cooler (and cold above 2,000 meters) from July to January. The rest of the homeland population occupies the valleys and slopes on the perimeter of the Tarascan subprovince approximately 1,500 meters above sea level with a temperate to hot climate ranging between 10° C and 34° C.

The Mexican national census of 1990 reports 87,088 phurhépecha speakers above the ages of five years in the state of Michoacán. This figure is approximately 50% lower than a 1994 estimate (which includes children under five as well as emigrants) by the Mexican Institute of Indigenous Affairs. Therefore, we believe that the present-day Tarascan-speaking population is between 125,000 and 185,000. Contemporary Tarascan speakers are overwhelmingly bilingual, with Spanish as their second language. In terms of ethnic identity, rather than language use, the size of the Tarascan population is certainly higher and, perhaps, growing in response to increasing local awareness and pride in the Tarascan heritage.

The linguistic affiliation of Tarascan has not been established. Affiliation with Macro-Mixtecan has been proposed, but convincing comparative evidence is lacking. Although considerable phonological and lexical variation exists, all dialects of Tarascan are mutually intelligible.

Among the groups who constituted the pre-Hispanic culture of the Mexican highlands, the Tarascans were unique in their skill in metallurgy as well as in the use of rounded monumental structures (Yácata or pyramids, which are common in Western Mexico) on rectangular platforms in ceremonial centers. Equally distinctive is the evidence of complex social differentiation without corresponding social distinctions based on access to, and use of, alienable lands. It is probable that the Tarascan system of tribute depended on the labor of commoners on public lands. Similarly, bondage involved the exclusive obligation to perform specific services for an individual. This practice probably formed the basis of a complex system of labor appropriation in which forms of mutual servitude may have existed, thus distinguishing the Tarascan system from both the Aztec mayeque system and from European serfdom. Both the division between noble and priestly groups and the more flexible forms of political succession -- based on personal leadership qualities and organized by a form of ambilateral kin reckoning still imperfectly understood by scholars -- is similar to that found among the Aztec and other Middle American groups of Highland Mexico.

At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, the Tarascan State was controlled from three main centers, Tzintzuntzan (the seat of the supreme leader or Caltzontzin), Ihuatzio, and Pátzcuaro. Between the first major intervention in the area by the Spanish in 1522 and the arrival of the Bishop Vasco de Quiroga in 1538, the Tarascan State as well as Tarascan society and culture suffered severely both from Spanish conscription for the conquest of Western Mexico and from forced labor. Even before the Spanish forces arrived, smallpox and measles introduced by the Europeans radically reduced the Tarascan population, with tragic consequences for the prevailing social order.

Vasco de Quiroga, supported by a group of European humanist friars, instituted a major program of social reform in the Tarascan homeland between the years of 1538 and 1565. The widely settled Tarascans were congregated in towns organized around religious-communal institutions. Local specialization in crafts was established in different towns as were markets and a series of norms concerning dress, communal work and property, and even nuptuality.

A problem for Tarascan cultural history is raised both by the brutal disruption of Tarascan culture and society through epidemics and violent oppression during the first two decades of Spanish occupation and by the successful social reforms of noted priest-humanists like Vasco de Quiroga, Juan de San Miguel, and Jacobo Daciano in the following decades. Some scholars have argued that although the Tarascans have maintained their language, as well as such objective cultural elements as the Middle American nutritional and culinary system based on beans, squash, chilies, and maize, they have adapted the basic complex of Spanish peasant culture with regards to religion, economy, and traditional forms of empirical or "folk" knowledge. In contrast to this "Hispanist" point of view, som Mexicanists argue that the Tarascans continue to represent major continuities in Middle American Culture, especially in the relation between language and culture and in such diverse domains as gender relations, socialization, cosmology, and ethnoscience.

