Original Villages: Discovering the Pueblos of Eastern Iztapalapa

Our Slow Discovery of the former Iztapalapa Peninsula

Delegación Alcaldía/Iztapalapa is just east of where we live in Delegación/Alcaldía Coyoacán. We can see the historically important Cerro de la Estrella (Hill of the Star) from our balcony. We can also see the fireworks from the many fiestas held in Pueblo Culhuacán (about 2.5 miles away) and its eight barrios. In prehispanic days, Culhuacán was a powerful altepetl (city-state) controlling the Iztapalapa peninsula between Lake Xochimilco to the south and Lake Texcoco to the north, and nearby areas.

Cerro de la Estrella, Hill of the Star,
with its Aztec temple platform and large, white Christian cross at top left,
was the western point of the Iztapalapa Peninsula,
dividing Lake Xochimilco, to the south (right),
from Lake Texcoco to the north (left)
Pueblo Culhuacán lies at its base.
It was likely an island during the high waters of the summer rainy season.

Lakes and Towns of the Valley of Mexico
as the time of the Spanish arrival in November 1519.

The Iztapalapa Peninsula divides Lake Texcoco, to the north,
from Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco to the south..

The altepetls of Culhuacán (here spelled Colhuacan)
and Iztapalapa (here spelled Ixtapalapa) are on the west end of the peninsula.

The town on the mid-north shore labeled Itztahuacan is now called Aztahuacan

Culhuacán is at the southwest foot of Cerro de la Estrella. Its location made it a natural for us to undertake some of our earliest expeditions to originally indigenous pueblos outside Coyoacán to Pueblo Culhuacán. We also visited the historic center of the altepetl of Iztapalapa, which is just north of Cerro de la Estrella, to see its famous Passion Play during Semana Santa (Holy Week before Easter). So we got to know pretty well these two significant pueblos at the western end of the large delegación and of what had been the Peninsula of Iztapalapa before Lakes Texcoco and Xochimilco-Chalco were drained and the peninsula merged with what originally was separate mainland. 

Given our focus on the western part of Delegación/Alcaldía Iztapalapa, in the spring of 2018 we were surprised to discover several other original pueblos in other parts of the delegación. One is a group that were originally islands in Lake Texcoco, north of the former peninsula, but which are now located in the northwest corner of the modern delegación, near Coyoacán. Hence, they are close and easy to get to, and we are in the process of visiting each of them.

Pueblos in the East of Iztapalapa

We also discovered yet another group, but they are far to the eastern end of the delegación, near the City's border with the State of Mexico, some eight miles away from our base in Coyoacán. The newly discovered pueblos are at about what was originally the center of the north shore of the peninsula, whose original base now lies within the neighboring state of Mexico.

Pueblos of Iztapalapa

In the west are 

Culhuacán (red/orange star)

Iztapalapa, historic altepetl (yellow/red star).

To the  east are:

Santa Cruz Meyehualco (green/yellow star);
Santa María Aztahuacan (purple/orange star);
San Sebastián Tecoloxtitla (aka Tecolotitlan, blue/blue star);
Santa Martha Acatitla (aka Acatitlan, blue/green star) and 
Santiago Acahualtepec (green/blue star)

They lie north of the volcanic Sierra de Santa Catarina (See our post: Little Volcanoes With Big Histories).

La Sierra de Santa Catarina,
a string of ancient ash cone volcanoes now dividing Delegacion/Alcaldía of Iztapalapa (foreground) from
Delegación/Alcaldía Tláhuac (invisible on the far side).
This southern part of Iztapalapa and the northern part of Tláhuac
were once part of the Peninsula of Iztapalpa.
Photo taken from Cerro de la Estrella.   

Map showing the indigenous pueblos on the original Iztapalapa Peninsula
at the time of the Spanish arrival.

The five pueblos we are considering here 
are near the middle of the north shore of the peninsula. 
Four of them,

Aztahuacan, Tecoloxtitla (here Tecolotitlan), Acatitla (here Acatitlan) and Acahualtepec,
lay around the edge of a small peninsula projecting into Lake Texcoco,
labeled here as Lago de México.

Visiting the Eastern Pueblos

At first, we were nervous about traveling that far, across a delegacion often described as "unsafe" by Mexicans we know. However, the pueblos' Facebook announcements that they were holding Carnavales (carnivals) in the spring, leading up to Easter, attracted us. Carnavales, we had heard were rare, if non-existent in Mexico City. So we decided to attend one, in Santa Martha Acatitla. 

