San Antonio Cámara

San Antonio Cámara is a village of about 250 people (246 in the 2020 census) in the municipality of Temax, grown up around a former henequen hacienda. It lies between Temax and Buctzotz, about 9 km east-northeast of Temax and 7 km west-southwest of Buctzotz, and about 83 km east-northeast of Mérida in a straight line. The name combines Saint Anthony of Padua with the surname of its old owners, the Cámara family.

The Cámaras were one of Yucatán's oldest landed families, descended from the conquistador Juan de la Cámara, who fought with Francisco de Montejo and was granted the encomiendas of Euán and Sinanché. San Antonio began as a cattle estate. In the mid-19th century it belonged to Nicolás de la Cámara y Castillo (1823–1866), who also owned Santa Ana, Xkalak and Chucmichén nearby; on his death in 1866 it passed to his eldest son, Raymundo Cámara Luján (1850–1919), a wealthy hacendado of the Porfiriato and father-in-law of José María Pino Suárez, vice-president of Mexico from 1911 until his murder in 1913. Under Raymundo the estate produced henequen; between San Antonio Cámara and Chucmichén he controlled 7,812 hectares of the agave. In the agrarian reform after 1937, 2,782 of the hacienda's 3,423 hectares were expropriated from the Cámara Vales brothers for the ejido, leaving them about 641 hectares around the old casco.

Today the village keeps much of the hacienda's layout. The long main house with its arcade faces a grassy open space, a small yellow chapel with a bell gable stands nearby, and along the road are stone walls, roofless ruins of estate buildings and the tall chimney of the old machinery. It makes a short detour on the drive between Temax and Buctzotz.