Prayer Specialists: Devotions and Discourse of Motiochihuanih as Nahua Religious Leaders

This presentation discusses the results of a doctoral dissertation project that documents the history and current social organization of Nahua religion in Chicontepec, a community in a region known as Huasteca Veracruzana in the north of Veracruz, Mexico. The data discussed was collected during a series of oral histories and interviews conducted in the Nahuatl language in a Nahua small town between 2014 and 2020, and they are analyzed from both an anthropological and an historical perspective. In the Huasteca Veracruzana there is a select group of people known in Nahuatl as motiochihuanih, whose main labor is to offer Christian prayers and carry out several rituals associated with the local religion known as el costumbre, “the custom,” often after a local resident passes away. In this presentation, I analyze the opinions and expertise of four prayer specialists, with a focus on their lived experience and on the challenges presented by their rapports with Catholic authorities and orthodox doctrinal perspectives between 1970 and the present.