Like many “first-world” visitors to “third-world” villages, I thought I understood everything after my first visit to Tlamacazapa in mid-1994. But through frequent visits over the next six years, I came to understand how much I needed to learn about life in the Americas today.
Tlamacazapa is an Indigenous village in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Over those six years. Tlamacazapa came to represent for me much that is wrong with the world today—malnutrition, political demagoguery, racism, sexism, social exclusion, environmental destruction, lack of access to safe water—and found as well a place of friendship, faith and family where people were willing to talk about new ideas and to try new ways of doing things.
By the time I moved back to Canada from Mexico in 2000, I could only stand before the 6,000 people of Tlamacazapa in humility and admiration.
People here survived not just the conquest, but also devastating plagues, 300 years of colonialism, the war of independence, the Mexican Revolution, twentieth-century capitalism and the advent of Coca-Cola. Today, Tlamacazapa is part of the municipality of Taxco, the old silver-mining city about 30 kilometres away. In Tlamacazapa, an ever-shrinking minority of older people, along with many of the women and small children, spoke Nahuatl.
From the Florentine codex: A Nahua woman speaking
For a few years, I stumbled over how to talk about questions of Aboriginal identity. Those big anthropological words—Indigenous and Aboriginal—didn’t seem useful. After many conversations with a Sirenia, a mother and grandmother who lived with her family in a tiny house far from the centre of town, I found a way into the question of identity.
“We speak Mexican. They speak Spanish,” she said. And then later: “We are Mexican. They are Spanish.” She was telling me that Aboriginal people were Mexicans, and that the dominant groups were Spanish—not in the sense any more of being from Spain, but in the sense that they spoke Spanish, not Nahuatl.
México profundo – deep Mexico
My colonial brain finally got it, and then a lot more about Mexico started to make sense to me. At a superficial level, this may seem like no insight at all: the word “mexica,” after all, is the Nahuatl word used at the time of the conquest by the people whom we commonly refer to as Aztecs to describe themselves, and it is the word from which modern Mexico drew its name. But at another level, the way that my friends in Tlamacazapa chose to explain how they are different from the dominant culture points to a different way of perceiving their history and culture.
This is a tiny glimpse into what anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla called “deep Mexico” or “México profundo”—the idea that a narrative of Mexican history subsists among Indigenous and other marginalized peoples that is distinct from the official version perpetuated by the dominant culture with its textbooks and universities. Stories, not always written down even yet, powerfully shape a people. (México Profundo – Reclaiming a Civilization, University of Texas Press.)
Sirenia and her grandchildren in 1994
“México profundo” represents more than just history. The U.S. journalist John Ross wrote of “an unseen and unheard-from nation buried in the remote sierras and deserts of the nation or the less distant but equally out-of-sight ‘lost cities’ (‘ciudades perdidas’) seething on the outer rims of urban magnets like Mexico City.” (Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas, Common Courage Press, p. 59.)
Ancient religious practice continues within and alongside the worship of the Christian churches. Against all odds, languages survive. Traditional dances are passed along from generation to generation together with the stories of Indigenous resistance: Mexica warriors and the torture of Cuauhtémoc, the nephew of Motecuhzuma II (known to us most commonly as Montezuma), the last hueyi tlatoani (“great speaker”) of the Mexica people, whose feet were literally put into a fire in a useless attempt to force him to reveal the location of gold.
When deep Mexico erupts, as it did in 1994 with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, or in 2006 with widespread protests in Oaxaca, it is met with incomprehension in the dominant culture.
We see this in Canada too. When Aboriginal people block a highway or a railroad to press for attention to a land claim or other issue, they are told that they must obey the law. Those of us who complain of the inconvenience of a blockaded highway forget that we too are bound to uphold the treaties that the dominant cultures have repeatedly and unilaterally broken generation after generation.
- You can learn more about Tlamacazapa through an organization now called Atzin, created in 1997 to address the problem of access to clean, safe water. Using the techniques of popular education, Susan Smith and her colleagues work alongside community members for change.
- Rodrigo Cruz has posted photos of the community.
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