My Cultural Identity Of Michoacan Nahuatl

A person’s identity is made up of an individual's experiences, ideas, relationships and most importantly culture. I view cultural identity as the most significant portion of who I am because it is my source and influence for all other aspects of my identity; however, this portion of my identity can also be a source of conflict within myself. This inner conflict occurs because of the different parts of my cultural identity that come from my American, Mexican, French and Michoacan Nahuatl cultural heredity. These different cultural versions of myself come to create the way I interact with the world, but they are not all equally ingrained into my identity. My cultural identity of Michoacan Nahuatl is very limited, for I don’t know the Nahuatl

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Interior and Exterior Landscapes, and its Pueblo stories come close to giving that same familiar experience that I get seeing Michoacan, she states that “The stories had also left me with a feeling of familiarity and warmth for the mesas, hills, and boulders where the incidents or actions in the stories had taken place.”(Silko pg.20). This warmth and familiarity comes from the deep seeded connection one has with their culture, where even if it isn’t one that is so prominent in your identity, such as myself and Nahuatl, it still affects you in ways no other thing can simply because you view a part of yourself in these traditions and in their stories. It is that same warmth and familiarity that I experience sitting on a log with my huaraches as my body was covered in dried warm mud and the approaching night was being brought in with the sounds of a huehuetl and my grandfather speaking Nahuatl words that sounded foreign and familiar in the same moment. It is that warmth and familiarity that Silko describes that is the reason of why Los Negritos is such an important tradition in my family, not because of the values and reasons behind the tradition, but more so because it allows us to remember that behind the American, French and Mexican background that like the dried mud covers our bodies and lives we too also come from a Nahuatl heritage that can wipe away the other cultures as we jump into atezcati and wash away our other cultures leaving only the Nahuatl within us to be