Chatino

The people and the landscape

The Chatino live in the Sierra Sur of southern Oaxaca, close kin to the Zapotec in language and long entangled with them in history. Like their neighbours, they inhabit a world of steep coffee-growing slopes and dispersed mountain communities.

A name in the record

The Chatino enter the ethnomycological literature chiefly through synthesis: Gastón Guzmán’s surveys count them among the Mexican peoples with recorded sacred mushroom use.¹ The Mazatec to the north drew the world’s cameras; the Chatino kept their practice quiet, which is part of why it endures.

The holy children in the Sierra Sur

Where the record follows the trail to specific towns, it comes alive. In Chatino communities of the Sierra Sur — Santiago Yaitepec among them — healers still turn to the sacred mushrooms for divination and curing, reading through the night for the hidden cause of an illness or the answer to a question.² The rite is close kin to the Mazatec velada: a shared Oaxacan grammar of the niños santos, the “holy children,” spoken here in a Zapotecan tongue. Less filmed, less written down — and, for exactly that reason, one of the living threads the outside world never managed to unravel.

Footnotes

1. Gastón Guzmán, “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview” (2008). ↩

2. Regional ethnomycology of the Chatino, Chontal, and Chinantec communities of Oaxaca (folk-taxonomy fieldwork, 2025). ↩