It turned out not to be so hard to travel the eight miles across the crowded delegación (population of nearly two million), as the broad boulevard, Calzada Ermita-Iztapalapa goes virtually straight across the whole way, and our cab driver on the day of the Carnaval was one of our regular drivers, Sr. Sanchez, who wasn't at all hesitant to take us there. The Carnaval was huge and we had a marvelous time, staying to the very end, as darkness fell.

That amble opened a whole new part of the city to us and offered several more opportunities to witness Carnavales. However, other aspects of our personal life got in the way, and we weren't able to attend any others in 2018. We had to wait for the other pueblos to hold their patron saint fiestas or for the Carnavales a year later to have the opportunity to become acquainted with the other pueblos and learn something of their prehispanic histories. This past January, we subsequently made it to San Sebastián Tecoloxtitlan's patron saint fiesta.

History of the Eastern Pueblos

With our curiosity now piqued about these pueblos, we wanted to learn about their histories. While much is known of the histories of the original altepetls of Culhuacán and Iztapalapa, which we have described in other posts, we could find nothing on the internet, either in Spanish or English, about these eastern pueblos.

When nothing turned up about the individual pueblos, we decided to do a search on the history of the Iztapalapa Peninsula, beginning in Spanish, thinking Spanish sources would be the most likely to be published. To our surprise, our search turned up a doctoral dissertation in English, Prehispanic Settlement Patterns of the Iztapalapa Peninsula Region of Mexico, written in 1970 by Dr. Richard Blanton for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. We found it had been published as a book, but is available only in university libraries. Dr. Blanton, we discovered, is now professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University and, on its website, we found his email address.

We wrote to Dr. Blanton about our interest in the history of the pueblos on the peninsula and he immediately and generously sent us a PDF file of his entire dissertation! It recorded his research, in the summer of 1969, in the area of the former peninsula, with maps of the settlements he had located from the Early Formative or Preclassic Period (2000 to 1000 BCE) to the time of the Late Post-Classic, Aztec/Mexica period (1300-1521CE), a span of 3,500 years!

He also recommended a book, The Aztecs Under the Spanish, by Dr. Charles Gibson, formerly of the University of Iowa, published in 1964 by Stanford University Press. He said it was a detailed history of the transition of indigenous culture into Hispanicized culture during the colonial period in the Valley of Mexico. One of our underlying motives in undertaking Mexico City Ambles is precisely seeking out the enduring physical and cultural artifacts of that transition to be found in the remaining indigenous pueblos of the large part of the Valley that is now Mexico City.

We were able to find a used copy on Amazon.com. The work turned out to be a virtual encyclopedic story of all the dimensions of change the indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico and their land had undergone over the three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule. We had hit two gold mines with one simple email, a miracle of the IT age! The Simpson book will serve as an underlying source in every future post that touches on the historical transformation of the pueblos into the virtually indistinguishable urban neighborhoods they are today.

Literally Putting Together the Pieces of Ancient Villages

For his dissertation, Dr. Blanton and three students spent the summer of 1969 literally on the ground, systematically surveying the entire area that had been the Iztapalapa Peninsula, square meter by square meter, collecting potsherds that were just lying on the open ground, as well as identifying ruins of indigenous era buildings. At the time, the area that had been the peninsula was still largely rural. That, in itself, was incredible to us, since, by 1980, the entire area and delegación were urbanized. Such a survey would thus have been impossible as the urbanization process destroyed all historic artifacts except those collected by Dr. Blanton and his team. 

Delegación of Iztapalapa in 1950
Volcanoes of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl
can be seen at the southeastern side of the Valley of Mexico
From Facebook page: Contacto 98.9 Fm

Dr. Blanton then identified the potsherds by using existing classifications of their styles according to the periods which produced them and, by their quantity at each site, estimated the size of the settlement. Thereby, he identified the age and size of virtually every settlement on the peninsula from what is called the Early Formative (or Early Preclassic) Period beginning around 2000 BC, through the Classic Period (100 CE through about 700 CE), and the Postclassic, up through the time of the Azteca (1300 to 1521 CE), when the Spanish arrived. It was an enormous and truly mind-boggling anthropological tour de force.
Dr. Blanton found that the earliest agrarian settlements were at the eastern end of the peninsula, where it extended from the mainland. We felt rather foolish, as we had viewed and visited the peninsula from what used to be its western end. Obviously, the first settlers came from the eastern part of the Valley. Our "mystery" pueblos were part of the western movement of these settlers.

The fact that they are now on the eastern periphery of Mexico City is a modern historical artifact, resulting from the arbitrary drawing of the boundaries of the Federal District (now Mexico City) in the mid-19th century. These pueblos are, in reality, centuries-old and contemporary neighbors of a number of settlements that now lie in the State of Mexico. The two oldest settlements on what was the peninsula are Iztapaluca and Tlapocaya, which was originally on an island in Lake Chalco. They date from the Early Formative through the Middle Formative Eras, around 1800 BCE to 400 BCE.

