Modesta Lavana Pérez (February 24, 1929 – December 13, 2010) was an indigenous

Nahua The Nahuas () are a group of the indigenous people of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico and second largest in El Salvador. The Mexica (Aztecs) were of Nahua ethnicity, a ...

healer and activist from the town of

Hueyapan San Andrés Hueyapan is a small town in the rural northeastern part of the Mexican state of Morelos, formerly in the municipality of Tetela del Volcán. It lies at an elevation of ca 2000–2500 metres above sea level on the southern slopes of t ...

Morelos Morelos (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Morelos ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Morelos), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 36 municipalities and its capital city is Cuer ...

, Mexico. She was recognized as an important activist for indigenous rights and women's rights in Morelos, where she worked as a healer and as a legal translator of the

Nahuatl Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller ...

language for the state of Morelos. She was also an authority on local

ethnobotany Ethnobotany is the study of a region's plants and their practical uses through the traditional knowledge of a local culture and people. An ethnobotanist thus strives to document the local customs involving the practical uses of local flora for m ...

, and on the usage of the

temazcal A temazcal is a type of sweat lodge, which originated with pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica. The term ''temazcal'' comes from the Nahuatl language, either from the words (to bathe) and (house), or from the word (house of heat) ...

sweat bath. Her traditional wool weavings on the

backstrap loom A loom is a device used to weave cloth and tapestry. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. The precise shape of the loom and its mechanics may vary, but th ...

were well known within the state of Morelos, and received many prizes. As a child, as was common in that period, she was punished for speaking her native Nahuatl language in school, but she kept speaking it and eventually became a translator helping other speakers access their rights in the legal system of the state of Morelos. She is cited as a source of linguistic data in several articles about the variety of

spoken in Hueyapan, Morelos. She was trained as a nurse and was responsible for much of the medical treatment of the inhabitants of Hueyapan administering injections, treating wounds and delivering babies in her home, until the construction of an official clinic. In 1977, with the anthropologist Laurencia Alvarez, she published an account of her own experience with the folk-illness

susto Susto (, ) is a cultural illness primarily among Latin American cultures. It is described as a condition of "chronic somatic suffering stemming from emotional trauma or from witnessing traumatic experiences lived by others". Symptoms Among the ...

, which has come to be frequently cited within the literature on this illness.Laurencia Álvarez Heydenreich, Jacques Galinier. 1987. La Enfermedad y la cosmovisión en Hueyapan, Morelos. Instituto Nacional Indigenista.

Bibliography

1929 births 2010 deaths Nahua people People from Morelos Translators from Nahuatl Mexican Mesoamericanists Women Mesoamericanists Shamanism of the Americas 20th-century translators Indigenous Mexican women {{Mexico-bio-stub

See also

Bibliography