Vegetable food gathering: : A Chichimeca tradition in Zacatecas

Abstract

In the state of Zacatecas there survive food ways of life that belonged to different Chichimec groups. In contemporary communities there are culinary processes, which -for centuries- have been of utmost importance for the semi-desert societies; by means of harvesting they have been able to find nutrients in different plants that have allowed people to maintain themselves in arid climate places. The ethnographic analogy has given a guideline to observe similarities with native survival techniques, described in the ethnohistoric sources of the XVI and XVII centuries by the Spanish colonizers and evangelists who arrived to the Great Chichimeca. This research work describes different pre-Hispanic knowledge of food production, based on the collection of semi-desert plants, practices that are still used today.