Casa Blanca (Cuyotliapa)

This village goes by two names: the official one, Casa Blanca, and the one the locality register keeps in brackets, Cuyotliapa. With 1,174 residents counted in 2020, it is one of five Tilapa communities besides the municipal seat to pass a thousand people, the others being San Félix Rijo, San Bartolo Cuexpala, Zolonquiapa and Agua Dulce. It sits at 1,241 metres on the eastern edge of the municipality, some 4.7 km east of central Tilapa and close to Izúcar de Matamoros. Zolonquiapa lies about 2 km to the southwest and Agua Dulce about 4 km to the north. State road PUE 31, which links Izúcar with Amayuca across the line in Morelos, runs through the village, and beside it lies the bed of an old railway that is no longer in use.

Tilapa means "black river", from the Nahuatl words tlil and apan. The municipality was created in 1895, covers almost 84 km² and belongs to the farming belt of the Atlixco and Matamoros valleys; its land barely climbs from 1,200 to 1,360 metres. It borders Tepexco, Tlapanalá, Tepeojuma, Izúcar de Matamoros and Chietla. It is warm for much of the year: mean temperatures run from 22 to 26 °C and 800 to 1,000 mm of rain falls, mostly in summer. Water drains to the Nexapa river, a tributary of the Atoyac and so part of the Balsas basin; the Ahuehuello and Atila streams flow all year, while the Acequia and Cocotla only carry water in season.

Almost 56 % of the municipality is farmed and another 40 % is still tropical forest. Vertisols, clay soils that crack open in the dry months, are common, and there are gypsum soils too, with a local gypsum mine. The municipal seat keeps its 16th-century church of San Miguel Arcángel, known for its arch and open every day of the year. Tilapa makes trees of life, its best-known craft, and the kitchen runs on mole poblano, pipián and chileatole, with alegrías, peanut brittle and pumpkin-seed sweets, and corn-dough atole or chocolate to drink. At festivals women dress as china poblana and men in charro suits.