Doctor Mora

Until 1949 the town was called Charcas, and what changed it was the stubbornness of one shopkeeper, José María Valencia Orduña. In the thick of the Cristero War, on Palm Sunday 1929, about thirty armed neighbours posted at key points held off an attack by Cristero forces for eight hours and saved the settlement. Later, as a state deputy, Valencia Orduña won the Melchor Ortega dam and the General Lázaro Cárdenas primary school, and in 1949 he led the push that made Charcas a municipality, renamed for the liberal thinker José María Luis Mora. Electric light arrived in 1951.

Doctor Mora sits at 2,120 metres in the hills that climb toward San Luis de la Paz, and the seat has about 6,200 residents. It is the youngest municipality in northeast Guanajuato, and the scale shows: a parish church facing the main garden, the Casa de Cultura Xochiquétzal, neighbourhood shops and the Plaza Unión Bicentenario, where the year's biggest moments happen.

What gives the place its identity is the table. Beef carnitas emerged in the early 1900s from the Sierra Gorda cattle tradition, and pulque has been part of family meals for decades. Every August, for the municipal anniversary, the Feria del Pulque y las Carnitas fills the plaza with stalls, music and crafts: the 2023 edition had 33 carnitas producers and 23 pulque producers, and the 12th, held 7 to 9 August 2026, brought about a hundred exhibitors, seventy of them local. It opens with a ritual of thanks to the maguey and the earth.

November adds a Day of the Dead parade, organised by local teachers since the mid-2010s. The rest of the year the town is quiet and agricultural, with part of its economy carried by money sent home from the United States.