The Mixe

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Near the top of Ipx Yukp, above the last band of cloud forest, a bundle of offerings is set down at a ledge the Ayuujk name the seat of King Condoy. What is left there, and how, belongs to the people who keep the rite; what is public is its purpose, which is the ordinary and enormous business of a community — a good harvest, honest authorities, protection from harm, the health of the town. Ipx Yukp is the highest ground in this reach of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a massif of roughly 3,400 meters, some eleven thousand feet, that the Ayuujk read as the mountain of twenty peaks. From its ridge the whole country of the Mixe falls away in green folds toward the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The people who climb it call themselves Ayuujk ja’ay, a name usually rendered as those who speak the mountain language. Carried up the slope with them, in the plain speech of the walk, is a claim older than any king: that this language may be the last living heir of the tongue of the Olmec.

It is a heavy thing to hang on a grammar. The Ayuujk themselves advance no such claim; it is the philologists who make it, and they are still arguing.

The Cerro Zempoaltépetl — Ipx Yukp, ‘the mountain of twenty peaks’ — the great massif and living shrine at the center of the Ayuujk world. Samayuujk, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The mountain language

The Mixe number roughly ninety thousand, and they live where they have long lived, in the rugged Sierra Mixe northeast of the city of Oaxaca — not a people recovered from the ground but a people at home in it, with a language spoken in the market and the schoolyard as much as on the mountain. Their country runs down through three elevation bands, from the cold highland towns near the summits, through a temperate middle country, to humid lowland toward the isthmus, and its principal centers — Ayutla, Tamazulapam, Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, Totontepec — sit strung across those zones like beads on the folds of the range. They call their tongue Ayuujk, and it belongs to the Mixe-Zoquean family, one of the oldest language stocks of southern Mexico. Its nearest relatives outside the sierra are not neighbors at all but the Sayula and Oluta Popoluca of Veracruz, isolated survivors of a family that once ran along the Gulf coast and across the isthmus — the scattered evidence, on the map of living speech, of a very old and very wide distribution.

That distribution is where the large claim begins. In 1976 the linguists Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman set out a pattern that had been half-visible for decades: a cluster of culture-words — cacao first among them, along with terms for squash, gourd, incense, and other goods of a settled agricultural life — had spread outward across the mutually unrelated languages of Mesoamerica, and the direction of the borrowing ran consistently from Mixe-Zoquean into the others, not the reverse. Words move where prestige and invention move. Campbell and Kaufman reasoned that the donor language had belonged to a culture powerful and early enough to seed the whole region’s vocabulary of civilization, and the only candidate of the right antiquity and reach was the Olmec, the Gulf-coast culture whose colossal heads and monumental centers make it the earliest of Mesoamerica’s dominating societies. The Olmec, on this argument, spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language — which would make Ayuujk and its cousins the living descendants of the founding tongue of Mesoamerican civilization.

The hypothesis is influential and it is contested, and the honest word is that it remains unproven. What the loanwords establish is a Mixe-Zoquean source for a swath of shared vocabulary; the identification of that source specifically with the archaeological Olmec is an inference, and a debated one. Kaufman, with the epigrapher John Justeson, pressed the case further, all the way to writing. On a basalt slab hauled from the Acula River near the village of La Mojarra in southern Veracruz — La Mojarra Stela 1, carrying Long Count dates that fall in the second century CE — runs a dense column of an early script, neither Maya nor Zapotec, that scholars call Epi-Olmec or Isthmian. In 1993 Justeson and Kaufman published a partial decipherment of it, reading the text as an archaic form of Zoquean and taking that as confirmation of the language behind the whole tradition. Four years later they reported that a newly cleaned column on the same stela had yielded to the same reading, which they offered as a test the decipherment had passed.

