A refuge for cultures

For millennia, Totonacapan has occupied a distinctive position as a corridor of exchange between peoples and civilisations, first among Olmecs, Maya and Mexica and later along the routes of the first wave of globalisation between Asia, the Americas and Europe. Products, innovations and cultural contributions that profoundly affected the world circulated from here.

At the same time it offered a refuge for cultural continuity. Peoples with millennia of history found in its mountainous, forested and fragmented geography the conditions to preserve languages, rituals, knowledge and ways of life over the centuries.

The perfect paradox

It is no accident that this region, just over 25,000 km² and approximately the size of the State of Israel, is among the smallest areas on the planet to contain so much natural and human diversity. For millennia, it has embodied a perfect paradox: a necessary passage between civilisations, first the Olmecs, Maya and Aztecs and later the great trade between Asia, the Americas and Europe, and at the same time a refuge where many peoples found isolation, continuity and a place to sustain their identity.

The lineage of lineages

One strand of the origins of The Integral Management Society lies around the Posada Humboldt in Papantla and La Bola de Oro’s jewellery and watchmaking workshops. For decades, engineers, artists, merchants, travellers, artisans and people of different communities, languages and origins spent time together there. The posada and the craft gave profoundly different worlds a common language.

Totonacapan is one of the most complex human and cultural ecosystems on the continent. For centuries, markedly different communities of practice, languages, technologies and ways of life coexisted here, bringing together the ancestral and the modern, the Indigenous and the global, the ritual and the commercial.

The Otomí live in the dry and desert areas of the high plateau, among agaves and cacti. They are one of humanity’s oldest peoples. For some 6,000 years, since the time of pharaonic Egypt, they have preserved their language and distinctive crafts. They invented amate paper and writing systems of their own. Unconquered and impossible to absorb, they have survived every empire.

The Tepehua live in the most inaccessible folds of the mountains, near caves, springs and ravines. They are known as guardians of the mountains and water. With scarcely 10,000 speakers left, theirs is an endangered but still vibrant lineage with a deeply intimate character.

The Nahua, who built Mesoamerica’s most extensive civilisation, live on the fertile slopes. Their language has been spoken widely across the region for centuries [1].

The Tenek or Huastec people, in the valleys of the northern belt, descend from the Maya civilisation of the jaguar. They are a people of celebration, ritual and character.

The Totonac people, or tutunaku, are called “the people of the three hearts”. Spiritual and deeply attuned to cosmic balance, they have historically been known as the goldsmiths of the sun. They are credited with building El Tajín, the great pre-Columbian city of Mesoamerica. In their tradition, jewellery is not an everyday ornament. It belongs to ceremony, sacred life and the cycle of life.

The Jarochos, the mestizo people of the Gulf, are joyful, sensual and musical, bearers of an identity that draws together and celebrates all that this territory has accumulated.

Afro-descendant communities, including maroons, fishers and musicians, and families of European origin arrived with the port and its trade and found in this territory the conditions to give the best of themselves.

Totonacapan’s cultural heritage is living practice as well as history. UNESCO inscribed the Ritual Ceremony of the Voladores of Papantla as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Papantla’s Centre for Indigenous Arts, Xtaxkgakget Makgkaxtlawana, was included in UNESCO’s Register of Good Safeguarding Practices for its contribution to the living transmission of Totonac knowledge.

Totonacapan’s cultural and culinary contributions also form part of the historical setting that led to UNESCO’s recognition of Mexican cuisine as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: vanilla, cacao, chilli, maize, ritual techniques and traditional systems of cultivation, cooking and passing on knowledge.

These recognitions carry more than institutional distinction. These recognitions are evidence of real continuity. Communities, families and individuals have kept alive knowledge, crafts, ceremonies and ways of knowing that would have weakened or disappeared in many other territories.

Translated from the Spanish edition. Read the Spanish edition

Documentary references

• Ritual ceremony of the Voladores (UNESCO)
• Centre for Indigenous Arts (UNESCO)