Ethnography
The inhabitants of Hueyapan are of Nahua ethnicity and the Nahuatl language is spoken by most adults. The name of the town comes from the Nahuatl language and means "on the great water" referring to the abundant water resources of the locality. The people of Hueyapan mostly practice subsistence agriculture: They produce maize, beans, squash, peach, avocado and plums. The people of Hueyapan are also known for their woolen products such as ponchos (gabán in the local Spanish), shawls (rebozo) and skirts (chincuete) of thick woolen cloth. The thread is made on traditional spindles called malacates, dyed with natural dyes (such as Añil, Walnut husks, St John's wort)and the fabric is woven on backstrap looms. Cultural aspects of Hueyapan and particularly the ethnic identity of the Nahuas of Hueyapan have been described in the book Being Indian in Hueyapan by American anthropologist Judith Friedlander. The Nahuatl dialect of Hueyapan has been the object of a few small studies. Karen Dakin and Diana Ryesky have done an ethnolinguistic and dialectal survey of Nahuatl in Morelos, and they describe the dialect of Hueyapan as a typical central dialect with some traits particular of the Morelos varieties. In 1949 Miguel Barrios Espinosa, a teacher from Hueyapan, published a collection of folktales from Hueyapan in the nahuatl language in the journal Tlalocan. An article by Patrick Johansson (1989) deals with the grammatical encoding of honorifics in the Nahuatl language. Currently SIL linguists are working on Morelos Nahuatl, collaborating with speakers from Hueyapan and from Cuentepec.
Read more about this topic: Hueyapan