Motzorongo

Motzorongo belongs to the municipality of Tezonapa, at the southern end of Veracruz's Altas Montañas region, about 7 km from the municipal seat and roughly 45 km by road from Córdoba. With around 4,000 people it is one of the largest communities in the municipality. Despite belonging to the mountain region it lies low, with a hot, humid climate all year, ringed by hills of evergreen forest, cedar and fruit trees such as mango, sapodilla, mamey and citrus. The name comes from Nahuatl motzolonco, usually translated as "place where the ravine comes together".

Its story begins with the hacienda built here by Carlos Pacheco, Porfirio Díaz's minister of development, on land that had been the low-lying eastern part of Zongolica. In 1888 the estate began planting ramie, a fibre the government hoped would rival henequen. To move the harvest, the so-called Agricultural Railway was laid from Córdoba: 46 km of track that reached Motzorongo in 1895 and was bought by the federal government in 1899. The sugar mill ran its first harvest in 1897, and by 1898 the estate had a sugar works, a distillery, a steam sawmill, a power plant and a 52-room hotel; senior Porfirian officials reportedly came to hunt in the surrounding hills.

In 1903 Pacheco's heirs sold the Motzorongo and Las Josefinas estates to a Chicago firm, the Motzorongo Company, promoted by Canadian psychologist Herbert A. Parkyn as an investors' cooperative. Its holdings reached some 360,000 acres, then the largest American-controlled farm property in Mexico. In April 1914 the plantation made international headlines when false reports claimed that Huerta's troops had shot about twenty of its American staff. Sugarcane still sets the rhythm: each May, when the harvest ends, the municipality holds the Feria de la Caña, with a festival queen, rodeo riding and horse races.