Tlapanec Erotic

The Tlapanec call themselves Mèꞌphàà, and the distinction matters: "Tlapanec" is a Nahuatl exonym carried over by the Spanish, and the people who use it for themselves are increasingly the ones outside the community. They live in the rugged eastern half of Guerrero, in the Sierra Madre del Sur and the dry tropical lowlands that fall away toward the Costa Chica. It is some of the steepest, most isolated country in southern Mexico, and that isolation has done a great deal to keep the language alive.

Mèꞌphàà sits inside the Oto-Manguean family — the same deep-rooted stock that produced Zapotec, Mixtec, and Otomí — but it is not mutually intelligible with any of its neighbors and is usually treated as its own small branch. It is a tonal language, with several tones doing real grammatical work, and it splinters into regional varieties (Malinaltepec, Acatepec, Tlacoapa, Azoyú and others) that differ enough that speakers sometimes default to Spanish when meeting from across the sierra. Linguists generally count it as one of the more endangered Oto-Manguean languages outside Oaxaca, though intergenerational transmission in the highland communities is still relatively strong.

Catholicism arrived in the sixteenth century and settled into the same uneasy coexistence found across indigenous Mexico: saints' days, processions, and parish life layered over an older ritual calendar tied to maize, rain, and the mountain itself. Petitions are still made at caves and springs; tlacololeros dance in some towns; healers work with copal, candles, and counted bundles of leaves. The civil-religious cargo system — rotating unpaid offices that bind a man to years of community service — remains the spine of village governance in much of the region.

The twentieth century was hard on the Tlapanec. Land disputes with mestizo ranchers, the long shadow of Guerrero's caciquismo, and the militarization that followed the dirty war and later the drug economy have all pressed on these communities. Out of that pressure came the CRAC-PC, the community police founded in 1995 in Mèꞌphàà and Na Savi towns, which still patrols a stretch of the Costa-Montaña region under indigenous customary law. Migration — to Sinaloa's fields, to Mexico City, to the United States — now shapes household economies as much as the milpa does, and remittances arrive in villages where the elders still address one another in a language Cortés never heard.