Not everyone was persuaded. In 2003 Michael Coe and Stephen Houston, trying to apply the Justeson-Kaufman system to a second Isthmian text and finding it would not deliver, argued that the corpus is simply too small — a handful of monuments — to sustain a genuine decipherment, and that a reading which cannot be checked against independent inscriptions is a hypothesis dressed as a solution. The debate has not closed. What can be said without controversy is narrower and still remarkable: the Mixe reach the historical record as heirs to one of the deepest linguistic strata in Mesoamerica, a family whose ancestors were speaking somewhere near the cradle of the region’s civilization when the first monuments were raised.

La Mojarra Stela 1, from Veracruz — a standing lord flanked by columns of the Epi-Olmec (Isthmian) script that Justeson and Kaufman read as an archaic Zoquean, the reading Coe and Houston dispute as resting on too small a corpus. Adrian Hernandez, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The seat of Condoy

In the Ayuujk sacred world the center is not a temple but a mountain. Zempoaltepetl — Ipx Yukp — is a living shrine, and offerings are still carried to its summit; the rites are kept close, and what an outsider may say of them is only what the community says in public: that the mountain is where the powers dwell and where the town’s most serious needs are set before them. On the peak resides Konk oy, whom the record more often spells Condoy, the culture-hero and king. With him in the sierra’s sacred geography stand Konk änää — also given as Poj ‘Enee, the lord of thunder and of fertility, of the storm that makes the maize — and Naaxwiiñ, the earth herself, and Mɨjku, a lord bound up with wealth and with death. The thunder-and-rain power at the heart of this world has counterparts across Mesoamerica: the figure the Nahua to the north called Tlaloc, the one the neighboring Zapotec called Cocijo. Konk änää stands beside them in the family of rain gods, and is none of them — his own lord, addressed in his own language, on his own mountain.

The mountain is not one shrine among several but the axis of the whole arrangement, the place to which the serious matters of a community are carried when they cannot be settled below. To read Ipx Yukp as the mountain of twenty peaks is already a theology: the massif’s many crowns are heads, seats, presences, and the summit is the highest court a town can bring its business to. Zempoaltepetl gives the sierra its name and its center of gravity at once, and the practice of climbing it with offerings is continuous — not a reenactment staged for visitors but an observance the towns have never stopped keeping. Because those rites are the community’s own, the outsider’s proper place is the folklorist’s distance: to record that the offerings go up, and for what, and to leave the how to the people who hold it.

Condoy is the axis of the tradition, and the Ayuujk tell his story as their own. In the legend, a couple out gathering firewood come upon two enormous eggs in a cave and carry them home with great difficulty. After three days the eggs open: from the one comes a boy, Condoy, and from the other a seven-headed serpent, who is his sister. The child grows at an impossible rate — by the third day he is a grown man — and eats so prodigiously that his mother must bring his food in baskets. He travels far in search of knowledge and means to better the Mixe country, which makes him its king; and in an age of constant war he leads the defense of the land from the height of Zempoaltepetl, his best stronghold, where arrows and bullets glance off him and where, with more-than-human strength, he hurls great boulders down on the armies that come against him. At the last he goes back into the mountain — into the rock, in some tellings into a cave or a river — and stays there, where his people can find him but can never quite see him. This is not a chronicle offered as fact in the manner of a king-list; it is the account the Ayuujk keep of who they are and whose country this is, and the offerings still laid on the summit are laid at the seat of a king the tradition holds to be present there yet.

Bound into the same sacred order is a calendar. The Mixe are among the very few living peoples of Mesoamerica who still keep the 260-day ritual count — the interlocking of thirteen numbers with twenty day-signs that has ordered ritual time across the region since the Preclassic — using it, as their ancestors did, to name the days, to read them, and to fix the observances of the year. That the count survives at all in daily use, when almost everywhere else in Mesoamerica it was broken by the conquest and the campaigns that followed, is one of the plain measures of how much of the older world the sierra held. The count does not float free of the rest; it is the frame on which the year’s observances hang, from the reckoning of an auspicious day to the great communal seasons of the dead, when the towns among the mountains call their own back and honor Konk änää in the same breath — the storm-lord whose rain the maize depends on, honored as the year turns and the harvest is asked for. Calendar, mountain, and rain-god are not separate departments of a religion but one continuous thing, and the days are kept because the world runs on them.

