Tecámac de Felipe Villanueva

Tecámac de Felipe Villanueva is the old village at the heart of one of Mexico's most populous municipalities. Tecámac municipality had 547,500 people in 2020, but most of them live in Ojo de Agua and other new housing districts; the seat itself had just 18,226. It lies in the northeast of the Valley of Mexico, between Ecatepec and Teotihuacán, and since 2022 it has had Felipe Ángeles International Airport next door, built on land in Tecámac and Zumpango.

The Nahuatl name is read as "at the stone mouth", and the town glyph shows exactly that: an open mouth with teeth, with a hand stretched out above it. Colonial friars called it Tecámac de la Santa Cruz; after the Reform Laws it became Tecámac de Reforma; and on 8 September 1944 Governor Isidro Fabela gave it its current name, after Felipe Villanueva. The violinist, pianist and composer was born here on 5 February 1862 and died in Mexico City in 1893, aged 31, and is one of the best-known names of Porfirian-era musical Romanticism. Since 1957 the municipality has been plain Tecámac, and the composer's name stays with the seat.

The centre is modest. There is the parish church, declared a historic monument in 1933, and the pink-stone town hall that residents built around 1962, opened by President Adolfo López Mateos. Everything changed after 2007, when the state's Ciudades Bicentenario programme brought mass housing and shopping centres to former ejido and hacienda land. Ojo de Agua, now home to more than 240,000 people, is the largest locality in Mexico that is not a municipal seat.

Traditions are kept alive by the municipality's twelve original villages, the seat first among them. Its regional fair honours the Holy Cross, with 3 May as the main day: Masses, processions, fairground rides and free concerts at the Teatro del Pueblo stage. During Lent in Santa Cruz Tecámac, a Judas figure parades through the streets with a following of children and teenagers.