Xico

Xico is the city that fills nearly all of Valle de Chalco Solidaridad municipality, on the eastern edge of the Valley of Mexico next to Mexico City's Iztapalapa and Tláhuac boroughs. It had 384,327 people in 2020, almost the whole municipality. The name comes from Cerro Xico, the extinct volcano that was once an island, and means "navel" in Nahuatl. The hill has its own Puebloteca page. Almost the whole city around it is built on what used to be the bottom of Lake Chalco.

That history is in the ground. The shoreline had fishing villages from the 9th century BC, a Teotihuacan village between 550 and 650, Otomi terraces on Cerro del Marqués, and from 1328 the Acxotecas and their chinampa fields; Tezozómoc conquered Xico in 1381. Under Porfirio Díaz, the Asturian businessman Íñigo Noriega won the concession to drain the lake and kept the land. After the Revolution it was handed out as ejidos, Estación Xico and San Miguel Xico, which stayed mostly empty until the late 1970s.

Then hundreds of families arrived from Oaxaca, Guerrero, Puebla, Michoacán and Mexico City itself looking for cheap plots, and built homes with no water, drains or power. By 1990 about 252,000 people lived here. President Carlos Salinas launched his National Solidarity Programme here, and on 7 May 1990 Pope John Paul II said Mass at what is now the cathedral of San Juan Diego, planting an ash tree that still stands. The municipality was created in November 1994. Dozens of Indigenous groups live here today, which shows in the food, with street snacks from central and southern Mexico, and in more than 40 neighbourhood patron-saint feasts.

The building with the most history is the Ex-Hacienda de Xico, built when the lake was drained. Zapatista and then Carrancista troops took it during the Revolution, after which it was left to decay; restoration began in 2015, and since 2018 INAH has worked on it and on the Cerro del Marqués remains. The Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico opened in 1996 in a 19th-century hacienda under INAH supervision, with trilobite fossils, mammoth bones, Ticomán and Coyotlatelco pottery, Tláloc-style offerings and a relief of Quetzalcóatl. The Chalchiuhtlicue culture centre, founded the same year, runs workshops in music, theatre, painting and traditional medicine.