Oaxaca, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca, is one of the 32 states that compose the Federative Entities of the United Mexican States. It is divided into 570 municipalities, of which 418 are governed by the system of usos y costumbres with recognized local forms of self-governance. Its capital city is Oaxaca de Juárez.
Oaxaca de Juárez, or simply Oaxaca, is the capital and largest city of the eponymous Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is the municipal seat for the surrounding municipality of Oaxaca. It is in the Centro District in the Central Valleys region of the state, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre at the base of the Cerro del Fortín, extending to the banks of the Atoyac River.
The Mixtecs, or Mixtecos, are indigenous Mesoamerican peoples of Mexico inhabiting the region known as La Mixteca of Oaxaca and Puebla as well as La Montaña Region and Costa Chica Regions of the state of Guerrero. The Mixtec culture was the main Mixtec civilization, which lasted from around 1500 BC until being conquered by the Spanish in 1523.
San Juan Bautista is the Spanish-language name of Saint John the Baptist. It may refer to:
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in the convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.
The Popolocan languages are a subfamily of the Oto-Manguean language family of Mexico, spoken mainly in the state of Puebla.
Chocho is a language of the Popolocan branch of the Oto-Manguean language family spoken in Mexico in the following communities of Oaxaca: San Miguel Chicahua, Teotongo, San Miguel Huautla, Santa Magdalena Jicotlán, San Pedro Nopala, San Miguel Tequixtepec, San Francisco Teopan, Ocotlán, Santa María Nativitas, San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca, and San Miguel Tulancingo. Chocho is spoken by 770 speakers.
The altepetl was the local, ethnically-based political entity, usually translated into English as "city-state," of pre-Columbian Nahuatl-speaking societies in the Americas. The altepetl was constituted of smaller units known as calpolli and was typically led by a single dynastic ruler known as a tlatoani, although examples of shared rule between up to five rulers are known. Each altepetl had its own jurisdiction, origin story, and served as the center of Indigenous identity. Residents referred to themselves by the name of their altepetl rather than, for instance, as "Mexicas." "Altepetl" was a polyvalent term rooting the social and political order in the creative powers of a sacred mountain that contained the ancestors, seeds and life-giving forces of the community. The word is a combination of the Nahuatl words ātl and tepētl. A characteristic Nahua mode was to imagine the totality of the people of a region or of the world as a collection of altepetl units and to speak of them on those terms. The concept is comparable to Maya cah and Mixtec ñuu. Altepeme formed a vast complex network which predated and outlasted larger empires, such as the Aztec and Tarascan state.
New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review.
The Chochos are an indigenous people of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca is a small town and municipality located in the Mixteca Region of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, and the center of the Coixtlahuaca district. The name, "Coixtlahuaca" means 'plain of snakes' in the Nahuatl language.
Coixtlahuaca may refer to:
The Codex Sierra is a colonial Mesoamerican account book from Santa Catalina Texupa, covering the years from 1550 to 1564. It uses both alphabetic and pictorial modes of writing. Though Texupa is a Mixtec and Chocho community, the text is written in Nahuatl, albeit with some Mixtec words. The pictorial portion likewise uses Mixtec conventions, such as the "A-O" year sign.
San Juan Achiutla is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. The municipality covers an area of 49.76 km2. It is located in a mountain range, between the hills Negro to the East, Yucuquise to the Northwest, Cuate to the North and Totolote to the South. It is crossed by the river Los Sabinos and has a dam called Cahuayande. Its weather is temperate. It is in the Mixteca Alta, one of the three parties that make up the Mixteca region and in the Mixteca Alta is part of what was Achiutla, the significant Prehispanic place.
The Cuenca del Papaloapan Region is in the north of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico where the foothills of the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca meet the coastal plain of Veracruz. The principal city is San Juan Bautista Tuxtepec, the second largest in Oaxaca state.
Coixtlahuaca District is located in the northeast of the Mixteca Region of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. As of 2005 the population was 9,018, down 2.8% from 2000.
The Indigenous people of Oaxaca are descendants of the inhabitants of what is now the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, who were present before the Spanish invasion. Several cultures flourished in the ancient region of Oaxaca from as far back as 2000 BC, of whom the Zapotecs and Mixtecs were perhaps the most advanced, with complex social organization and sophisticated arts.
The state of Oaxaca, Mexico has a total population of about 3.5 million, with women outnumbering men by 150,000 and about 60% of the population under the age of 30. It is ranked tenth in population in the country. Fifty three percent of the population lives in rural areas. Most of the state’s population growth took place between 1980 and 1990. Life expectancy is 71.7 for men and 77.4 for women, just under the national average. Births far outpace deaths. In 2007, there were 122,579 births and 19,439 deaths. Approximately 85% profess the Catholic faith.
In the Central Valley region of the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca archeologists discovered evidence of historic settlements. Aztecs from Tenochtitlan on the volcanic plateau to the North around what today is Mexico City first arrived in this region around 1250 AD establishing military rule in the 15th century until the arrival of the Spanish. After the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish took over Oaxaca which led to the eventual decrease of the Native population and the increase in African slaves. The region was then settled by mostly Spanish immigrants from Europe and the African slaves they brought with them. Oaxaca was considered a department after the Mexican War of Independence, but after the fall of emperor Agustín de Iturbide, it became a state in 1824 with José Murguia as its first governor. During the 19th century, Oaxaca was split between liberal and conservative factions. The political and military struggles between the factions resulted in wars and intrigues. A series of major disasters occurred in the state from the 1920s to the 1940s. In the 1940s and 1950s, new infrastructure projects were begun. From the 1980s to the present, there has been much development of the tourism industry in the state.
The internal classification of Mixtec is controversial. Many varieties are mutually unintelligible and by that criterion separate languages. In the 16th century, Spanish authorities recognized half a dozen lenguas comprising the Mixtec lengua. It is not clear to what extent these were distinct languages at the time. Regardless, the colonial disintegration of the Mixtec nation and resulting isolation of local communities led to the rapid diversification of local dialects into distinct languages. Below are some attempts at Mixtec classification by various scholars.
