Tenextepango

The name is Nahuatl for "place of lime walls": tenextli is lime, tepantli is wall and -co marks the spot, a nod to the valley ringed by hills where the village sits. It lies at roughly 1,150 metres in the municipality of Ayala and had 8,835 residents in 2020, which makes it the municipality's third-largest village.

Its story is that of a hacienda. In 1603 Nicolás Abad had a farming estate built that was called San Francisco Mapachtlán; around 1750 the villagers, backed by the estate owners and guided by the Dominicans, raised a church to San José, and the place came to be known as San José Mapachtlán. Later the Santiago Tenextepango estate passed through the hands of Mexico City merchants until the sugar magnate Isidoro de la Torre bought it in 1863. His son Ignacio de la Torre y Mier inherited it in 1881 at fifteen, married Amada Díaz, daughter of Porfirio Díaz, and ran one of the region's biggest cane producers, with some 16,000 hectares. Díaz is said to have spent winter stretches here for the climate. The mill was dynamited in 1913, during the Revolution; a photograph on Wikimedia Commons shows the narrow-gauge locomotives that hauled cane on the estate.

Today the village lives mostly off farming: there are more than 600 ejido members, seasonal labourers come from Guerrero, and others commute to the Cuautla industrial park. On 25 July it celebrates its patron, Santiago Apóstol, and the tecuanes dance is performed that day. The Zapatista Constancio Farfán was born here, and the former hacienda and the parish of Santiago Apóstol are among the sites the municipality of Ayala lists as attractions.