Tata Vasco y Tata Lázaro: dos héroes culturales en la tradición oral michoacana

Abstract

The characters of Vasco de Quiroga and Lázaro Cárdenas frequently appear as cultural heroes in the oral narrative of the lake zone in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. This paper presents and studies a series of oral narratives documented in field work between 2013 and 2018 in that area to analyze how Quiroga and Cárdenas are characterized and how these narratives are structured. In them the characters fulfill a series of functions of the cultural hero: they create an ordered world for the humans, they are founders of places and distributors of goods and crafts. This paper proposes that these characters form a symbolic duality in the oral narrative, which also fulfills the function of giving structure to historical time in the memory of the communities.