Xochitlán Todos Santos

At the main entrance of the chapel of the old San Jerónimo Alfaro hacienda, founded by the Jesuits and dedicated to Saint Rosalia, is the mouth of a tunnel that, as people in town tell it, ran all the way to Tecamachalco and was last used during the Revolution. The chapel has a black-stone façade carved with saints and angels. It is one of the corners of Xochitlán Todos Santos, whose Nahuatl name, from xochitl, flower, and tlan, among, translates as "place among the flowers". The town had 5,975 people in 2020 and sits at about 1,900 m in the farming valley of east-central Puebla, some 59 km in a straight line from the capital and 49 km from Tehuacán.

It was founded by Olmec-Xicalanca groups; before the Spanish conquest it answered to Tepeaca, which in turn paid tribute to Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Later it belonged to the Tecamachalco district, and in 1895 it became a free municipality, now almost 164 km², bordering Tochtepec, Tecamachalco, Huitziltepec, Molcaxac, Juan N. Méndez, Tepexi de Rodríguez, Yehualtepec and Tlacotepec de Benito Juárez. The 17th-century parish church of the Assumption, part of the Diocese of Tehuacán, dominates the centre; south of town lies the Aranzazú hacienda.

Water is shared carefully here: several irrigation canals cross the municipality from north-east to south-east, run by the Emiliano Zapata irrigation unit, which makes sure each farmer pays his quota and keeps the channels maintained. Streams feed small ponds called jagüeyes, such as Jagüey Chiquito, El Arroyo, Los Santiagos, Plan Juárez and Los Moros, and drinking water comes from wells and the Cuesta del Toro dam. More than half the land is farmed, with maize, beans, alfalfa and sorghum, and the rest is scrub; cattle and pigs are the main livestock. The climate is mild and dry, 14 to 18 °C with only 600 to 800 mm of rain. People weave palm and saw building planks, and the kitchen serves mole poblano, pipián and tamales, with atole, chocolate and aguardiente.