Santiago Tepeticpac

Santiago Tepeticpac is a village in the municipality of Totolac, at about 2,244 metres above sea level, with 1,556 residents at the 2020 census. It went from 264 people in 1900 to 576 in 1980 and 1,048 in 2000. Its name is Nahuatl, tepetl icpac, on top of the hill, and Santiago el Mayor, Saint James the Great, is its patron. Tepeticpac was one of the four lordships of Tlaxcala, and the Enciclopedia de los Municipios gives it as the area's first foundation, earlier than Ocotelulco, Tizatlán and Quiahuixtlán; a church was raised here in 1550, had to be rebuilt after damage in 1552 and was destroyed a year later.

What defines the village today is the 3 May feast, the Parada de Cruz, which according to the anthropologist Octavio Zempoalteca of INAH's Tlaxcala centre is held at La iglesia vieja, on the summit of Cerro del Fuerte, inside the archaeological zone. It is the only occasion of the year when residents visit the site, which collective memory regards as the community's first Catholic church. It is organised by a first mayordomo with about twenty helpers chosen in assembly each December; Santiago and the patron saint of the barrio of San Marcos Tepeticpac must be present, and guests come from neighbouring villages. In the 2011 account there was mass, mole, pulque, music, cockfights and a bullock-testing ring.

The teacher Pedro Suárez Angulo also came from here, born on 26 April 1884, a constituent deputy in 1918, who died in 1983 and was buried in his home village. A 1761 map, the Códice Santiago Tepeticpac, was on show at the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala in 2015.