Jáltipan

Jáltipan, officially Jáltipan de Morelos, is a town and municipal seat on the plains of southern Veracruz, about 18 km west of Minatitlán and 30 km from Coatzacoalcos, and part of the Minatitlán metropolitan area. It had 31,856 people at the 2020 census. The name comes from Nahuatl and means "place on the sand"; in Popoluca the town is called Po•ymá•yim, "place of much sand". It was an important Popoluca area and has strong Nahua roots, and the site was settled long before the conquest: in 2013 INAH archaeologists led by Alfredo Delgado excavated a pyramid, a brick workshop and 30 pre-Hispanic burials here, with offerings of jade beads, mirrors and imported figurines.

In the 16th century Jáltipan belonged to the province of Coatzacoalcos. Local tradition holds that Doña Marina, La Malinche, Cortés's interpreter, was born in these lands, although historians more often name nearby Olutla; the Danza de la Malinche, a dramatisation of the conquest, has a special place here. The town was made a villa with the name Jáltipan de Morelos on 21 May 1881 and a city on 27 November 1953. A disaster in 1920 destroyed its colonial buildings and an earthquake in 1959 caused heavy damage, so the centre is modern, with the municipal palace and the Rebeca Arias de López school as its landmarks. For most of the 20th century Jáltipan lived from sulphur mining, which drew American, Canadian, Spanish, Lebanese, Italian and Japanese residents; the sulphur works were later nationalised and closed after a large explosion, and silica sand and minerals are still processed here.

Today the town is known in the region for its music and food. Since 1979 the Feria Folclórica de Jáltipan has been held every May to celebrate the town's Nahua roots, with representatives of its four original barrios, traditional food, the cacao drink popo, a cane mill pressing sugar-cane juice, and a festival of traditional son jarocho. At year's end a fandango festival brings in well-known musicians; in December 2017 Natalia Lafourcade played here with Los Cojolites, and the town now has a Son Jarocho documentation centre that also teaches embroidery, cooking and dance. The Avenida Juárez is the course of the year-end Carrera del Pavo road race, and the markets are the place for empanadas, garnachas, tamales and carne de Chinameca. Since February 2024 Jáltipan has had a passenger station on Line Z of the Tren Interoceánico between Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz.