Otomi
The Otomi are an Indigenous people of Mexico inhabiting the central Mexican Plateau region.
The Otomi are an Indigenous people of the Americas who inhabit a discontinuous territory in central Mexico. They are linguistically related to the rest of the Otomanguean-speaking peoples, whose ancestors have occupied the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt for several thousand years. Currently, the Otomi inhabit a fragmented territory ranging from northern Guanajuato, to eastern Michoacán and southeastern Tlaxcala. However, most of them are concentrated in the states of Hidalgo, Mexico and Querétaro. According to the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, the Otomi ethnic group totaled 667,038 people in the Mexican Republic in 2015, making them the fifth largest Indigenous people in the country. Of these, only a little more than half spoke Otomi. In this regard, the Otomi language presents a high degree of internal diversification, so that speakers of one variety often have difficulty understanding those who speak another language. Hence, the names by which the Otomi call themselves are numerous: ñätho, hñähñu, ñäñho and ñ'yühü are some of the names the Otomi use to refer to themselves in their own languages, although it is common that, when speaking in Spanish, they use the native Otomi, originating from Nahuatl.
Etymology
The word Otomi, is used to describe the larger Otomi ethnic group and the dialect continuum. From Spanish, the word Otomi has become entrenched in linguistic and anthropological literature. Among linguists, the suggestion has been made to change the academic designation from Otomi to Hñähñú, the endonym used by the Otomi of the Mezquital Valley, but no common endonym exists for all dialects of the language. Like most of the native names used to refer to the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, the term Otomi is not native to the people to which it refers. Otomi is a term of Nahuatl origin that derives from otómitl, which means "one who walks with arrows", although authors such as Wigberto Jimenez Moreno have translated it as "bird arrowman". The Otomi language, belonging to the Oto-Pamean branch of the Oto-Manguean language family, is spoken in many different varieties, some of which are not mutually intelligible.Culture
Like most sedentary Mesoamerican peoples, the Otomi traditionally subsisted on maize, beans and squash, but the maguey was also an important cultigen used for production of alcohol and fiber. Although the Otomi people rarely eat what Westerners would consider a balanced diet, they maintain reasonably good health by eating tortillas, drinking pulque, and eating most fruits available around them. In 1943 to 1944, a report about a nutritional study about the Otomi villages located in the Mezquital Valley of Mexico, recorded that despite the arid climate and land unfit for agriculture without irrigation, the Otomi people chiefly depended on the production of maguey. Maguey is used to produce weaving fibers and “pulque”, a fermented unfiltered juice that played an important part in the Otomi's economy and nutrition. However, this practice has begun to decline due to its new large-scale production. The maguey plant was heavily depended upon, even to the point that huts were constructed out of the plant's leaves. During this time, most of the region was vastly underdeveloped and most agriculture was low-yielding. Often densely settled areas would be confused as locations devoid of habitation, as dispersed dwellings are built low and concealed.The Otomi were blacksmiths and traded valuable metal items with other Indigenous confederations, including the Aztec Triple Alliance. Their metal crafts included ornaments and weaponry, although metal weaponry was not as useful as obsidian weaponry.
Spirituality
The prehispanic Otomi religion was polytheist, and was closely related to that of the Nahua peoples. Most of the major Nahua deities likely had Otomi equivalents, such as Huitzilopochtli, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc, Tlazolteotl, Ometochtli, Cihuacoatl, Xipe Totec, Xochiquetzal, Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl, Huehuecoyotl, and Mictecacihuatl. The most important deities overall were the fire-death god Otontecuhtli, the moon gooddess Zäna, and Yocippa. The Otomi calendar bore very close resemblance to that of the Aztecs, most of the names being semantically equivalent.In modern times, many Otomi populations continue to practice shamanism and hold pre-Hispanic beliefs such as Nagualism.
