Xiloxoxtla

The place of the flowering corn

50 Pages

Photographs by Laurence Salzmann

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Xiloxoxtla, meaning place of the flowering corn in Nahuatl or Mexicano, still spoken by some some 1.7 million people who live mostly in Central America, has been spoken since the 7th century, and was the language of the Aztec/Mexica.

As a young man I did a summer of anthropological field training in the small village of San Lorenzo Xiloxoxtla on the lower slopes of La Malinche Mountain in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico, Its Nahuatl name always fascinated me. At that time, only people over 60 years of age spoke Nahuatl.

The photographs for this short collection were however not made in San Lorenzo Xiloxoxtla but in Maras, Peru where many years later I had the good fortune to spend an extended time photographing the lifeways of that town published in my larger collection of photographs entitled: Misk'i Kachi Runakuna // Sweet Salt People. However, for both San Lorenzo Xiloxoxtla and Maras corn has been an important part of each places economy in more ways than one.

Today's digital cameras permitted me to visualize the photograph as I was working.

- Laurence Salzmann