Tochan, “The House of All of Us”: Decolonizing Space through Nahua Oral Narratives

ABSTRACT

Mapping is an established practice by which people represent, explore, and share their understandings of geography. While cartographic products have become the dominant medium for this, there are many ways of expressing spatial knowledge, providing a rich opportunity to understand different forms in which people recreate, navigate, and understand their landscape. This research explores how Nahuas in Mixtla de Altamirano, Veracruz, Mexico, build tochan, their space called “house,” and how this knowledge is transmitted orally over time. This shows the potential that oral narratives have to inform and decolonize historical and archaeological knowledge and to lead us to revaluate our own spatial thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral narratives
• Nahua
• hearth
• memory
• rhythms of change
• fluid history
• community-based research
• spatial thinking

Acknowledgments

We want to express our gratitude to the people in Mixtla de Altamirano who generously have allowed us to be part of their stories and have gifted us with their time. A special thank you goes to Eleazar Mayahua, who has been a key person in this research. We also thank Alicia Mayahua and Victor Quihua, who helped with some of the translations; Brenda Bowser and five anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive comments, which strengthened this paper; and Kelly Donovan for assistance with the figures.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

All the material collected during fieldwork, including recordings of the oral narratives, collective interviews and pictures from Mixtla de Altamirano, were distributed in each community visited inside the municipality. Outside the municipality a copy of all the materials were given to the communitarian radio station in Zongolica and to the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (Indigenous University) located in the municipality of Tequila, Veracruz. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted under Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología México grant number 313690.

Notes on contributors

Julieta Flores Muñoz

Julieta Flores Muñoz is an Assistant Professor in Economics and Geography and a Researcher at the Tropical Research Center at the University of Veracruz in México. Her research focuses on oral narratives, spatial practices, landscape, decolonizing archaeology, and Indigenous archaeology. She incorporates a multi-method approach to the study of materiality and is an advocate of multidisciplinarity. She earned her PhD in Archaeology at the University of Southampton in the UK; MS in Anthropological Sciences from the National Autonomous University of México; MA and BA in Archaeology from the National School of Anthropology and History of México; and BA in Economics at the National Polytechnic Institute of México.

Patricia Murrieta Flores

Patricia Murrieta Flores is Professor of Digital Humanities and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub in the Department of History at Lancaster University in the UK. Her research focuses on the spatial humanities, application of artificial intelligence techniques, and development of GIS and other computational methods for the study of early colonial Mexico. She is principal investigator of “Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A Big Data Approach to XVI Century Historical Sources,” funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities, and “The Future of the Past: Harnessing AI for Early Modern Spanish American Collections” with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. She holds a PhD in Archaeology and MS in Archaeological Computing from the University of Southampton in the UK, and a BA in Archaeology from the National School of Anthropology and History of México.