Santa Cruz Huitziltepec

In Santa Cruz Huitziltepec carnival is the big celebration: from the Sunday to the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the huehues come out to dance through the streets in costume. The community, an auxiliary town of Molcaxac, sees itself as indigenous: some people still speak Nahuatl as a second language, some matters are settled by customary law, and a council of elders was recently set up as a civil association to revive traditions and open markets for local crafts among young people. Its name is explained as "the hill of the hummingbird", from huitzil and tépetl. In 2020 it had 1,747 inhabitants, at 1,858 metres and about 48 km in a straight line from the state capital.

Oral tradition says the village used to stand elsewhere and that floods every rainy season drove the ancestors to move to the present site. The auxiliary council is led by a president and four councillors, chosen by plebiscite on the fourth Sunday of January for a three-year term; they take office on the second Sunday of February. Besides carnival there is a fair on 3 May, Day of the Holy Cross, and another on 14 September for the Señor de las Misericordias, the dead are honoured and the posadas start on 30 November. Near the centre the old railway station still stands; there is a dam on the boundary with San Andrés Mimiahuapan, and on top of Cerro Campaña residents built a chapel.

Maize, beans, sorghum and squash are grown and livestock raised, and artisans braid palm into ribbon and tenate baskets; lately clothing and shoe workshops have opened. Molcaxac, "where the sparrows have their nests", lies in the Mixteca of Puebla: it was subject to Tepeji in colonial times, its church of the Assumption, from the 16th century, became a parish in 1755, and in 1916 the town was burned by Juan Andrew Almazán's troops. In San José de Gracia, another of its towns, there is a tetele mound that may be Preclassic. Food includes mole, pipián, bean tamales, cecina and chileatole, with squash candy, jamoncillo, mezcal and aguardiente, and feasts ring with flute and teponaxtle drum.