Tlacotepec de Benito Juárez

On the first Sunday of July the roads into Tlacotepec fill with walkers: thousands of pilgrims come on foot from across Puebla and neighbouring Veracruz to the Shrine of the Señor del Calvario, and the fair runs through the octave, until the second Sunday of the month. That is the best-known face of this town of 9,913 people in 2020, seat of the municipal government, at about 1,950 m and some 37 km in a straight line from Tehuacán. Its name joins tlahco, half, tepetl, hill, and the ending co: "halfway up the hill".

The area has been occupied for a very long time, since about 1300 BC, and in the 15th century it paid tribute to Tenochtitlan. Records place the secular clergy in Santa Cruz Tlacotepec in 1567, and in 1638 a República de Indios was formed with the same boundaries; in 1895 it was made a villa. From the colonial period comes the 16th-century church of the Santa Cruz shown in the photo. On Avenida Juárez stands a house that, according to local tradition, served for three days as Benito Juárez's own office. A recent episode made national news: in January 2018 the Supreme Court ordered the mayor and nine council members removed and criminally charged for failing to pay compensation for an expropriated plot, as the courts had required.

The municipality, nearly 400 km² in the Tehuacán and Sierra Negra region, rises from 1,880 to 2,900 m and borders Yehualtepec, Palmar de Bravo, Cañada Morelos, Tepanco de López, Juan N. Méndez and Xochitlán Todos Santos. The landscape is mostly semi-arid, with scrub and rain-fed fields; most of its runoff heads to the Salado River in the Papaloapan basin. In Santa María la Alta palm is woven into hats, and the table offers mole poblano, barbacoa and tlacoyos, pitaya and xoconoxtle sweets and pulque. Commons also records an archaeological site with pyramids, Teteles de Santo Nombre, within the municipality.