The Huasteca Region of Mexico

Since the Husteca region is the first area we plan to explore, I've been websurfing and reading my guidebooks. The most interesting link I've found so far is to the Nahua Newsletter, published by the University of Indiana.

Not quite 1/4 of the way down the page, there is a review of a book called Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space. Here's a brief quote from this article.

The region has been marginalized from the national project and its history and culture are seen to differ from Mexico as a whole. Thus the region is defined in Mexican ideology as a frontier, a remote and lawless place that "has not yet been immortalized in textbook or mural" (p. 51). But the region is believed to have its hidden sources of wealth. Central Mexicans are convinced that Indian peoples of the Huasteca can predict weather or cure diseases that modern medicine cannot. The Huasteca is widely believed to be the location of hidden treasure or untold mineral wealth (it does in fact contain major oil resources). The region is a kind of untapped periphery that remains unexplored and unexploited. Yet paradoxically this reserve of physical and cultural wealth "is seen as quintessentially Mexican because it represents the great, dormant, untapped Mexico" (p. 51). The Huasteca serves national elites as a metaphor of untamed possibilities, both the strength and the potential of an unrealized Mexico.