Tacuate Erotic

The Tacuate are a small Indigenous people of southwestern Oaxaca who speak Mixtec and still insist, with some justification, that they are not simply Mixtecs. Almost all of them live in two municipalities: Santa María Zacatepec, on the road that drops from Putla toward the Pacific coast, and Santiago Ixtayutla, a harder place to reach in the broken hills of the Jamiltepec district. Their neighbors, Mixtec, Amuzgo, Triqui, Chatino and the Afro-Mexican towns of the coast, know them by the name and by the clothes, and Mexican Indigenous agencies have long counted them as a people of their own. The name is an outsider's word, usually traced to Nahuatl terms for land and snake, though its original sense is debated.

Their speech belongs to the Mixtecan branch of the Oto-Manguean family and is tonal like its relatives. Linguists treat the Zacatepec and Ixtayutla varieties as distinct from each other and from the coastal Mixtec spoken nearby. Nearly everyone young also speaks Spanish, and schooling, wage work and migration keep pulling in that direction. Most families still farm maize, beans and chile on steep plots, with some coffee as a cash crop. Religion is Catholic in form, organized around the mayordomía, in which households take turns sponsoring a saint's feast at real expense, and it sits alongside older Mesoamerican habits of petitioning for rain and a good harvest.

Zacatepec was a Mixtec-speaking lordship before the Spanish arrived, within reach of the coastal kingdom of Tututepec. It left one of the better known documents of early colonial Oaxaca: the Lienzo de Zacatepec, a large painted cloth from the sixteenth century that maps the town's boundaries and records its ruling line in the old pictorial style. The community kept it for generations as proof of its lands, which says something about what mattered then and still does. Land, and friction with the mestizo ranchers and merchants who hold much of the local trade, run through the modern history of both towns.

What outsiders notice first is the clothing. Men's traditional dress is white cotton, a loose shirt and wide trousers, with collars, cuffs and hems crowded with tiny embroidered animals: birds, insects and small four-legged creatures barely bigger than a fingernail. Women wear a long white huipil worked with the same miniature figures, and in Zacatepec a half gourd, the jícara, worn on the head like a hat. Much of this now comes out mainly for fiestas or stays with the older generation, but the embroidery is still women's work, and it has become a source of cash as well as pride.