Otomi

The Otomi are an Indigenous people of the Americas who inhabit a discontinuous territory in central Mexico. They are linguistically related to the rest of the Otomanguean-speaking peoples, whose ancestors have occupied the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt for several thousand years. Currently, the Otomi inhabit a fragmented territory ranging from northern Guanajuato, to eastern Michoacán and southeastern Tlaxcala. However, most of them are concentrated in the states of Hidalgo, Mexico and Querétaro. According to the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, the Otomi ethnic group totaled 667,038 people in the Mexican Republic in 2015, making them the fifth largest Indigenous people in the country. Of these, only a little more than half spoke Otomi. In this regard, the Otomi language presents a high degree of internal diversification, so that speakers of one variety often have difficulty understanding those who speak another language.

The word Otomi, is used to describe the larger Otomi ethnic group and the dialect continuum. From Spanish, the word Otomi has become entrenched in linguistic and anthropological literature. Among linguists, the suggestion has been made to change the academic designation from Otomi to Hñähñú, the endonym used by the Otomi of the Mezquital Valley, but no common endonym exists for all dialects of the language. Like most of the native names used to refer to the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, the term Otomi is not native to the people to which it refers. Otomi is a term of Nahuatl origin that derives from otómitl, which means "one who walks with arrows", although authors such as Wigberto Jimenez Moreno have translated it as "bird arrowman".

Like most sedentary Mesoamerican peoples, the Otomi traditionally subsisted on maize, beans and squash, but the maguey (century plant) was also an important cultigen used for production of alcohol (pulque) and fiber (henequen). Although the Otomi people rarely eat what Westerners would consider a balanced diet, they maintain reasonably good health by eating tortillas, drinking pulque, and eating most fruits available around them. In 1943 to 1944, a report about a nutritional study about the Otomi villages located in the Mezquital Valley of Mexico, recorded that despite the arid climate and land unfit for agriculture without irrigation, the Otomi people chiefly depended on the production of maguey. Maguey (century plant) is used to produce weaving fibers and “pulque”, a fermented unfiltered juice that played an important part in the Otomi's economy and nutrition. However, this practice has begun to decline due to its new large-scale production.

The ethnic territory of the Otomi has historically been central Mexico. Since pre-Hispanic times, the Otomi people have inhabited that region and are considered native peoples of the Mexican highlands. The Otomi may have been found in Mesoamerica at least since the onset of sedentism, or the settling of the nomadic population, which took place in the eighth millennium B.C.E. Occupation of the Otomi in central Mexico then refers to the fact that the linguistic chains between the Otomanguean languages are more or less intact, so that the linguistically closest members of the family are also close in the spatial sense. The first separation of the Otomi group occurred when the eastern languages separated from the western languages. The western branch is composed of two major branches: the Tlapaneco-Manguean-speaking peoples and the Oto-Pame-speaking peoples. Among the latter are the Otomi, settled in the Mexican Neovolcanic Axis along with the rest of the peoples that form part of the same Otomanguean branch: Mazahuas, Matlatzincas, Tlahuicas, Chichimecas.