NAHUATL RELIGION. The speakers of Nahuatl dialects compose the largest group of indigenous people in Mexico. Numbering about 800,000, they live primarily in the Federal District and the states of México, Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Guerrero, Veracruz, and San Luis Potosí. Smaller populations can be found in Jalisco, Nayarit, Oaxaca, and Tabasco. The proportion of Nahuatl speakers in central Mexico is declining, but their absolute number is fairly stable and is augmented by millions of Spanish-speaking villagers who preserve elements of Nahuatl heritage. Among both these groups, remnants of pre-Hispanic Nahuatl religion persist in combination with a Catholicism that retains much of the character of its sixteenth-century Hispanic origins.

Folk Catholicism in most Nahuatl villages is more than a superficial veneer on a pre-Hispanic substratum; it constitutes the very meaning of village life. Social solidarity is expressed in terms of spiritual kinship, that is, as godparenthood and...