Cerano

Cerano sits at 1,886 metres on the far western edge of Yuriria municipality, closer to Michoacán than to most sizeable towns in Guanajuato: Puruándiro lies to the southwest and Moroleón to the east. With about 5,400 residents in 2020 it is the municipality's second-largest settlement after the seat, and the street life shows it. The shopping district runs between Jesús Montaño and Lázaro Cárdenas, and people from the ranches round about come in for clothes, shoes, furniture and building supplies.

Its origin comes in two layers. Local tradition has a Purépecha group arriving from the Lake Chapala shore in the early 1600s and calling the spot Cherapite, roughly "place of red waters". Then came the hacienda, which passed to an Italian named Juan Bautista after the Jesuits were expelled in 1767; as the village tells it, he gave it the name of his birthplace, Cerano, with St John the Baptist as patron. During the War of Independence the hacienda was attacked repeatedly in 1812, and in the Revolution it sheltered raiding bands such as that of José Inés Chávez García.

What remains of the hacienda compound is the expiatory temple of the Señor de la Sacristía, the oldest building in town, remodelled and reopened in 1999. The parish church of San Juan Bautista is far newer: eight years in the building under the priest J. Jesús Montaño, inaugurated in 1945. Beside it stands the Santuario de la Virgen de Guadalupe, on the site of the old cemetery, paid for with the bazaars, dances and rodeos of the pilgrims who walk to the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

The calendar is crowded: seven fiestas a year, among them 12 February (coronation of the Virgin and village fair), 3 May, 24 June (San Juan Bautista), 28 October (San Judas Tadeo) and 12 December. The singer Junior H was born here. The surrounding fields grow maize, beans, wheat, sorghum and chickpeas, and pigs and cattle are the main livestock.