Paraíso Novillero

Paraíso Novillero, in the municipality of Cosamaloapan de Carpio, lies in the Papaloapan basin on federal Highway 175 about 24 km from the municipal seat on the way to Tuxtepec. Its roughly 2,300 residents live from sugarcane, cattle and fishing. Local history dates its founding to 31 May 1898, by Joaquín Gutiérrez Pitalua, on land that once belonged to the Santo Tomás de las Lomas hacienda.

The village owes its existence to a French venture. In 1880 Napoleón Magne, a former cavalry officer later elected deputy for the Dordogne, bought 9,305 hectares of that hacienda to build a sugar mill. He died in January 1900, months before the Sociedad Agrícola e Industrial Francesa del Paraíso Novillero ground its first harvest on 1 October that year. Under managers such as José and Francisco Pailles de Pont the mill drew investors from many countries, joined forces in 1906 with the neighbouring San Gabriel, San Cristóbal and Lerdo de Tejada mills, ran a Decauville locomotive to haul cane and, from 1915, used barges towed by tugs on the Papaloapan river. Village memory also holds that its distillery made rum for Bacardí in the 1930s. The mill worked for 61 years; the grandest claims about its size come from local chroniclers and are best taken with some caution.

Plenty of that era is still standing. The Catholic church the Pailles family built in 1902 holds the crypts of its founders; the Hardy chimney of 1955 carries the company crest; molasses drainage tunnels survive inside Secondary Technical School 32; and a pochote tree is said to have been planted by Magne in 1880 to mark the mill site. The festival calendar is full: the mojiganga and papeleta parades on the eve of 12 December, feast of the patron Virgin of Guadalupe; El Viejo on 31 December; a jaripeo rodeo on 1 January; and a carnival held since 1950.