Tarascans

Andrew Roth-Seneff, Robert V. Kemper

Michuguaca, Phorhépicha, Purepecha, Purépecha, Tarasco

It remains commonplace for older-adult generations, especially in peasant villages, to refer to themselves as “Tarasco” or “Tarasca” (Tarascan) or forego any identification beyond the name of the principal Tarascan town of their municipality. In contrast, the younger-adult generations, especially young professionals who live—or have resided—in regional or national urban centers, use the term “Purépecha.” The entire population shares a common reference for significant others (especially their mestizo neighbors), who are called “Turísïcha.”

During the past seven centuries, the Purépecha or Tarascans have inhabited and defined a territorial homeland that 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, but the 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 Purépecha or Meseta Tarasca) and a small valley of the Río Duero to the north of the Sierra Purépecha (calledLa Cañada de los Once Pueblosin Spanish andEráxamaniin Purépecha).

The Tarascan Subprovince of the Neovolcanic Axis is located within 19°20' to 19°55' N and 101°00' to 103°00' W. The Neovolcanic Axis is a unique east-west range of volcanoes in central Mexico. It forms a central to west-central belt of highland plateaus and forests of great climatological and ecological diversity that carry precious water along stepped series of lake basins branching to the northwest along the Lerma-Santiago riverway and westward to the Balsas River Basin. This belt is often referred to as the “Tarascan-Aztec System,” a label that refers to the two pre-Hispanic state empires that controlled the Central Volcanic belt and surrounding areas for two centuries prior to the Spanish Conquest.

The inhabited areas of Tarascan Subprovince are between 1,700 and 2,400 meters in elevation. 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 in the north and northwest, Lake Pátzcuaro in the east, and into the Uruapan region and the Tepalcatepec River Basin in the south. The Tarascans are for the most part highlanders. Approximately seventy percent of the Tarascan-speaking population lives between 1,700 and 2,300 meters above sea level. The rest of the homeland population occupies the valleys and slopes on the perimeter of the Tarascan Subprovince, at around 1,500 meters elevation.

The term “Purépecha” referred to “the commoners” in ancient Tarascan society and is a counterpart to the Aztec termmacehualli. The term “Tarascan,” in contrast, probably entered into use during contact with the first Spanish soldiers in the sixteenth century, displacing the Aztec term,michoaque(possessors of fish, sing.michua), which in the locative form was the Aztec name for the ancient Tarascan empire. Michoacán (Aztec:michi, “fish,” plusatl, “water,” pluskan, locative) is still the name of the state where the Tarascan homeland is situated.

The Mexican national census of 1990 reported 87,088 Purépecha speakers above the age of five in the state of Michoacán. This figure is approximately half that of a 1994 estimate (which includes children under age five, as well as emigrants) by the Mexican Institute of Indigenous Affairs.

The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) counted 142,459 Purépecha (Tarasco) speakers in Mexico in 2020. Defined in terms of ethnic identity rather than language use, the Tarascan population is certainly larger and, perhaps, growing in response to increasing local awareness and pride in Tarascan heritage.

The linguistic affiliation of Tarascans 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. Contemporary Tarascan speakers are overwhelmingly bilingual, with Spanish as their second language.

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, orcaltzontzin), Ihuatzio, and Pátzcuaro. Between the first major intervention in the area by the Spanish in 1522 and the arrival of 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 Spanish forces arrived, smallpox and measles introduced by the Europeans radically reduced the Tarascan population, with tragic consequences for the prevailing social order.

Considering their importance as a pre-Hispanic state, knowledge of the situation of the Tarascans during the Mexican colonial period is strikingly limited. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did the systematic study of Tarascan ethnohistory and linguistics begin. In that period, the Tarascan homeland was being significantly altered. In the Sierra Purépecha, forests were cut by foreign companies to provide railroad ties for the modernization program initiated during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. In the lacustrine zone to the east, shallow Lake Zacapu was drained to create land for a major maize plantation, radically altering the traditional lifeways of Tarascans in the area. These environmental alterations were accompanied by a significant in-migration of Hispano-Mexicans. In the twentieth century, revolution, agrarian reform, and resistance to state policies of social reform spurred major changes in the demography, economy, and local political and moral order of the Tarascan homeland.

Between the years of 1538 and 1565, Vasco de Quiroga, supported by a group of humanist European friars, instituted a major program of social reform in the Tarascan homeland. Widely settled Tarascans were resettled in towns organized around religious-communal institutions. Local craft specialization was established in the various towns, as were markets and a series of norms concerning dress, communal labor and property, and even marriage.

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, as well as by the successful social reforms of noted priest-humanists like Vasco de Quiroga, Juan de San Miguel, and Jacobo Daciano over the following decades. Some scholars have argued that although Tarascans have maintained their language along with cultural elements such as the Middle American nutritional and culinary tradition based on beans, squashes, chilies, and maize, they have adopted the basic complex of Spanish peasant culture regarding religion, economy, and folk knowledge. In contrast to this “Hispanist” point of view, some Mexicanists argue that Tarascans continue to represent major continuities in Middle American culture, especially the relation between language and culture, and in such diverse domains as gender relations, socialization, cosmology, and ethnoscience.

