USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center
Abstract
This essay explores the idea of cultural hybridity in the hill town of Cuetzalan, Mexico. It focuses on two entities within the town: the tianguis, or informal Sunday market, and the Santuario de Guadalupe, also known as the Iglesia de los Jarritos, or “Church of the Clay Pots.” Hybridity, the essay shows, is not a facile outcome of the intermingling of different cultures, but the result of historical political struggle — in this case between the indigenous Nahua Indian population and the mestizos who moved to the Sierra Norte de Puebla during the nineteenth century. I conclude that by embodying socio-political and aesthetic oppositions, in tension with one another, hybridity creates stimulating places and facilitates the survival of marginal cultures
