San José Hilí

San José Hilí, a small locality of Motul municipality, lies about 9 km west-northwest of the town of Motul, measured directly rather than by road, and Motul is roughly 42 km east of Mérida. The village stands on a plain 7 metres up, inside the old henequen belt that surrounds Motul. Its name pairs Saint Joseph with the Maya word hilí. Its size has barely moved in more than a hundred years: 195 residents in 1900, about 300 from the 1990s onward, and 298 counted in 2020, of whom 148 were men and 150 women.

The settlement owes its existence to the Hacienda San José Hilí, whose best years came with henequen, between the last decades of the 1800s and the first of the 1900s. The estate was owned by Benita Palma de Campos, who inherited a number of haciendas near Motul, Timul and Kancabchén Ucí among them, from her husband Roque Jacinto Campos Marrufo. Hilí struck its own tokens to pay its labourers, and collectors now seek them out for their design; one surviving piece could be exchanged for a tercio, a bundle, of firewood. The Enciclopedia Yucatanense lists them as belonging to Benita Palma de C.

What draws the eye are the old estate buildings, with arcades and stone walls, still woven into the village. With nothing laid on for tourists, a visit here is brief and fits into a loop through the comisarías west of Motul, adding nearby Kiní and Sacapuc. Motul, the municipal seat, rounds things off with San Juan Bautista, a 17th-century church, and the house where Felipe Carrillo Puerto was born, now open as a museum.