Among the groups that 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 (yácatas, or pyramids (which are common in western Mexico) on rectangular platforms found 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 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 Aztec and European systems of slavery and serfdom. A division between noble and priestly groups and flexible forms political succession—based on personal leadership qualities and organized by a form of ambilateral kin reckoning still imperfectly understood by scholars—were common to Aztec and other highland Mexican groups.

The traditional texture of Tarascan settlements changed significantly in the last half of the twentieth century. The movable wooden cabin ortrojewith fir shingles, and the stacked-stone walls of family compounds are rapidly being replaced by structures of brick and concrete. Also, migrants to Mexican cities and to the United States have returned with a taste for two-story structures with windows and concrete floors. Such changes are especially visible in the towns along the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro.

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 dedicated to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (called theyurhixuin Tarascan orhospitalin Spanish). Towns have a central plaza surrounded by barrios grouped so as to divide the settlement in two halves. Barrios are comprised of household compounds, each of which traditionally features wooden structures in the front facing the street that are used for storing goods. These lead to a packed-earth courtyard (calledek'ukutiniarhuin Tarascan), past which there typically is a wooden kitchen house (that also serves as sleeping quarters), a granary, and a small, roofed corral. Behind the cooking house is a large area (inchákutini) for growing maize, fruit trees, and medicinal and ornamental plants for family consumption. Bilingual Tarascans often use the Spanish termsolarto describe this compound garden plot and orchard, whereas local Hispano-Mexicans use the borrowingecuaro(from the Tarascanekuáɹu) that can also refer to areas suitable only for hoe cultivation.

Tarascan towns range in population from 1,000 to 7,000 inhabitants. The settlement pattern varies in the different subregions of the Tarascan homeland. Most distinctive is that in the small Duero River Valley, or Cañada de las Once Pueblos, forming an almost unbroken line along the old colonial road connecting Morelia with Guadalajara. All Tarascan towns have an associated constellation of hamlets or ranchos, ranging from as few as 30 to as many as 500 inhabitants. Generally, such hamlets formed over generations, as sites used seasonally for cultivation and pasturage gradually became permanent settlements.

In general, the Tarascan economy has a peasant substrate that combines wild foods (agave, honey, fish) and domestic production (maize, beans, squashes, fruit, hogs, chickens, turkeys) with cash cropping, share cropping, day labor, and craft production.

The Tarascan homeland is characterized by local and regional specialization in the production, extraction, and control of both natural and social resources.

Although the region is dominated by small-scale agriculture, there are also some fishing communities with exclusive commercial rights to Lake Pátzcuaro. Other communities specialize in forest products (ranging from turpentine to the split-wood shingles), and still others have developed a tourist industry with guides, rental services (boats and horses), and souvenir shops.

Since World War II, Tarascans have left their homeland to find jobs in other parts of Mexico and in the United States and the government has established a program of formal schooling. Since the late 1960s, professionalization through formal education, new strategies of economic accumulation, and new consumption practices associated with migration have combined to bring significant changes to the traditional peasant basis of the Tarascan economy.

Tarascan towns and barrios are identified by their distinctive pottery, woodworking, basketry, woven fabrics, and embroidery.

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

There is a clear sexual division of labor. Women prepare food, wash clothes, care for infants and toddlers with the help of older children, cultivate thesolar(garden) in the household compound and, when necessary, help men prepare, plant and harvest field crops and orchards. Lumbering, carpentry, construction, and net fishing are exclusively men's activities. Certain stages of pottery and basketry are organized by sex. For example, women typically paint designs on ceramics, but men do the firing. Both men and women participate in commercial activities. It is common for women to control the trade in items utilized in exclusively feminine activities, such as embroidery and the weaving of shawls and blankets.

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 createejidos. 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, an 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 acomunerowhen the holding is through family membership in the Indian community or as anejidatarioif family membership is in theejidoassembly. 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 allows commercial 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.

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. Ideally, postmarital residence is virilocal; daughters-in-law are clearly subordinate to their respective in-laws, especially the husband's mother.

The major kinterm 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. Similarly, the order of preferred namesakes for children reflects a flexible, ambilateral kin hierarchy with patrilineal bias. The firstborn is named by, or after, the parents' marriage godparents, who, as ritual kin, bring together the respective kindreds of husband and wife. The paternal grandparents are the next preferred namesakes, and the maternal grandparents follow in priority.

Tarascan adulthood is traditionally established by marriage and parenthood. Baptismal godparents are the preferred go-betweens in marriage negotiations, especially in cases of marriage by elopement. Sixteenth-century accounts of Tarascan marriages, as well as excellent ethnographic descriptions in the twentieth century, indicate striking continuities in the ritual process. Marriage leads to the establishment of new ritual-kin relations. It is common for the marriage godparents 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.

Newlyweds are calledachátiorwarhíti sapichu(“little mister and misses”) until the birth of their first child, when they usually will establish neolocal residence.

Thus, at different moments in 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 cofounded by husband and wife.

