San Felipe Otlaltepec

Otlaltepec joins otlatl, reed, tepetl, hill, and the locative co, so the name means "on the hill of reeds"; the San Felipe in front honours Philip the Apostle, the patron saint. It is one of the main settlements of Tepexi de Rodríguez in southern Puebla and serves as one of the municipality's juntas auxiliares. The 2020 census counted 1,980 residents here, spread over dry rolling hills at about 1,844 metres, 55 kilometres from Tehuacán and 78 from the state capital.

The area sits on a cultural borderline: Tepexi el Viejo was founded by Popoloca people and lay between Popoloca-, Mixtec- and Nahuatl-speaking towns, before paying tribute to the Aztecs and being refounded after the Conquest on its present site. In colonial times the district was known as Tepexi de la Seda, Tepexi of the silk. The land around Otlaltepec is low tropical forest, scrub and grassland, with temperatures of 16 to 24 degrees and only 600 to 900 millimetres of rain a year; the streams draining towards the Acatlán and Atoyac rivers mostly flow only in the wet season.

That dryness and the distance from any city make for very clear nights: a photograph of the Milky Way taken at dawn in February 2021 in San Felipe Otlaltepec is on Wikimedia Commons. INEGI's municipal compendium singles the village out for its wind bands, and local cooking includes guasmole, barbacoa, roasted grasshoppers, alachis broth and tetelas, with sweets of mango, fig and chilacayote squash. Palm and raffia weaving and onyx carving are regional crafts.