Zapotecs Erotic

The Zapotecs are one of the oldest continuously settled peoples in the Americas. Their heartland is the central valleys and northern sierras of what is now Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and they have been there long enough to have built a city — Monte Albán — that was already ancient when the Aztecs were a rumor. They call themselves Be'ena'a or a regional variant of it, meaning, more or less, "the people"; "Zapotec" is a Nahuatl exonym the Spanish inherited and never bothered to retire.

The language is the giveaway. Zapotec is not one tongue but a cluster of dozens, sometimes mutually unintelligible across a single mountain range, all branches of the Oto-Manguean family — a family unrelated to anything spoken outside Mesoamerica and notable for using tone the way Mandarin does, to distinguish words that look identical on paper. A Zapotec from the Isthmus and a Zapotec from Ixtlán, in the northern sierra, may need Spanish to talk to each other, and often do. The Ixtlán branch, high in the cloud forests of the Sierra Norte, has its own distinct varieties and a strong tradition of communal land governance under the system Oaxacans call usos y costumbres: village offices rotated, decided in assembly rather than by ballot, with unpaid service expected from every adult man in turn.

Catholicism arrived with the conquest in the sixteenth century and stuck, but it stuck on its own terms. Patron-saint feasts in Zapotec villages are organized by mayordomos who carry the year's expense as a civic-religious honor, and the underlying logic — reciprocity, obligation to the community, an annual cycle tied to maize — is older than the church on top of it. Pre-Hispanic ritual fragments survive in healing practices, in attitudes toward the dead, and in the elaborate Day of the Dead observances for which Oaxaca is now internationally known.

The other thing worth knowing is that Zapotec society has always been mercantile. The Sunday market at Tlacolula, the textile workshops of Teotitlán del Valle, the mezcal palenques of the southern valleys — these are not folk survivals staged for visitors but functioning economies that long predate them. Migration to Los Angeles and to the agricultural valleys of California has added a transnational layer; remittances now help fund the same village festivals the migrants left to support, and a child raised in Koreatown may still be brought home to Oaxaca to take a turn in the village hierarchy when their name comes up.