Given their importance as a prehispanic State, our present knowledge of the Tarascan situation during the Mexican colonial period is amazingly limited. Only at the end of the XIX century did systematic study of Tarascan ethnohistory and linguistics begin. In that period, the Tarascan homeland was being significantly altered. In the Sierra Phurhépecha, forest was cut by foreign companies to provide the railroad ties needed for the modernization program initiated during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Similarly, in the Zacapu Valley region, the draining of the shallow Zacapu and its replacement by a major maize plantation altered radically the traditional lifeways of the Tarascan population in that area. Both environmental alterations were associated with a significant immigration of the Hispano-Mexican population. In the twentieth century, revolution, agrarian reform, and resistance to state policies of social reform wrought major changes in the demography, economy, and local political and moral order of the Tarascan homeland.

Most Tarascan towns were formed during the social reforms of the sixteenth century. To this day, the central plaza in each town contains a Church whose patron saint represents the local indigenous community and a building site dedicated to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (called the yurhixu in Tarascan or hospital in Spanish). Towns are organized into barrios leading out from the central plaza and typically grouped together to divide the settlement in two halves. Barrios are composed of household compounds, each of which traditionally features wooden structures for storing goods in the front facing the street and leading to a packed earth courtyard (called ek'uku-tiniarhu in Tarascan). Typically, at the end of a compound's courtyard is a wooden kitchen house (which also serves as sleeping quarters), a granary, and a small roofed corral. Behind the cooking house is a large area (inchákutini) for cultivating maize, fruit trees, and medicinal and ornamental plants for family consumption. Bilingual Tarascan often use the Spanish term solar to describe this compound garden plot and orchard, whereas local Hispano-Mexicans use the Tarascan borrowing, ecuaro, which also refers to areas of cultivation in lands suitable only to hoe farming.

Tarascan towns range in population from 1,000 to 7,000 inhabitants. The pattern of town settlements varies in the different subregions of the Tarascan homeland. Most distinctive are the settlements in the small Duero River valley or Cañada de las Once Pueblos, which form an almost continuous line along the original colonial road connecting Morelia with Guadalajara. All Tarascan towns are associated with a constellation of small hamlets, or ranchos, ranging from as few as 30 to as many as 500 inhabitants. Generally these hamlets were formed over generations when sites for seasonal cultivation and pasturage gradually became permanent residences.

The traditional texture of Tarascan settlements has changed significantly in recent decades. The movable wooden cabin, or troje, with its fir shingles, and the stacked stone walls of the family compounds are rapidly being replaced by brick and concrete. Migrants to Mexican cities and to the United States have returned with new house plans and a taste for concrete floors and two story structures with windows. These changes are especially visible in the towns along the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro.

The Tarascan homeland is characterized by local and regional specialization in the production, extraction, and control of both natural and social resources. Tarascan towns and barrios are identified by their distinctive pottery, woodworking, weaving of cloth and straw, and embroidery. Although the region is dominated by small-scale agricultural activities, there are also communities of fishers with exclusive commercial rights to Lake Patzcuaro. Other communities specialize in certain forest based activities (ranging from the extraction of turpentine to the splitting of shingles), and still others have developed unions of tour guides, rental services (boats and horses), and souvenir shops to accommodate tourists.

The regional economy is marked by central wholesale-retail markets in large mestizo towns, as well as by special markets that operate during religious festivals in individual Tarascan towns. Money is the basic medium of exchange, although bartering is still common and, on certain days in certain markets, the expected practice.

In general, the Tarascan economy has a peasant substrate that combines food production (maize, beans, squash, fruit, hogs, chickens, turkeys) and collection for consumption with cash cropping, share cropping, day labor, and handcrafting. Legally, land in Tarascan townships is collectively held. In those areas of the Tarascan homeland once controlled by large agricultural estates (haciendas), collective land rights were established through federal appropriation of the former estate's lands to create ejidos. In other areas, the collective landholding unit is the Indian Community, recognized by law as a communal-property holding body. Often both forms of collective land tenure overlap in a single town. By law, each individual's right to land is established either by membership in the collective unit or by kinship with a legitimate landholding member. The cultivator is referred to as a comunero when the holding is trhough family membership in the Indian community or as an ejidatario if family membership is in the ejido assembly. In practice, these collective lands were, for the most part, divided into de facto private holdings, with varying degrees of collective constraint over the right to purchase individual titles, especially as regards persons not recognized as community members. A 1992 constitutional reform allowscommercial title to the land – that is, permits each individual holder to sell his or her land freely. Local Tarascan political groups, however, produced and cosigned a declaration rejecting this reform and forbidding the individual alienation of any collective land in the Tarascan homeland. This declaration was reaffirmed by cosigners and additional Tarascan groups in February 1994.

