Huastec Erotic

The Huastec call themselves Teenek, meaning roughly "the people from here," and the "here" is a warm, wet corner of northeastern Mexico that the rest of the country names after them: La Huasteca. Their villages sit in the low hills and river valleys of eastern San Luis Potosí and northern Veracruz, with smaller communities in Tamaulipas and Hidalgo. What marks them out is their language. Teenek is Mayan, the only Mayan tongue spoken anywhere near the Gulf of Mexico, cut off from its relatives in Chiapas, Yucatán and Guatemala by more than a thousand kilometers of Nahua, Otomí, Totonac and Spanish-speaking country. It split from the rest of the family so early that Yucatec or Tzeltal speakers cannot follow it, and its one close cousin, Chicomuceltec of Chiapas, died out in the twentieth century. Two main dialects survive, one on the Potosí side and one on the Veracruz side, and well over a hundred thousand people still use them at home.

Before the conquest the Huastec ran a chain of towns along the Pánuco and its tributaries, Tamtoc among the largest, and their sculptors carved life-sized stone figures that rank with the best of Postclassic Mexico. The Aztecs fought them, taxed them and slandered them, describing Huastec men as drunks who went without loincloths and filed their teeth. Propaganda in part, but tooth filing, cranial shaping and tattooing do show up in the archaeology. Conquest hit them harder than most. In the late 1520s Nuño de Guzmán, governor of Pánuco, shipped Huastec captives into Caribbean slavery, and the population took centuries to recover.

Most Teenek today are Catholic, but the Catholicism has absorbed older obligations. Maize is treated less as a crop than as a person, Dhipaak, honored with offerings at planting and harvest. At Tamaletom near Tancanhuitz, men perform their own flying-pole ceremony, Bixom T'iiw, the dance of the sparrowhawk. Xantolo, the Huasteca's masked and musical Day of the Dead, takes over their villages at the start of November. Women carry the visible identity: the petob, a crown of brightly dyed wool yarn wound into the hair, and the dhayemlaab, a white cape cross-stitched with trees of life and animals, are worn to market and mass, not only to fiestas. Men mostly dress like their mestizo neighbors. Families grow maize, beans and chili on communal land, boil cane into piloncillo, pick coffee and citrus, and twist zapupe agave fiber into rope and bags.