Daily Survival Strategies
What is the spanish translation of the customs indigenous communities participate in?
Las costumbres
The author describes this as “deep México,” or the living indigenous world that continues to shape the country’s true identity.
What is Mexico Profundo?
What are some examples Batalla gives of resistance to outside innovation?
Communities reject: seed and fertilizer vaccinations they may refuse or use misuse government built houses.
This term refers to the combination of Christian elements with Mesoamerican practices and origins.
What is popular Catholicism (or syncretism)?
Name one Indigenous group mentioned by Batalla that resisted Spanish conquest.
Yopes of Guerrero, Chiapas communities, northern nomads.
When participants can’t explain the reasons behind rituals or ceremonies, what does the author say it makes indigenous traditions like?
Irrational traditionalism
The author says that indigenous peoples didn’t just resist colonization, as they preserved civilizations through this strategy that redefined imposed systems such as government and religion.
What is adaptation?
How does the idea of autonomy help explain why communities resist external changes?
Accepting outside innovations more often than not means losing self sufficiency and becoming dependent on outside powers
Indigenous peoples began identifying this Catholic figure with the Aztec goddess of fertility and motherhood after a 16th-century apparition at Tepeyac Hill.
Who is the Virgin of Guadalupe?
According to Batalla, what did Indigenous warriors defend besides land and people?
Their autonomy, cultural traditions, and social structures.
What was an important aspect of indigenous communities social life?
Group decision-making or group work
The author contrasts Mexico Profundo with this version of Mexico, a westernized identity promoted by elites that often erases or denies indigenous roots.
What is Mexico imaginario?
Explain the difference between resistance and appropriation as forms of cultural defenses.
While resistance rejects foreign objects, appropriation takes those objects and uses them for its community purpose.
Despite incorporating foreign elements, syncretism does not indicate this about Aztec culture.
What is weakness or loss of authenticity?
According other the reading Batalla emphasizes that conquest was never fully complete. How do the actions of the warriors show Lon term resistance ?
Up to interpretation, broader thinking question, along the lines of talking about after major defeats like Tenochtitlán, communities continued uprisings, mobility, and defense of cultural space(s).