The Tarascan population is characterized by a clear sexual division of labor. Women prepare food, wash clothes, care for infants and toddlers with the help of older children, cultivate the solar in the household compound, and, when necessary, help men prepare, plant, and harvest field crops or orchards. Carpentry, construction, net fishing and lumber work are exclusively men's activities. Certain phases of ceramic work and straw weaving are organized by sex. For example, women typically paint designs on clay works while men fire the pottery. Both men and women enter into commercial activities. It is common for women to control the commerce of products of exclusively feminine activities such as embroidery and hand weaving shawls and blankets.

Since World War II, the Tarascans have left their homeland to find in other parts of Mexico and in the United States and have the recipients of government programs of formal schooling. Since the late 1960s, profesionalization through formal education, new strategies of economic accumulation, and new consumption practices associated with migration have brought significant changes to the traditional peasant substrate of Tarascan economy.

Tarascan kinship reckoning is bilateral to such a degree that each nuclear family must be seen as the union of the respective kindreds of mother and father. The major kin-term distinction is between highly familiar terms for members of the nuclear family and more formal bilateral terms for the extended kindred. There is, however, a degree of patrilineal bias. Ideally postmarital residence is virilocal and daughters-in-law are clearly subordinate to their respective in-laws, especially the husband's mother. Similarly, the order of preferred namesakes for children reflects a flexible ambilateral kin hierarchy with patrilineal bias. The first born is named by, or after, the parents' marriage godparents who, as ritual kin, represent the uniting of the respective kindreds of husband and wife. The paternal grandparents are the next preferred namesakes, and the maternal grandparents follow in priority. Newly weds are called acháti or warhíti Sapichu ("little mister and misses") until the birth of their first child, when they usually will establish neolocal residence. Thus, at different moments of the domestic life cycle, a Tarascan will live in an extended family compound composed of several separate family houses and in a single household compound co-founded by husband and wife.

Both rights of primogeniture and ultimogeniture are loosely recognized in inheritance. The last born often inherits the family compound, along with the obligation to provide daily care for parents in their old age. Inheritance is a major source of conflict, given the relative independence of a husband's and wife's property rights, the general and overlapping expectations of all offspring, and the tremendous irregularities in the written titles to the lands of the Tarascan homeland.

Tarascan adulthood is traditionally established by marriage and parenthood. Baptismal god parents are the preferred go-betweens in marriage negotiations, especially in cases of marriage by elopement. Sixteenth century testimonies of Tarascan marriages, as well as excellent ethnographic descriptions in this century, indicate striking continuities in the ritual process. Marriage leads to the establishment of new ritual kin relations. It is common for the marriage god parents to name, or approve of, the baptismal godparents of each child. Baptismal godparents will, in turn, approve or name the marriage godparents of their godchild.

By tradition, a child is baptized after the patsákuni or forty-day postpartum period of rest and isolation of mother and child. Prior to baptism, reference to the child is made in terms of the marriage godparents, painu pitántskata or maína pitántskata (godfather's or mother's namesake). Children are swaddled for the first weeks of life and usually remain in constant body contact with the mother or with an elder sister, cousin, or aunt during the first year. Nursing is prolonged, often lasting until the third or fourth year. Gender-differentiated imitation of adult activities results from prolonged periods of parallel play when accompanying adults engaged in everyday tasks. This is the most common mode of socialization in Tarascan towns and hamlets. In contrast to children socialized in urban environments, Tarascan children enjoy constat physical and emotional contact with care givers.

