Hey! Love your blog ๐ I noticed you mentioned a concept tho I've been struggling w aka knowing I have very recent indigenous Mexican ancestry but having no real way of knowing what tribe or group they belonged to outside of being from Puebla. Is it wrong for me to then claim a mexica identity? Or be interested in learning nahuatl if I'm not 100% sure what group my relatives specifically belonged to? Just interested in your thoughts. Thanks so much!
Mexicans have always had indignity woven into the entirety of our culture. The Mexican spanish is heavily indigenized with many words that come from Nahuatl, Purepecha, Maya etc. Another thing people fail to recognize is that technically speaking Mexican food IS native American cuisine, posole, atole, tamales, tortillas, mole and many many more dishes were already being eaten before contact therefore a Mexican restaurant has always been a native American cuisine restaurant....I can go on but what I'm saying is that since the implementation of the spanish caste system Mexico has only ever been allowed to acknowledge its European side despite the long imposed label of "pueblo mestiso" so they have always recognized that we're a mix and we have native in us and for me that means I don't necessarily have to continue to uphold my euro side as more valid and more real than my native side. That being said, if you aren't 100% sure of your nation then yes you can center your indiginization on the Mexica but don't call yourself mexica you can say you practice mexicayotl (mesh-eek-ah-yo) which means you practice the Mexica way but you yourself seeing as you're from puebla are most likely just a descendant of another Nahua group so you may say you are Nahua and that's just a broad term to describe native groups that come from Puebla area....and yeah learn to speak Nahuatl (I recommend the Huastecan variant) because being native doesnt come from a dna test it comes through connection to community, land, culture, tradition, and language.