The earliest evidence of human agrarian settlement found by Dr. Blanton in the area of the five pueblos we wanted to get to know comes from the Early Formative Era (2000-1000 BCE), found in the area of Aztahuacan.

From: Prehispanic Settlement Patterns of the Iztapalapa Peninsula Region of Mexico, by Dr. Richard Blanton 
Obviously, the original settlements did not have their current names.
They are Nahuatl names, likely adopted during what Dr. Blanton calls the Toltec Period,
or the subsequent Aztec Period (see maps below of those periods).

Between 600 and 400 BCE, the first settlement appeared in the Culhuacán area. By the Terminal Formative Period, 400 BCE to 100 CE. a settlement was established where present-day San Sebastián Tecoloxtitla is located.

From: Richard Blanton, ibid.

During the Early Classic Period from 100 CE to 300 CE (the time when the great city of Teotihuacan was rising to dominance in the north of the Valley), a settlement was established where Santa Martha Acatitla now sits.

From: Richard Blanton, ibid.

Then during the Late Classic Period, 300-600 CE, a drastic change occurred. During this period Teotihuacan went into decline. While, remarkably, the settlement in what is now Aztahuacan continued, those at Tecoloxtitla and Acatitla were abandoned, as were virtually every other settlement on the peninsula, including large ones in the Culhuacán-Iztapalapa area. Dr. Blanton and other scholars think that the population moved into Teotihuacan, possibly for safety during an era of political and social upheaval.

The fall of Teotihuacan in 600 CE was followed by a period of disorder and lack of new settlement, but by 800 CE the Tolteca city of Tula, to the northwest of the Valley, had become the dominant power, and old settlements on the peninsula, including a large one in the Culhuacán-Iztapalapa area, were reestablished and new ones created. The settlement at Aztahuacan continued as it had through all the previous epochs. Those at San Sebastian and Acatitlan did not get re-established until after 900 CE.

From: Richard Blanton, ibid.

When Tula fell around 1100 CE, all these settlements, including the one at Aztahuacan which had existed continuously for over 2,000 years, were again abandoned. The exception was Culhuacán, which was extended from the base of Cerro de la Estrella literally into the lake, built on chinampas, man-made islands. This extension is now Pueblo San Francisco Culhuacán in Delegación/Alcaldía Coyoacán. It is separated from its sister Pueblo Culhuacán, in Delegación Iztapalapa by the National Canal, popularly known as La Viga, The Beam, originally the Royal Canal built by the Spanish after they drained Lake Texcoco. The canal provided a water route for agricultural goods from the chinampas of Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco to the center of Mexico City, which, during the colonial period, was limited to the former area of Tenochtitlan (now Centro).

After the Tepanecas of Atzcapotzalco took control of Culhuacán and the peninsula in the late 1300s and then the Mexica/Azteca took control from them in 1428, many old settlements were reestablished on the peninsula, including those at Aztahuacan, Tecoloxtitla and Acatitla, and new ones were built. It was a time of significant population growth on the peninsula.

From: Richard Blanton, ibid.
It is curious that Dr. Blanton did not apparently find any evidence
 at the site of the indigenous pueblo of Santa Cruz Meyehualco, between Aztahuacan and Iztapalapa.

This is the heavily occupied peninsula that Cortés and the Spanish found when, at the beginning of November 1519, exactly five hundred years ago this year, they crossed Lake Chalco-Xochimilco on the causeway the Mexica had built via the island altepetl of Cuitláhuac (now the center of Delegación/Alcaldía Tláhuac). They were headed for Iztapalapa (ruled by Moctezuma´s brother, Cuitlachac) in order to make their fateful entrance onto the causeway across Lake Texcoco to Tenochtitlan. 

Moctezuma II (the Younger) meets Hernán Cortés
on the causeway from Iztapalapa
on November 8, 1519.
Tile mural on the wall of Jesús Nasareño Church on Pino Suárez Avenue, Centro Histórico,
believed to be the site of the meeting.
reproduced from 17th or 18th-century oil painting.

After Cortes defeated the Mexica of Tenochtitlan in August 1521, all the pueblos on the peninsula, like all those in the entire Valley and all over Nueva España, were given "paternal surnames" of Christian saints, such as Santa María, San Sebastián, Santa Martha, added to their indigenous "maternal surnames". Hence, their double Spanish-indigenous heritage of today. (In Spanish custom, each person's surname consists of the combination of, first, their father's father's surname, and second, their mother's father's surname.)

Delegación/Alcaldía Iztapalapa

medium green to right, east of Coyoacán (dark purple in center)