San José Tzal

San José Tzal is one of the largest comisarías of Mérida municipality, about 19 km south of the city centre in the semi-rural fringe beside the Cuxtal Ecological Reserve. It had 4,428 inhabitants in the 2020 census, and it is a Maya community in more than name: Yucatec Maya is still widely spoken, and in August 2024 the village was entered in the national catalogue of Indigenous peoples and communities published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación. Its people are known as tzaleños. The name joins Saint Joseph with Tzalmí, an area between today's Hotzuc (in Umán) and San José Tzal where the settlement began under a Spanish encomienda.

The first written record dates from 1851, when San José Tzal appears as a ranch in the registers of Mérida's San Sebastián parish, with 18 Spaniards and 83 Maya residents. It seems to have become a proper village around 1878, and by 1900 its population had grown fivefold. In 1915, in one of Yucatán's early land distributions, the village received ejido land taken from the neighbouring haciendas of Campepén and Hotzuc and from the lands of Texán and Chuctuac; the local hacienda itself also became an ejido after the reforms of the 1930s, while its main house stayed in private hands. Like the rest of the henequen zone the village lived from the fibre until the crisis of the 1970s, after which many of its people found work in Mérida.

Today San José Tzal has schools up to a high-school campus, a community building named after Felipe Carrillo Puerto, sports grounds and several small parks, and its parish church of San José y Purísima Concepción faces the main square. Village traditions are strong: vaquerías, the hetzmek ceremony for babies and the cha' chaak rain ceremony are still practised. The main fiesta is for Saint Joseph on 19 March, and the Assumption of the Virgin is celebrated on 15 August. It is a good place to see a working Maya village on Mérida's doorstep, and it sits on the road south towards Petac, Tzacalá and the old hacienda country.