Tarascans

Tarascans (now also called Purépecha), the Native American linguistic and cultural group that in pre-Spanish times occupied most of the area of the present Mexican state of Michoacán. The Tarascans dominated an empire that extended into regions of the present states of Guerrero, Guanajuato, and Jalisco but probably did not reach the Pacific coast. The expansionism of the Tarascans and the Aztecs brought them into conflict that cost many lives but did not give either side a decisive victory.

The Tarascan ruler, known as the cazonci, had his capital at Tzintzuntzan on Lake Pátzcuaro in central Michoacán. The population of the Lake Pátzcuaro basin at the time of the Spanish Conquest was about 100,000. Tzintzuntzan was dominated by a platform on which there were five temple structures called yácatas. The principal deity was Curicaueri, a god of the sun and fire, to whom perpetual fires were kept burning. A major female deity, Cuerauáperi, was goddess of fertility in humans and the soil. Religious ceremonies included human sacrifice, particularly of war captives.

The first major Spanish expedition entered the region in 1522, under the leadership of Christóbal de Olid, but it withdrew after six months. The last cazonci, Tzintzicha Tangaxoan, was executed by Nuño de Guzmán in 1530. Franciscan missionaries arrived in 1525, followed by Augustinians in 1537. The royal judge Vasco de Quiroga, who became first bishop of Michoacán in 1538, is revered as the protector of the Tarascans.

In 1540–1541 one of the Franciscans, probably Jerónimo de Alcalá, wrote Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Michoacán, the most informative description of the life and culture of the Tarascans. The missionaries also prepared grammars and dictionaries of the language, which is unrelated to other Mesoamerican tongues. The Tarascan grammar published by Maturino Gilberti in 1558 was the first grammar of an American Indian language to be printed.

During the colonial period the Tarascans maintained a mixed cultural identity at the village level, largely centered in their churches, hospitals, and confraternities. They have survived as an identifiable group in Michoacán, where the language is still spoken by over 105,000 people in a number of villages, and they are noted for craftsmanship in copper, wood, lacquer, textiles, and pottery.

See alsoGuzmán, Nuño Beltrán de; Indigenous Peoples; Michoacán; Olid, Cristóbal de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Maturino Gilberti, Arte de la lengua de Michuacán (1558; 1987).

George M. Foster, Empire's Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan (1948).

Jerónimo De Alcalá, Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobierno de los indios de la provincia de Michoacán (1956; 1977).

J. Benedict Warren, Vasco de Quiroga and His Pueblo-Hospitals of Santa Fe (1963).

Delfina E. López Sarrelangue, La nobleza indígena de Pátzcuaro en la época virreinal (1965).

Jerónimo De Alcalá, The Chronicles of Michoacán, translated and edited by Eugene R. Crane and Reginald C. Reindorp (1970), a somewhat faulty translation.

Shirley Gorenstein and Helen Perlstein Pollard, The Tarascan Civilization: A Late Prehispanic Cultural System (1983).

J. Benedict Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán (1985).

                                       J. Benedict Warren