San José del Rincón

San José del Rincón is the seat of a municipality that only came into being in 2001. Decree 36 of the state legislature, published on 2 October that year, carved 494.9 km² out of San Felipe del Progreso, and a provisional council took office on 1 January 2002. The town itself, officially San José del Rincón Centro, had 3,827 people in the 2010 census, while the whole municipality counted 100,082 in 2020 according to INEGI, spread over more than 130 mostly rural communities between 2,500 and 3,700 m. Locals are called monteros, because the neighbouring towns always referred to people from here as "the ones from the mountain".

This is Mazahua country. The municipal emblem shows a hill topped by a pine with a spring at its foot and a monarch butterfly, xofiy in Mazahua, an animal held sacred in these communities. Spanish land grants carved up the area from the 1500s, and later came haciendas such as La Providencia, San Onofre, Jaltepec and Lamillas. They lived off zacatón, a bunchgrass whose roots were exported to Europe, along with timber, pulque, wool and charcoal, all shipped out on the rail spur that mining companies ran from Tultenango to El Oro and Tlalpujahua in 1895, with a stop at Carmona station.

The main square is faced by the parish church of Señor San José, built of quarried stone on land given by Elías Marín's hacienda and made a parish around 1907. The bigger draw lies to the west: roughly 15,200 hectares of pine and sacred-fir forest inside the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. There the La Mesa ejido guides visitors to the wintering butterflies from November to March, and the Las Rosas conservation unit has trails for spotting the forest's birds and other wildlife.