Both rights of primogeniture and ultimogeniture are loosely recognized in inheritance. The lastborn 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.

By tradition, a child is baptized after thepatsákuni, the 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 pitántskataormaína pitántskata(godfather's or godmother's namesake). Children are swaddled for the first six weeks of life and usually remain in constant bodily 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 while 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 constant physical and emotional contact with care givers.

While some scholars surmise that pre-Conquest Tarascans had lineages, the only kinship networks today extending outside the family and household are the looser form of kindred association and godparents. Outside of kinship, it is the civil-religious hierarchy of the fiesta system that is the principle organizing tool of local society.

By the late twentieth century this political-religious dichotomy was fading. Different groups of Tarascan professionals seek to consolidate a general pan-Tarascan regional identification and to achieve institutional recognition of this unity through electoral redistricting. These aims have inspired a revisionist revitalization of the Tarascan heritage. Thecabildo, now seen as a council of elders, is being actively promoted in several communities, and a pan-Tarascan version of thecabildoandcargosystem is present in the celebration of the Purépecha 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 religiouscargosystems. 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 Purépecha flag and theta’rhésÏ(a stone on which is engraved 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 elders, a pattern that is reminiscent of the formercabildosystem.

Tarascan sociopolitical organization and ritual reflect the complex and intertwining 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 postrevolutionary socialism and a policy of agrarian reform. The constitutional establishment of an exclusively secular basis for community properties (ejidos) and local governments (Comunidades Indígenas) conflicted with the traditional religious-communal organization of the Tarascan homelands.

Traditionally, each town’scabildowas 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, thecabildodesignated 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 thecabildolost all real political authority; asymmetrical relations between Tarascans and mestizos became politically explicit in rejecting the political legitimacy of native religious authority. By 1950, with the exception of the municipio of Cherán, all Tarascan villages and hamlets came under the control of mestizo townships ormunicipios. Most communities were divided by prolonged local conflicts depicted in Purépecha 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.

Thecargosystem constitutes an elaborate form of social ordering and control that channels talent and treasure into highly structured roles of ceremonial life. Most minor disputes are adroitly handled by local officials. At worst the offenders pay a small fine or spend the night in jail to cool off. A state judiciary system with courts in the largest towns handles major crimes.

Ethnic tensions do exist between Tarascans and the dominant mestizo populations. The latter in general look down on the Tarascans, referring to them aslos naturalitos, “the little naturals”, implying they are lowly native creatures, orlos nakos, “the women”, meaning effeminate and cowardly. The Tarascans, in turn, show little respect for the mestizos, whom they regard as lazy and indolent.

Specialization in magical ritual and curing with herbs and incantations is widespread and associated with certain towns such as Cherán in the Sierra Purépecha. The dual concept of soul and body is the source of many practices, for example, thematsïp'ini(“twisting” of body and soul) of a firstborn son is intended to make him resistant to the danger ofespanto(the separation of body and soul) and to the harmful effects of themal de ojo(“evil eye,” the malicious interest of others who might endanger body-soul harmony).

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. Characteristic practices include community-based devotion to saints and virgins, organized by the system of religiouscargosand festivals, and a complex calendar of pilgrimages to local, regional, and national shrines. There is also a rich oral tradition that 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,tiósïrhi wantárhicha(“those who speak of God”; sing.tiósïrhi wantárhi), intercede in marriage negotiations (especially those involving elopement), and officiate at wedding celebrations and at burials. They possibly represent continuity with the role of thepetamuti, a pre-Hispanic religious functionary responsible for preserving the collective memory of Tarascan cosmology.

The Catholic calendar has many saint and feast days; not all are celebrated by local townspeople and villagers. Each community has a patron saint whose birthday or feast day is celebrated, usually as part of thecargosystem, as are major religious holidays. For example, the Tarascan town of Ichupio celebrates the birthday of their patron saint, San Isidro, as well as major religious holidays such as Lent, Holy Week, Corpus Christi, and All Saints' Day.

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, communities have received international recognition for their signature products, whether for the fantastic creations of Ocumicho, the giant green pineapples of Patamban, or the white ware of Tzintzuntzan.

Tarascans understand disease in terms of its origins, severity, and stage of life in which it occurs. They seek various kinds of treatment, either self-administered in the home, by local curers (curanderos) or medical practitioners (practicantes) such as a nurse, or in a clinic from a doctor trained in modern medicine. Which treatment is sought depends on the severity of illness and costs.

Tarascans typically believe in an afterlife and in a complex Catholic conception of heaven, including purgatory and limbo, and in selling one’s soul to the devil. They have specialists to aid the soul's struggle to leave the body during the agony of death and to accept its eternal destiny.

The culture summary is from the article "Tarascans" by Andrew Roth-Seneff and Robert V. Kemper, in theEncyclopedia of World Cultures, Vol. 8,Middle America and Caribbean, James W. Dow and Robert Van Kemper, eds. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co. 1995. Ian Skoggard wrote the sections "Social Organization," "Social Control," "Conflict," "Ceremonies," and "Medicine," and Leon G. Doyon updated the population figures in July, 2023.

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