San Bernardo

In San Bernardo the Virgin of Guadalupe is celebrated a month late. Since nearly everyone farmed and was still busy in the fields in December, the town decided to move the feast to 12 January, after the harvest; locals now count it among the biggest celebrations in the region, with dawn serenades, masses and well-known bands. This Mixteca village is a junta auxiliar of the municipality of Acatlán and became one of its subdivisions on 3 April 1883 because of its closeness to Acatlán de Osorio. It sits at 1,272 metres; in 2020 it had 828 inhabitants, and counting the outlying settlements under it the total reached 1,472.

Its modern history revolves around land. The ejido was formed from the lands of the Tulapa hacienda, and a presidential resolution under Lázaro Cárdenas, published on 30 July 1935, handed 2,332 hectares of grazing land to 162 farmers. Two extensions followed, in 1941 and 1981, and the ejido now covers about 3,286 hectares. The first church of San Bernardo was built between 1936 and 1941 and now serves as the sanctuary for the Blessed Sacrament; in 1992 the parish of San Bernardo de Claraval was created, part of the diocese of Huajuapan de León. For posadas, the calenda procession and the Stations of the Cross the community divides into barrios with names like El Mimilte, La Cuchilla, Palo Amarrado and Los Ciruelos.

The landscape belongs to the Sierra Madre del Sur: heavily eroded metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rock, rugged relief and tropical dry forest that drops almost all its leaves in the dry season. Copal, frangipani, organ cactus and jiotilla are common, and the hills hold armadillos, deer, iguanas, coyotes, roadrunners and rattlesnakes. The traditional milpa is planted from May to July with maize, beans, squash, peanuts, hibiscus and sesame, and harvested in November and December, while goats grazed on the open range are the main livestock. In the second half of the 20th century bentonite, white stone and talc were mined north of the village; those mines now lie abandoned.