San Antonio Tizostoc

San Antonio Tizostoc is a locality in the municipality of Ixtacuixtla de Mariano Matamoros, in western Tlaxcala, at roughly 2,252 metres above sea level. INEGI counted 2,130 people there in the 2020 census; the population has grown steadily from 436 in 1900 and 1,341 in 1980. Its patron saint is St Anthony of Padua, who gives the village its name.

Tizostoc is a Nahuatl word. Wikipedia breaks it into tizatl (chalk), oztotl (cave) and the locative suffix -co, so something like "place of the chalk cave", though the article does not settle on a final translation. The village appears by name in the municipality's agrarian history: the Enciclopedia de los Municipios lists Tizostoc among the towns that filed land petitions in 1917, alongside Ixtacuixtla, Xocoyucan and Tezoquipan, when peasants claimed the ejidos of neighbouring haciendas. In the early 2000s the same source recorded commerce and services, rather than farming, as its main activity.

The building that anchors the village is the church of San Antonio, which the municipal catalogue places about 500 metres off the Tlaxcala–San Martín Texmelucan highway, at the junction heading north. It is a stone-walled building with a dome and a bell tower painted white and red. The whole municipality lies on the Cacaxtla and Xochitécatl tourist route, and in the surrounding area families make paper flowers, baskets, piñatas and alebrijes, crafts the encyclopedia credits to Ixtacuixtla's artisans in general.