Atencingo

Atencingo is a town in the municipality of Chietla in south-western Puebla, 3 km from the municipal seat and near the Morelos line. The name means "place by the water". It had 12,162 people in 2020, more than Chietla itself, and has held the rank of villa since December 2010. It lies in the Matamoros valley at about 1,090 m.

Everything in Atencingo revolves around sugar. Cane has been grown here since colonial times, when the haciendas crushed it in small mills to make piloncillo. Between 1921 and 1936 the Compañía Civil e Industrial Atencingo of the American businessman William O. Jenkins bought up the haciendas and cane fields between Matamoros and Atencingo; in 1938, by decree of President Lázaro Cárdenas, the company became the Atencingo ejido cooperative, and in 1970 the mill returned to private hands. It is the only sugar mill in south-western Puebla and one of the largest in Mexico: it crushes about 1.8 million tonnes of cane a year, brought from 15 municipalities in Puebla and Morelos, during the harvest from November to May.

Atencingo was also the hub of a narrow-gauge sugar railway network: about 90 km of 600 mm track toward Tepeojuma, San Juan Raboso and San Félix Rijo, and another 60 km of 900 mm track toward Jaltepec, El Órgano and Campo Nuevo. In the mid-1950s the rails were lifted and the embankments became farm roads; the old railway terminal survives from that time.