San Juan de los Jarros

San Juan de los Jarros is a community in the municipality of Atlacomulco, in the northern Toluca valley, at 2,480 m, with 2,660 residents in the 2020 census. Its past is better documented than that of many larger towns, thanks to a 1604 document that UNAM published in 2020: the congregación of San Juan de los Jarros. It records that before the regrouping the village was called Cuiyatepec, Nahuatl for "hill of the frogs", and sat on a hillside. None of the sources we read explains where "jarros" (jars) comes from.

A congregación was a viceregal policy of gathering scattered settlements into one. On 11 May 1603, after Mass, the judge Jorge de Baeza y Carvajal and the parish priest Juan González de Urbina addressed the Indigenous residents; the priest spoke Otomí and Mazahua, so no interpreter was needed. Seven small settlements were joined, leaving about 390 to 398 tributaries of Mazahua, Otomí and some Nahua origin. Their lands gave maize, fava beans, pulses, pigs and hens, and the barrio of San Bartolomé grew maguey and sold pulque to the Tlalpujahua mines. The governor at the time was Francisco de Villegas, a Mazahua.

The priest himself described a village on a high rise, one league from the head town, on cold and windy ground where no water reaches and it must be fetched from a short distance away. In 1712 the Real Audiencia sided with the subject barrios of San Bartolomé, Santo Domingo and San Felipe against Spaniards trying to settle on their land, and this same document was produced in their defence. Today the draw is the atrium and the church of San Juan Bautista, a catalogued historic monument, and the hill scenery of the north of the valley.