Cultural extremists

pp. 157-176

in: Judith Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

In the 1950s, members of a Nahuatl renaissance movement came to Hueyapan to encourage the villagers to preserve their indigenous heritage. Based in Mexico City, they visited the pueblo as part of their effort to build a following in Indian communities where people still spoke the language of the Aztecs. Supporters of the movement firmly believed that their attempt to revive prehispanic traditions would help the nation become powerful once again, the way it was in the early sixteenth century, in the days before the Spanish conquest. For reasons I hope will become self-evident, I refer to members of this renaissance movement, and of groups similar to it, as "cultural extremists."