Nahua peoples

Nahua communities span central Mexico: the Huasteca hills of Hidalgo, Veracruz and San Luis Potosí, the highlands of Puebla and Tlaxcala, the mountains of Guerrero, and neighbourhoods of Mexico City itself. Mexico's 2020 census counted 1,651,958 Nahuatl speakers, the country's largest Indigenous language by far.

Their political past includes the most famous state in the Indigenous Americas: the alliance led from Mexico-Tenochtitlan, whose great temple precinct lies under and beside Mexico City's main square. But the Mexica were one Nahua people among many altepetl, city-states that fought, allied and traded, and Nahuatl written in Latin letters became one of the best-documented Indigenous languages on Earth in the century after the invasion, in court records, annals and poetry.

The present is not a museum: Nahuatl carries daily life in hundreds of municipalities, national law recognises it among Mexico's official Indigenous languages, and words that left it long ago, tomato, chocolate, avocado, coyote, are spoken worldwide every day.

This is an introduction, the first layer. A full collection, like the Mapuche collection that opened this atlas, follows as research and review are completed for each people.