Tocumbo

Tocumbo is a small town in the hills southeast of Cotija with an unlikely claim to fame: it is where the paleterías known as La Michoacana began. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, local paleta makers sold ice pops packed with chunks of seasonal fruit, and young men from Tocumbo learned the trade. In the 1940s some of them took it to Mexico City, and the idea spread across the country and abroad. Accounts differ on who deserves the credit; Rafael Malfavón and the Alcázar brothers are the names most often mentioned.

The money that came back changed the town. Paleteros lent to their neighbors to start their own shops, and Tocumbo became known for its large houses, built with earnings from ice-cream shops all over Mexico.

The town celebrates its trade with a huge concrete paleta monument, several stories high, and with the Feria de la Paleta, held every December since 1989 around the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when many paleteros come home for the holidays.