Religion in Hueyapan

pp. 95-121

in: Judith Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

The vast majority of the people living in Hueyapan in 1969–1970 were practicing Catholics. There were, however, some notable exceptions, the majority of whom came from Protestant families that had embraced evangelical sects in the early decades of the twentieth century. By the time I got to the pueblo, there were several hundred Protestants in Hueyapan and their numbers were growing.¹ A handful of villagers had rejected Christianity entirely and joined an Aztec renaissance movement, accepting the invitation of an urban-based group that had contacted Hueyapan in the 1950s with the hope of recruiting Nahuatl-speaking Indians to their cause. As we see in chapter seven, even though the movement never really caught on in the village, it captured the imagination of a few people in town, in particular the members of one family.