Middle American Indian
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Middle American Indian, member of any of the aboriginal peoples inhabiting the area from northern Mexico to Nicaragua.
The physical spine of Middle America is the broad mountain chain extending from the southern end of the Rockies to the northern tip of the Andes, with Middle America in the area from northern Mexico to Nicaragua. The mountain chain marks off the area into four major regions. The heartland of Middle America is the central valley of Mexico. A second region is the highlands along the southern Pacific slope of Mexico. Beyond the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are the southeastern highlands in the Mexican state of Chiapas and in Guatemala. The arid region in the northwest of Mexico is a fourth region.
Within these four major geophysical regions there is tremendous variety in ecology, climate, soil, and the possibilities of human life. The mountains crumple the face of the land into a multitude of valleys and microenvironments; the result is a mosaic of crops, peoples, and settlements about which it is difficult to generalize. The high valleys of central Mexico, Oaxaca, Jalisco, and Guatemala have been the most densely settled parts of Middle America. But the lower slopes of mountains near the seacoasts have also carried substantial populations. The steamy tropics of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the hot limestone thumb of Yucatán have also been heavily populated.
The Indians of Middle America live almost everywhere in the region. The basic requirement for human settlement is water. The major river systems and the high valley lakes have been the primary settlement sites since prehistoric times.
The people
The Indians of Middle America are descended from Asiatic forebears who crossed the Bering Strait and moved southward. They tend, except in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to be small in stature (155–160 centimetres or a little over five feet on the average), with brown to coppery skin, straight black hair, and dark-brown eyes often set above high cheek bones, sometimes with epicanthic folds. The Maya facial features are particularly distinctive, being flatter than those of the other groups; the Maya also have more prominent noses, and a tendency to rounder heads. Mexico is basically a mixed (mestizo) nation; there has long been extensive interbreeding between Indians and non-Indians. In Guatemala there has been much less interbreeding. But the term “Indian” is not a biological designation so much as a social, cultural, economic, and linguistic summary of the differences between some rural ways of life and the dominant national culture. Race in and of itself is not socially as important as it is in other parts of the world. The usual census definition of “Indian” is based on linguistic criteria, and the population figures for Indians must therefore be read as figures for speakers of Indian languages.
Cultural areas
While the social heritage of Middle America is highly complex, within the broad historical flow five separate cultural areas can be distinguished. They are regional configurations of the basic Middle American cultural patterns. One cultural area is that of the Maya. The southern, highland Maya were and are concentrated in western Guatemala and the state of Chiapas in Mexico. The northern Maya inhabited the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and the jungle of Petén in Guatemala. The Maya of these two regions form a continuous territorial and historical entity. (There are also contemporary Maya people in Veracruz and San Luis Potosí in Mexico, known as the Huastec.) The monumental ruins left by the pre-Columbian Maya are one of the puzzles of anthropology; theirs is one of only a few civilizations known to have flourished in a tropical rainforest.
The southern Mexican highlands and the adjacent coastal regions form a second cultural area within the basic Middle American pattern. That region covers most of the present Mexican states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, the southeastern part of Veracruz, and parts of Puebla and Morelos. Its highland people developed the traditions of the Mixtec and Zapotec, whose ruins survive at Mitla and Monte Albán, whereas the coastal people seem to have been somewhat isolated from them.
A third cultural area is the central Mexican highlands, including the valleys of Puebla, Toluca, and Morelos, along with the eastern slopes of the Mesa Central and parts of the Balsas River basin. That area was the centre of the Aztec empire. Mexico City is built on the ruins of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, and descendants of the Aztecs still live in the area.
The mountain chain around the high lake of Pátzcuaro, in present-day Michoacán, forms another cultural area. The relative isolation created by the mountains permitted the Tarascans to work out their own cultural variant. They reached a level of social and political organization comparable to that of the Aztec and the Maya.
A fifth cultural area is northwest Mexico. That region is not historically or culturally a single unit; it exhibits three major types of ecology and three major types of human adaptation. The high mountains provided possibilities for simple agriculture without irrigation, whereas the desert required settlements around valley bottoms dependent on floodwaters in the rainy season. In the west the abundant shellfish were the basis for a coastal culture. The historical forces at work in the northwest area were different from those in the four other cultural areas. The population was taken over by the Jesuits, who built mission communities. The relative isolation of the region following the collapse of Spanish power, together with the weakness of the succeeding Mexican governments, permitted the survival of a blend of Spanish and Indian cultures.
Language groups
Hundreds of languages were spoken in Middle America, and hundreds continue to be used in the 21st century. The Uto-Aztecan languages are sometimes divided into Northern and Southern branches, the latter of which comprises four families: Piman, Taracahitic, Cora-Huichol, and Aztecan. The Otomanguean language family includes Oto-Pamean, Chinantecan, Tlapanec-Manguean, Popolocan-Zapotecan, and Amuzgo-Mixtecan. The large family of Mayan languages includes 31 living and two extinct languages.
In addition, the region has two small families—Xinkan and Lencan—as well as some language isolates (languages with no known relatives), including Cuitlatec, Huave, and Tarascan (Purépecha). Garífuna (formerly also called Black Carib), an Arawakan (South American Indian) language, is a late arrival from the Caribbean.