15 - The Indigenous Peoples of Western Mexico from the Spanish Invasion to the Present

Summary

THE CENTER-WEST AS CULTURAL REGION AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Over the past several millennia the physical asperities of western central Mexico – of alpine ranges, lacustrine basins, arid canyon lands, and humid Pacific fringes – have softened and contracted upon each other under the continuing impact of human habitation, and more recently of modern technologies of transport and communication. Even at the end of the twentieth century, however, they still constitute a difficult geography. Nor have progressive integration into a national state or the homogenizing influence of modernity completely eroded the unique characteristics of the several remnant native regional cultures that cohabit in the Center-West. Nonetheless, as in most of what has been called Indo-America the heritage of indigenous culture remains strongest in areas such as the Michoacan highlands, where native population was densest and state-level polities most developed at the advent of the Europeans, or most isolated from contact with the European colonists and subsequent national society, such as the mountains of Nayarit. Those zones less densely settled at the arrival of the Spanish, less culturally advanced, or more quickly and thoroughly depopulated by disease or emigration – such as the hot plains of the Pacific littoral, or the high, cool, semi-arid steppe country of the Altos of Jalisco – more closely resemble the “neo-Europes” the invaders invented for themselves with their material technologies, their cultigens, and their livestock in far-flung corners of the New World, the South Pacific, and Africa (Map 15.1).