Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata is the seat of the municipality of the same name in the hills of northern Tlaxcala, right on the border with Puebla. Its official elevation is 2,884 metres, the highest of any municipal seat in Mexico. It had 3,364 people at the 2020 census. The landscape is pine-covered hills, and people live from growing maize and potatoes, from clothing assembly workshops and from quarrying and cutting stone slabs (lajas).

The town is young. For centuries its land belonged to the Tenexac hacienda, which raised livestock and made pulque, and landless peasants lived in a hamlet called Ojo de Agua that supplied seasonal labour. In 1926 its residents began meeting to request ejido land from the hacienda, owned by Justo Bretón, and on 14 July that year the settlement was founded as part of Terrenate municipality. The state governor rejected the request in 1929, but the President of Mexico overturned that ruling on 30 October 1930, and on 5 September 1931 an engineer from the National Agrarian Commission handed Ojo de Agua 1,864 hectares taken from Tenexac. On 6 July 1932 the village took the name of the agrarian revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and on 27 September 1995 it became the seat of its own municipality, split from Terrenate.

On some rock outcrops near town there are petroglyphs and rock paintings that have never been dated. Local oral tradition says Hernán Cortés's army came through here in August 1519, placing the first clash with the Otomí at a spot called El Convento, between the Lomas de Vacas and La Mancera ranches, and a first mass by the rock of La Santa Mitua, before the Gustavo Díaz Ordaz neighbourhood.

On the main square, with its blue-domed kiosk, fountain and stone arches, stands the church of Cristo Rey, with a white façade, stone columns and niches and a single tower; inside, a wall of stone from the municipality's own quarry depicts the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Cristo Rey fiesta is usually held on the third Sunday of November, with masses, fireworks, fairground rides, a parade of the fiesta queen, bullfights and a greasy pole. At carnival "La Pandilla" goes out, a troupe of 12 to 40 huehue dancers, all men, who dance for three days at the houses that invite them and perform "El Ahorcado". Local food includes mutton barbacoa in mixiote, chileatole and pulque.