El Rosario Micaltepec

El Rosario Micaltepec is a small farming community in Puebla's Mixteca, in the municipality of Petlalcingo. It had 250 people in 2010, 29% of them Indigenous, and 275 in 2020. It stands at about 1,450 m. It was originally just El Rosario; to tell it apart from another place of the same name, Micaltepec was added, after the abundant mica in a nearby hill.

The year's festivals set the village's rhythm: the feast of its patron, the Virgin of the Rosary, and the Day of the Dead in early November. At Christmas the locos come out, villagers in costume dancing through the streets, one of the most striking traditions. In October 2008, during the patron-saint festival, El Rosario Micaltepec hosted the first gathering of maromeros from the Mixteca, the region's traditional acrobats: nine troupes took part, seven from Oaxaca and two from Puebla, with performers such as Isabel Bonilla "Chabelita", Avelino Morales "Abelín" and Venustiano Martínez "Chiquilín", and the host, Jesús Teófilo.

The municipality of Petlalcingo lies at the southern tip of Puebla, next to Oaxaca, which it borders through Cosoltepec, Tequixtepec, Huajuapan de León and Ayuquila. It covers about 234 km² between 1,200 and 2,000 m, with the Acatlán valley to the north and the Sierra Mixteca dominating the relief. The Petlalcingo River, a tributary of the Acatlán in the upper Balsas basin, runs through it.