Indigenous Jalisco

Indigenous Jalisco: Living in a New Era
By John P. Schmal

The Mexican state of Jalisco is located in the west central part of the Mexican Republic. This large state, occupying a total of 78,839 square kilometers, borders the states of Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, Nayarit and Durango (on its north), Guanajuato (on its east) and Michoacán de Ocampo and Colima to the south. On its west, Jalisco borders the Pacific Ocean.

Jalisco is crossed by two large mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Neo-Volcanic Axis.  With a wide range of topographies, Jalisco became the home to wide variety of indigenous peoples.  Domingo Lázaro de Arregui, in his “Descripción de la Nueva Galicia” – published in 1621 – noted that 72 native langauges were spoken in the Spanish colonial province of Nueva Galicia, which included a large part of Jalisco, as well as Aguascalientes and Zacatecas.

The Spaniards first visited the indigenous peoples of Jalisco in the early 1520s and their journey for the rest of the Sixteenth Century led to displacement, assimilation and mestizaje which I have discussed in a separate article at:

http://houstonculture.org/mexico/jalisco_indig.html

By the early part of the Nineteenth Century, very few people living in Jalisco still spoke Indian languages. In fact, a large number of the original languages spoken in Jalisco had disappeared from the face of the earth. However, the descendants of the original Indians still lived in Jalisco and many of them still felt a spiritual, cultural and physical bond to their Indian ancestors.

On June 23, 1823, the Department of Guadalajara was proclaimed as the “El Estado Libre y Soberano de Jalisco” (The Free and Sovereign State of Jalisco). This new era, however, did not bring stability to Jalisco, nor did it bring economic reform to the descendants of Jalisco’s indigenous peoples. The historian Dawn Fogle Deaton has written that in the sixty-year period from 1825 to 1885, Jalisco witnessed twenty-seven peasant rebellions, most of them carried out by indigenous citizens.

According to Ms. Deaton, the cause of these “waves of unrest, popular protest, and open rebellion” arose “out of the political and social struggles among classes and between classes.”  She further explained that the “commercialization of the economy,” especially in agriculture, had led to fundamental changes in the lifestyles of the peasants and thus brought about “the seeds of discontent.”

The bond that the people of Jalisco felt towards their indigenous ancestry continued well into the Twentieth Century and is clearly manifested in the 1921 Mexican census. At the time of this census, which was tallied after the end of the devastating Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), 199,728 Jalisco natives identified themselves as being of “indígena pura” (pure indigenous) descent, representing 16.8% of the entire state’s population.  In contrast, a mere 195 individuals were classified as speakers of indigenous languages (primarily Náhuatl and Huichol).

In a true testament to the mestizaje of Jalisco’s inhabitants, 903,830 Jaliscans classified themselves as “indígena mezclada con blanca” (Indigenous mixed with White), representing 75.8% of the total state population. The mestizos of Jalisco, in fact, represented 10.6% of the mestizo population of the entire Mexican Republic in the 1921 census.

In contrast, only 87,103 of Jalisco’s 1,191,957 inhabitants referred to themselves as “blanca.”  When the next census was counted in 1930, only 1,681 inhabitants of Jalisco spoke indigenous languages. Nearly all of these persons were Huicholes (1,676). The racial classifications of Jalisco’s population in 1921 is illustrated in the following table:

According to the 2000 census, the population of persons five years and more who spoke indigenous languages in Jalisco totalled 39,259 individuals. The most common of these languages were:  Huichol (10,976 persons), Náhuatl (6,714), Purépecha (3,074), Mixteco (1,471), Otomí (1,193), and Zapoteco (1,061).  The majority of the indigenous languages spoken in the state were transplanted tongues from other parts of México and the Huichol language represented the only truly indigenous language of these tongues.

The State of Jalisco contains 124 municipios, but only 11 of these entities contained indigenous populations that numbered more than one percent in 2000.  I have illustrated the indigenous populations of these municipios in the following table:

The most important indigenous group still living in Jalisco are the Huichol people. In the entire Mexican Republic, there were 30,686 persons five years of age or more who spoke the Huichol language in the 2000 census.  They were primarily distributed across portions of four adjacent states:  Nayarit (16,932), Jalisco (10,976), Durango (1,435), and Zacatecas (330).  The Huicholes have managed to preserve their identity, language, culture and religious customs, largely because of their isolation in the Sierra Madre Mountains in the northern reaches of Jalisco, where they occupy portions of all four states.

The three main Huichol communities belong to the northern Jalisco municipio of Mezquitic. The Huichol speakers numbered 7,652 in the 2000 census and represented 64.75% of the municipio’s population.  Monolingual Huicholes numbered 2,621 individuals, representing 34.25% of the Huichol speakers and a clear indication of their resistance to assimilation into mainstream Mexican culture.

In 2000, Huichol speakers also represented 48.35% of the population of the Municipio of Bolaños. The Huicholes have been described and analyzed in a multitude of published works. The reader may be interested in checking this source for a brief, but detailed, description of this indigenous group:

http://68.166.190.115/wixarika/Assets/pdf/THEHUICHOl-Wixarika.pdf

The Náhuatl language is spoken by many inhabitants of Jalisco.  Because this language has been spoken for so long in so many parts of México for so long, some Náhuatl speakers are probably migrants from other states, while others are natives to the state.  Náhuatl speakers tend to inhabit municipios with larger populations, such as Guadalajara (where 1,494 Náhuatl speakers lived in 2000), Zapopan (7,348 speakers) and Puerto Vallarta (779 speakers). They are largely bilingual and can communicate in Spanish.

Purépecha is the third most commonly spoken language in present-day Jalisco.  The Purépecha –  who are sometimes called Tarascans (a label that was given to them by the Spaniards in the Sixteenth Century) – ruled over a significant portion of Michoacán during the pre-Hispanic era and have managed to preserve their language and many of their unique customs. Many of the Purépecha speakers live in the border regions adjacent to Michoacán.

The Otomí, Mixtec and Zapotec languages are also believed to be largely migrant languages in Jalisco. Otomí is widely spoken through many central Mexican states, while the Mixtec and Zapotec languages have their origins in the southern state of Oaxaca. The Mixtecs and Zapotecs have migrated to many states of Mexico and are in great demand as agricultural laborers throughout the northern states.

The Cora people, like the Huichol, have survived in isolation, occupying mountains and valleys within the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountain range. The vast majority of the Cora speakers (15,380) live in the State of Nayarit, Jalisco’s northwestern neighbor.  However, in 2000, only 162 Cora speakers lived within Jalisco’s borders.

As Jalisco moves into the Twenty-First Century, the percentage of indigeous speakers in the state – as with many other Mexican states – will continue to drop as assimilation continues. The presence of migrant laborers from other parts of the country will ensure that Jalisco has a significant number of persons speaking Indian languages, but most of those languages are not truly indigenous to the state itself.  Nevertheless, many sons and daughters of Jalisco recognize and feel great pride in the indigenous heritage that they have inherited from their distant ancestors.

Sources:

Departamento de la Estadistica Nacional, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, “Censos General de Habitantes: 30 de Noviembre de 1921, Estado de Jalisco,” (Mexico, Distrito Federal: Talleres Graficos de la Nación, 1926)

Dawn Fogle Deaton, "The Decade of Revolt: Peasant Rebellion in Jalisco, Mexico, 1855-1864," in Robert H. Jackson (ed.), "Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America." (Albuquerque: New Mexico Press, 1997).

Population statistics from Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática (INEGI).