ABSTRACT
Otom speakers were located in the northern half of the central highlands, particularly in the areas that are now known as the Mezquital Valley and Jilotepec Province, at the ends of the northernmost expansion of the Mexica empire. The economic emphasis of such research hardly managed to hide the great deficiency in the Mexican anthropology of the Otomes from the Mezquital Valley. The twentieth-century ethnographer, when rescuing the ethnography and the ways of life of the Otomes, had intellectually assumed their marginalization from Mesoamerican cultural development and civilization as much as the vision of the Otomes as impoverished by the Spaniards and the Mexicans. The pre-Hispanic regional history was shown as disquieting, nonlinear, and contradictory as compared to what was known up to that point. Archaeological research also discovered the site that regional oral traditions indicated as the place that was going to be Mexico.