Native territory
The ethnic territory of the Otomi has historically been central Mexico. Since pre-Hispanic times, the Otomi people have inhabited that region and are considered native peoples of the Mexican highlands. The Otomi may have been found in Mesoamerica at least since the onset of sedentism, or the settling of the nomadic population, which took place in the eighth millennium B.C.E. Occupation of the Otomi in central Mexico then refers to the fact that the linguistic chains between the Otomanguean languages are more or less intact, so that the linguistically closest members of the family are also close in the spatial sense. The first separation of the Otomi group occurred when the eastern languages separated from the western languages. The western branch is composed of two major branches: the Tlapaneco-Manguean-speaking peoples and the Oto-Pame-speaking peoples. Among the latter are the Otomi, settled in the Mexican Neovolcanic Axis along with the rest of the peoples that form part of the same Otomanguean branch: Mazahuas, Matlatzincas, Tlahuicas, Chichimecas.The Otomi currently occupy a fragmented territory that extends through the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Tlaxcala, Puebla and Veracruz. All these states are located in the heart of the Mexican Republic and concentrate most of the country's population. The areas with the highest concentrations of Otomi population are the Mezquital Valley, the Eastern Highlands, the Semi-desert at Peña de Bernal, Querétaro and the north of the state of Mexico. Isolated from these large groups that concentrate around 80% of the total number of members of this Indigenous people are the Otomi of Zitácuaro, those of Tierra Blanca and those that still remain in Ixtenco. Due to the territory in which they are located, the Otomi live in an intense relationship with large metropolitan areas such as the Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City, the city of Puebla, Toluca and Santiago de Querétaro, places where many of them have had to emigrate in search of better job opportunities.
History
Historiographical texts on the Mesoamerican peoples of the pre-Hispanic era have paid very little attention to the history of the Otomi. Many centuries ago, great cities such as Cuicuilco, Teotihuacan and Tula flourished in the territory occupied by the Otomi at the arrival of the Spaniards. Even in the Aztec Triple Alliance that dominated, the so-called "Mexica Empire", Tlacopan inherited the domains of Azcapotzalco, with a majority Otomi population. However, the Otomi are almost never mentioned as protagonists of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican history, perhaps because the ethnic complexity of central Mexico at that time does not allow us to distinguish the contributions of the ancient Otomi from those produced by their neighbors. Only in recent years has interest begun to appear in the role played by these people in the development of the cultures living in the Neovolcanic Axis, from the pre-colonial to the conquest.Otomi peoples in pre-Hispanic times
By the fifth millennium B.C.E., the Otomi people formed a large group. The diversification of the languages and their geographic expansion from the valley of Tehuacán must have occurred after the domestication of the Mesoamerican agricultural, composed of maize, beans and chili. This is established on the basis that there is a large number of cognates that exist in the Otomi languages in the repertoire of words alluding to agriculture. After the development of emerging agriculture, the proto-Otomanguean legion gave rise to two distinct languages that constitute the antecedents of the present-day eastern and western groups of the Otomi family. Following the linguistic evidence, it seems likely that the Oto-Pames—members of the western branch—arrived in the Valley of Mexico around the fourth millennium B.C.E. and that, contrary to what some authors maintain, they did not migrate from the north but from the south.Some historians believe that the Otomi were the first inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico, nevertheless, they were later expelled from the valley by the Tepanec in 1418. The Otomi were one of various ethnic groups present within the city of Teotihuacán; one of the largest and most important cities of ancient Mexico. The fall of Teotihuacan is a milestone that signals the end of the Classic Period in Mesoamerica. Changes in political networks at the Mesoamerican level, disputes between small rival states and population movements resulting from prolonged droughts in northern Mesoamerica facilitated the arrival of new settlers in central Mexico. Around this time, large Nahuatl-speaking groups arrived and began to displace the Otomi to the east. They then arrived in the Eastern Highlands and some areas of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley. In the following centuries, large states developed in the Otomi territory, led by the Nahua peoples. Around the 9th century, the Toltecs turned Tula into one of the main cities of Mesoamerica. This city constructed a large part of the population of the Mezquital Valley, although many of them continued to live to the south and east, in the state of Mexico and the Eastern Highlands.
Around the year 1100 AD, Otomi-speaking peoples formed their capital city-state, Xaltocan. Xaltocan soon acquired power—enough power to demand tribute from nearby communities up until its subjugation. Thereafter, the Otomi kingdom was conquered during the 14th century by the Mexica and its alliances. The Otomi people then were subject to pay a tribute to the Aztec Triple Alliance as their empire grew; subsequently, Otomi people resettled in lands to the east and south of their former territory. While some Otomi resettled elsewhere, other Otomi still resided near current-day Mexico City, but most settled in areas near the Mezquital Valley in Hidalgo, the highlands of Puebla, areas between Tetzcoco and Tulancingo, and as far as Colima and Jalisco.