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Overview
Alfredo Delgado Calderón’s Veracruz atlas describes female tepas appearing at midday near springs, streams, crossroads and hills. Their frightening faces are generally concealed; seeing one is associated with grave illness. They can lead children into the forest and take their spirits, yet some tepas quietly help women with housework. The chapter compares these figures with Popoluca macti and Maya Xtabay without providing a single shared narrative.
Anath Ariel de Vidas’s fieldwork in Nahua La Esperanza, Tantoyuca, presents another emphasis. Tepas are original earth guardians who withdrew underground when the sun arrived and can manifest as winds. The researcher’s interlocutors did not supply a detailed origin myth or claim ancestral kinship with them. Their demands and capture of human shadows form part of relationships maintained alongside Catholic devotion. This local account concerns earth ownership and reciprocal obligations rather than a fixed portrait of a dangerous woman.
Origins & earliest records
The inspected atlas chapter belongs to the 2010 Atlas del patrimonio natural, histórico y cultural de Veracruz. Ariel de Vidas’s 2019 article draws on Nahua field stays from October 2003 to November 2008 and cites Roberto Williams García’s Las tepas, published in 1965, as an earlier regional study.
Records & interpretation
These sources document different settings: an atlas’s regional synthesis and fieldwork in a particular Tantoyuca settlement. Ariel de Vidas notes that the name occurs especially around the Sierra de Otontepec and that analogous beings elsewhere bear other names. Her proposed etymology is a scholarly suggestion, not an established translation adopted here.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Manifestaciones culturales mestizas
Atlas del patrimonio natural, histórico y cultural de Veracruz; inspected tepas passage printed pp. 197–198.
- 02
El arte de combinar. La gestión ritual de horizontes religiosos distintos en medios nahua y teenek de la Huasteca veracruzana (México)
Anales de Antropología 53(1), pp. 7–17; inspected pp. 9–10 distinguish La Esperanza earth guardians and the geographical scope of the name.
Family & connections
A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.
References
Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.
- ResearchDelgado Calderón: Manifestaciones culturales mestizas, Veracruz atlasResearch access: 2026-10-05
- ResearchAriel de Vidas: El arte de combinar, inspected scholarly PDFResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
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