The term Mezcala Tradition is used to group together pieces of mortuary stone sculpture from the from the Middle Balsas River basin. Pieces of this type have been found in the Mezcala River basin but they are not exclusive to this tributary.

It is part of a stone carving tradition that produced anthropomorphic figures, as well as some images of fauna and architecture, using different colored small stones from the region. The human figures often represent men standing with their arms at their sides and frequently the forearms are folded against their trunk.

The collections of the Mezcala tradition is dominated by a strong abstraction which determines the form of the human body using predominately straight lines. However, sporadically pieces are found that share some of these characteristics but not others.

This piece  coincides fully with the Mezcala conventions and it even has the typical conventional position of the arms, attached to the trunk, with the forearms folded and placed on the abdomen. What is noteworthy about this figurine is that the face has been crafted with a natural expression filled with detail: the lips are well defined, it has protruding cheeks and cheekbones, and folds that run from the tear ducts beside the nose to the corners of the lips that give the figurine a facial expression. This helps to distance this figurine from the better-known Mezcala repertoire.

It is very unlikely that there was an "evolutionary" sequence in Mezcala stone carving that took it from naturalism to abstraction or vice versa. It is more likely that some local manifestations survived and that they interpreted the style in their own way.