The never-conquered

The Mixe are remembered, across Oaxaca and in their own account alike, as the people no empire took. Before the Spanish came, neither the Zapotec kingdom of Zaachila nor the Mexica of the central plateau — the power the wider world calls the Aztec empire — brought them fully to heel; the sierra was raided and pressed and never possessed. When the Spanish arrived after 1521 the pattern held. Expeditions sent up into the Mixe country to subdue it came back defeated, and Hernán Cortés, surveying the problem, recorded that the land was so broken and rocky that it could not be crossed even on foot, and that the arms and fierceness of its people closed it against conquest. The phrase that has followed the Mixe ever since — the never-conquered — is not romance but a fair reading of the terrain and the resistance together: a country nearly impassable, defended hard, that no outside state ever fully absorbed.

Nominal colonial rule did come, administered from the Spanish villa of San Ildefonso de Villa Alta, seat of an alcaldía mayor that governed the Zapotec, Chinantec, and Mixe communities of the Sierra Norte on paper more than in fact. From that seat, in the early eighteenth century, the sierra was swept by the extirpation of idolatry — the campaign of ecclesiastical courts against the calendar-keepers and the burning of what the friars called idols. It should be named for what it was: religious persecution, an assault on a living religion by an institution that held the power to prosecute it. The vocabulary that campaign left in the archive — idolatry, superstition, devil-worship — is a description written by the persecutor, and to repeat it as though it named something real is to take the inquisitor’s side against the fact; the fact is a people’s own faith, and the frame is a distortion to be set aside. The full weight of that reckoning — the conquest of the Oaxacan valleys, the machinery of extirpation, the burning and the slow recovery — belongs with the histories of the Zapotec and the Mixtec, whose countries bore it most heavily. The Mixe part of the story has its own shape, and it is a paradox: the same Villa Alta whose courts prosecuted the old religion also preserved it, after a fashion, in ink. Its archive holds some eighty documents written in Mixe communities between 1572 and 1774 — testaments, petitions, records of dispute — now kept in the Archivo Judicial de Oaxaca, among the fuller bodies of colonial-era writing from any Mesoamerican people, and a running thread of the Ayuujk voice through two centuries of nominal rule.

What the sierra came through with, in the end, was more of the older world intact than survived almost anywhere else in Mesoamerica. The summit cult of Zempoaltepetl and the offerings to Condoy; the thunder god Konk änää and the powers of earth and death; the 260-day count still in use; the ancestor observances of the days of the dead, when the towns call their own back and set out what the returning dead are owed — all of it endures as living practice, the closed rites kept at the respectful distance of the public record. This is not a survival pickled in amber. It is the religion of a people who are vigorously, unmistakably present.

That presence has a sound, and the sound is a wind band. The Mixe towns are famous across Oaxaca for their bandas filarmónicas, the brass-and-reed philharmonic bands that nearly every community fields and that turn out for every feast, funeral, and civic occasion; Santa María Tlahuitoltepec is known as the land of musicians, and its children learn an instrument as a matter of course, sending players into orchestras and conservatories well beyond the sierra. The band is not decoration but institution: a town’s music is provided by the town, rehearsed and paid for and staffed under the same communal obligation that keeps the paths and the church and the assembly, so that to belong to a Mixe community is in part to owe it music. The instruments are European and the repertoire ranges from the sacred to the funeral march to the popular tune, but the thing they serve is old — the marking of the town’s own time, the accompaniment of its dead and its saints and its offices up and down the year. Centers such as Ayutla, Tamazulapam, and Totontepec carry the language forward in schools and print and broadcast, and the identity that goes with it — a people who write their own name as Ayuujk ja’ay, who keep their own calendar, who lay their own offerings on their own mountain. The empire that could name them never took them; the persecution that tried to unmake their religion left much of it standing. And the king who went into the rock is there still, the Ayuujk say — findable, if never quite seen.

San Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla, one of the principal Mixe towns of the Sierra Norte — the living present of a people the empires never conquered. Berenice Zambrano, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

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