Cuitlatec

The Cuitlatecs were an indigenous people of the Tierra Caliente lowlands of Guerrero, in the Balsas river basin, whose chief towns at the time of the Spanish arrival included Ajuchitlán, Totolapan and Cutzamala.

Their language, Cuitlatec, was a language isolate unrelated to any other surviving Mexican tongue, and some scholars link its speakers to the earlier Mezcala culture of the region. Their name is a Mexica exonym, coined from the Nahuatl word for excrement.

The sixteenth-century Relaciones geográficas still recorded Cuitlatec in Ajuchitlán and Tetela del Río and along much of the Costa Grande, and around 1550 the parish priest Martín de Espinosa y Monzón wrote a grammar of the language while serving at Ajuchitlán.