Tarascan sociopolitical organization and ritual reflect the complex and inter twining power relations of mestizo and Tarascan coexistence over the centuries. With the Mexican Constitution of 1917, rural, regional, and local social institutions had to contend with a nationalist post revolutionary socialism and policy of agrarian reform. This constitutional affirmation of an exclusively secular basis for community properties and their government (ejidos and Indian Communities) conflicted with the traditional religious-communal organization of the Tarascan homelands.

Traditionally, each town's cabildo was composed of the members of the community who had carried out a series of costly ritual obligations organized around the annual calendar of religious celebrations. With the exception of the Catholic sacraments, the cabildo designated or ratified all local civil and religious functions and served as the supreme community-level body for adjudication. In the first half of the twentieth century, a purely civil institutional order was implemented and the cabildo lost all real political authority. In this context, asymmetrical relations between Tarascans and mestizos became politically explicit by rejecting the political legitimacy of native religious authority. By 1950, with the exception of the municipio of Cheran, all Tarascan villages and hamlets came under the control of mestizo townships or municipios. Most communities were divided by prolonged local conflicts depicted in Purhépecha oral tradition as a struggle between the conservative followers of Tarascan Catholic tradition and its institutions, on the one hand, and radical agrarian "atheists", on the other.

Currently this political-religious dichotomy is fading. Now, different groups of Tarascan professionals seek both to consolidate a general pan-Tarascan regional identification among Tarascan towns and to achieve institutional recognition of this unity through electoral redistricting. These aims have inspired a revisionist revitalization of the Tarascan heritage. The cabildo, now seen as a council of elders, is being actively promoted in several communities, and a pan-Tarascan version of the cabildo and cargo system is present in the celebration of the Phurhépecha New Year (P'urhépecherhi Jimpanhi Wéxurhini). Since 1982, this event has been organized both to revitalize Tarascan custom and ethnic pride and to promote local consciousness of the homeland. The celebration is organized at the regional level along lines similar to the local religious cargo systems. The celebration rotates annually among the Tarascan towns of the subregions of the homeland. The representatives of the host town are responsible for the recently created pan-Tarascan national symbols, the Phurhépecha Flag and the T'arhésï (a stone on which is engraced the emblem of each town that hosts the New Year's celebration). After the celebration, each town's representatives become part of a council of the elders, a pattern that is reminiscent of the former cabildo system.

The Tarascans have developed their own distinctive form of Native Mesoamerican Catholicism, often described as a "folk" or "popular" version of Catholic doctrines and religious ritual. These practices include community-based devotion to saints and virgins, organized by the system of religious cargos and festivals, and a complex calendar of pilgrimages to local, regional, and national shrines. There is also a rich oral tradition which includes supplications and songs for the perpetuation of harvests, as well as stories centered on the figure of the Pingua or devil-patron. Local orators or tiósïrhi wantárhicha ("those who speak of God"; sing. tiósïrhi wantárhi), officiate at burials, intercede during marriage negotiations (especially those involving elopement), and at wedding celebrations. They possibly represent a continuation of the petamuti, a pre-Hispanic religious orator responsible for preserving the collective memory of Tarascan cosmology. Specialization in magical ritual and curing with herbs and oral incantations is widespread and associated with certain towns such as Cherán in the Sierra Phurhépecha. The dual concept of soul and body is the source of many practices such as the matsïp'ini ("twisting" of body and soul) of a first born son to make him resistant to the danger of espanto (the separation of body and soul) and to the harmful effects of mal de ojo ("evil eye," the malicious interest of others who might endanger body-soul harmony). Tarascans typically believe in an afterlife and in a complex Catholic conception of heaven, including purgatory and limbo, as well as notions of bondage in life to the devil. There are specialists to aid in the struggle of the soul to leave the body during the agony of death and to accept its eternal destiny.

Tarascan singers and composers, pirericha, are recognized throughout the Tarascan homeland. Many are regionally and nationally famous, their songs performed by numerous local groups and their recordings purchased and enjoyed throughout the Tarascan homeland and beyond. In the ceramic arts, the Tarascans have received international recognition, whether for the fantastic creations of the town of Ocumicho, the giant green pineapples of Patamban, or the white ware of Tzintzuntzan.

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