Otomi Erotic

The Otomi are one of the older continuous presences in central Mexico — a people whose ancestors were already settled across the highlands long before the Nahua expansions that produced the Aztec state. They live today in a scatter of communities across Hidalgo, Querétaro, the State of Mexico, Puebla, and Veracruz, occupying terrain that ranges from the cold, semi-arid Mezquital Valley to the cloud forests of the Sierra Gorda and the humid lowlands of the Huasteca. That geographic spread is part of why outsiders often miss how coherent the group actually is: an Otomi farmer in the Mezquital and a Ñuhu speaker in the Sierra de Puebla can look, at first glance, like they belong to different worlds.

What unites them is language, and the language is unusual. Otomi belongs to the Oto-Manguean family — a stock unrelated to Nahuatl or to the Mayan languages, and one of the deepest linguistic lineages in the Americas. It is tonal, with three tones in most varieties, which sets it apart from almost every other indigenous language a Mexican is likely to encounter. The Otomi themselves call their language Hñähñu, Ñuhu, or one of several related self-designations, and the variation between regional forms is wide enough that speakers from distant communities sometimes shift to Spanish to be understood. Linguists generally treat these as a cluster of closely related languages rather than a single tongue.

Catholicism arrived in the sixteenth century and was absorbed without displacing the older religious vocabulary underneath it. Saints' day cycles, godparenthood, and pilgrimage are the public face; behind them sit ritual specialists, offerings to hills and springs, and the cut paper figures — the famous muñecos of San Pablito in the Sierra Norte de Puebla — used in healing and agricultural ceremonies. The papermaking tradition itself is pre-Hispanic, made from the bark of the jonote tree, and survived suppression to become one of the few unbroken continuities of indigenous Mexican craft.

The Otomi were long stereotyped by their Nahua neighbors and later by colonial chroniclers as rustic and unsophisticated, a slander that stuck for centuries and is only now being undone by their own writers, anthropologists, and political organizers. Migration to Mexico City and across the U.S. border has reshaped community life since the 1980s, but the Mezquital remains the cultural and demographic core, and Hñähñu is still being passed to children there in numbers that most of Mexico's indigenous languages can no longer claim.