Ciudad de Jocotitlán

Jocotitlán, officially the Heroica Ciudad de Jocotitlán, is the seat of the municipality of the same name in the north of the State of Mexico, between Ixtlahuaca and Atlacomulco. It sits against the lower slopes of the Jocotitlán or Xocotépetl volcano, which has its own Puebloteca page, looking out over the flat Ixtlahuaca valley at about 2,670 m. It had 7,965 residents in 2020. The Nahuatl name is usually translated as "among the tejocote trees". This has been Mazahua country since before the conquest, and the state named the town a Pueblo con Encanto on 30 August 2021.

The Spanish town was founded by royal decree in 1540. From 1592 until his death in 1635 its priest was Diego de Nájera Yanguas, who learned his parishioners' language and wrote a Mazahua-language catechism, published in 1637 and described as the only known book printed in Mazahua. Two centuries later the War of Independence came close: the parish priest, José Ignacio Muñiz, handed Hidalgo the edict of excommunication at Ixtlahuaca in 1810, and in April 1811 the town rose up, killed the Ixtlahuaca district officer in the plaza and was crushed by royalist troops under Juan Bautista de la Torre, leaving more than 400 dead. That is why the municipality was declared a "heroic city" in 2013.

The centre has cobbled streets and houses with red tile roofs. The main plaza has two levels, with the bandstand and trees on the upper one and the parish church of Jesús Nazareno on its east side. The church was founded in 1575 and has gone through three building phases: the 16th-century atrium cross survives from the first Franciscan church, while the present Neoclassical building of black sandstone with brick trim was begun in the 1860s, its towers only finished in 1983. Inside are a baptismal font carved from a single block of stone, probably 16th-century, and the white-and-gold Santísimo chapel.

Across the plaza to the south, the arcades hold the Diego de Nájera Yanguas culture centre, and a little further south the municipal market serves barbacoa, mole and quelites, plus wild mushrooms, escamoles, maguey flowers and cupiches, a kind of butterfly larva. Knitted goods in thread and yarn are still made in town.