Tarascan

Quality 0.50 · 1 view · Updated 2 months ago

Name for the Purépecha culture

title: "Tarascan" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["exonyms", "purépecha", "ethnonyms"] description: "Name for the Purépecha culture" topic_path: "general/exonyms" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarascan" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Name for the Purépecha culture ::

Tarascan or Tarasca is an exonym and the popular name for the Purépecha culture. It may refer to:

the Tarascan State, a Mesoamerican empire until the Spanish conquest in the 1500s, located in (present-day) west-central Mexico
the Purépecha people
the Purépecha language

The term has pejorative connotations of "loathsomeness and disgust" when it refers to the people or their language.

Etymology

The name "Tarascan" (and its Spanish-language equivalent, "tarasco") comes from the word "tarascue" in the Purépecha language, which means indistinctly "father-in-law" or "son-in-law". The Spanish took it as their name, for reasons that have been attributed to different, mostly legendary, stories.

The Nahuatl name for the Purépecha was "Michhuàquê" ("those who have fish"), whence the name of the Mexican state of Michoacán.

References

"History of Mexico - the State of Michoacan".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::