Zapotec

The Zapotec are an Indigenous people of the Oaxaca region of southern Mexico, builders of one of Mesoamerica's earliest urban civilizations, centered from around 500 BCE at the hilltop city of Monte Alban, which developed one of the first writing systems and calendar systems in the Americas. Zapotec society survived later Mixtec incursions and Aztec tributary pressure before Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, and Zapotec communities today speak a family of closely related but often mutually unintelligible Zapotec languages across dozens of distinct Oaxacan municipalities. Zapotec culture remains prominent in Oaxacan civic and religious life, including the Guelaguetza festival, and produced Mexico's first Indigenous president, Benito Juarez, in the nineteenth century.