Chiautla de Tapia

Chiautla de Tapia, seat of Chiautla municipality, lies in south-western Puebla at just over 1,000 m, not far from the Morelos line, and had 11,776 people in 2020. Its Nahuatl name comes from chiauitl, greasy mud, plus a suffix of abundance: a place thick with mire. For centuries it was Chiautla de la Sal, after a salt lake whose salt was sold to towns in Morelos. A state decree of 1874 renamed it for Mariano Antonio Tapia, vicar of Tlapa in Guerrero and an insurgent colonel under Morelos.

Before the Spanish conquest it was the capital of a strategic Aztec province whose towns produced cotton, copal and salt, and local history says it sent warriors to Texcoco for the flower wars. Its first encomendero was Alonso de Grado. Around 1550 the Augustinians began a large complex of church, convent, hospital and cemetery, which is why church records still call it Chiautla de San Agustín; the friars ran the parish until 1755, when the first secular priest took over. During the War of Independence it was a Morelos stronghold, and townspeople carried food to Cuautla while it was under siege.

Today the town lives on trade, cattle and farming, growing maize, beans, sorghum, watermelon, melon, sesame and peanuts, and has a regional campus of BUAP, the state university. The diplomat Gilberto Bosques Saldívar came from here. The regional fair falls on 12 December, the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe; San Agustín is celebrated on 28 August and San Miguel, in his own barrio, on 29 September, with bull riding, brass bands and the vaqueros and moros y cristianos dances. Local cooking includes pipián with bean tamales, ash tamales with mole and huaxmole made with guaje pods, and the municipality tans leather.