Tepatlaxco de Hidalgo

Around 1550-1555 Viceroy Luis de Velasco and Charles V authorised don Francisco Cuapinto to refound the town of "Tepatlasco or Tepatlachico" with Saint Sebastian as patron; the Franciscans took charge of the church, and the painting of the boundaries Cuapinto left behind became the title deed the town would bring out for centuries. Agustín Ramírez, its legal representative, did exactly that in 1924 to claim the lands and waters of the La Malinche forest: he did not win them all back, but secured sizeable ejido lands. Earlier, in 1856, under the Lerdo Law, Tepatlaxco had offered to buy from Tepeaca the part of the mountain it rented, arguing it had held it since time immemorial.

The name is officially read as "plain where stony ground abounds", for the rocky soil at the foot of the volcano; other Nahuatl readings suggest "place where things are crushed with stone" or "place of the broad stone". On the outskirts stands a tetel, a pre-Hispanic mound that probably dates from when the area belonged to the Chichimec lordship of Cuauhtinchan. In colonial times its people worked on the branch of the Mexico-Veracruz road through Nopalucan and Amozoc, while the haciendas of Santa María, Vallarte and Cansino nibbled away at its boundaries. In the Revolution two of its sons stood out, General Lorenzo Morales and Captain Camilo Romero Crisóstomo. It depended on Tepeaca until 1926, when it became a municipality and added the name Hidalgo.

Today the town is a sizeable place, with 18,374 people in 2020, at 2,377 metres, inside the Puebla-Tlaxcala metropolitan area. The municipality, about 61 km², climbs from the Tepeaca valley to the summit of La Malinche, where it meets Huamantla, and a third of it is forest. It is cool: averages run from 4 to 16 °C. Wooden beams are hewn here, and the table offers mole poblano, lard-and-salt tamales, hojaldras, a squash sweet called tlayacualotl and the pulque known as nehutli.