Tenango

The name Tenango comes from Nahuatl tenamitl, "wall", plus the locative co, roughly "place enclosed by a wall". It sits in the municipality of Jantetelco, in eastern Morelos, at about 1,170 m above sea level, among fields of sugar cane, sorghum and maize, with some cattle raising. It is also listed as Tenango (Santa Ana) after its patron saint, honoured on 26 July.

The census tells its recent story. In 1900 it had 894 inhabitants and by 1921, after the Revolution, only 267. Since then it has grown almost without a pause: 1,027 in 1970, 1,715 in 1990 and 1,945 in 2020. Much of that history is tied to the Hacienda de Santa Ana de Tenango, which began in 1590 as a modest sugar mill and grew into the largest sugar estate in Morelos, at some 38,000 hectares. In the Porfiriato it gained an irrigation canal from Cuautla, rail lines for the cane and a dynamo for electricity. Revolutionaries burned and dynamited it in 1914, and it burned for eight days. In 1949 the Bernal García Pimentel family rebuilt it, and it is now one of the better preserved ex-haciendas in the state.

The chapel, from the 1700s, is Puebla baroque with a talavera-tiled dome, and serves as the village church. The surroundings are quiet farmland: there are no hotels in the village itself, and the nearest are about 12 to 14 km away.