For the ancient Purépechas, the Petámuti was the priest who presided over ceremonies of justice and also had the responsibility of recounting the genealogy, history, ethical values, and the history of the lineage of the ruling dynasty as part of the festival known as Equata-cónsquaro. Therefore, we can gauge the value of oral history not only as a means of preserving the past but also as a regulator of the collective in Pre-Hispanic societies.
Oral tradition constitutes one of the fundamental pillars of the cultural reproduction of the Indigenous cultures of Mexico, functioning as a complex system for transmitting knowledge, values, traditions, and collective memories. Through stories, myths, songs, prayers, and ritual discourses, communities preserve their history, their cosmovision, and their own ways of understanding the world without depending exclusively on writing. This dynamic character allows oral tradition to remain not a vestige of the past, but a living practice that adapts to changing contexts.
Oral tradition is closely linked to social structure and, above all, to language, making it a key element in linguistic preservation. In many Indigenous communities, the loss of language also implies the erosion of narratives, concepts, and cultural categories that cannot always be fully translated into other languages, such as Spanish. For this reason, orality acts as a vehicle of cultural resistance in the face of historical processes of colonization, marginalization, and homogenization.