Iztapalapa

Delegación/Alxaldía Iztapalapa is one of the largest in area and the largest in population, nearly 2,000,000 people, most of them part of the explosion of population that took place in the Federal District in the 1960s to 80s. However, it contains a number of original pueblos, grouped in various parts of the current delegación. Most were on the original peninsula between Lakes Texcoco and Xochimilco; some were on islands in Lake Texcoco.

Hill of the Star and the Origins of Culhuacán and Iztapalapa 

Cerro de la Estrella, Hill of the Star. is a small, extinct volcano that sits in what is now the Delegación of Iztapalapa. At the north end of the fairly flat summit is a large white cross and a flat structure behind it. The flat structure is a Mexica/Aztec temple. The Mexica took over the peninsula that lay around Cerro de la Estrella in 1400. It had been controlled by the Toltecs for some 800 years. Toltec power was centered in Culhuacán, at the base of the Hill. The Mexica rebuilt the temple for a ritual called The Binding of the Years, aka the New Fire ceremony. It was carried out every 52 years to guarantee the continued rising of the Sun at the crucial juncture when the first day of their solar calendar of 365 days coincided with the first day of their divinitory calendar of 260 days.

Contemporary Culhuacán, Gods of Darkness and Light  

The original pueblo of Culhuacán is now immersed in urban sprawl that has replaced the fields, and "floating" island gardens of the now-disappeared lakes. So, locating vestiges of the pueblo is not an easy task. A few short blocks up Avenida Tláhuac from its intersection with Avenida Taxqueña, we come to an old stone wall. In the narrow side street, we find a gate and enter. Inside is an urban oasis, a shaded park surrounding a square pool. It is the Estanque de Culhuacán, the Culhuacán Reservoir, constructed by the Spanish in the 16th century as a harbor at the edge of Lake Xochimilco, with a pier for shipping goods north to their new Ciudad de México. To one side is the Ex-convento de Culhuacán, built by Augustinan monks in the 1550s.

Holy Week Passion Play: Part I - Palm Sunday

As we have explored the original indigenous villages of the City, we realized that we needed to go to Iztapalapa during Semana Santa and witness its Passion Play, in spite of being told it is attended by millions and the area is "dangerous". So at about 11am on Palm Sunday, we board Line 12 of the Metro at Estación Ermita (the Hermitage Chapel) and head east. Exiting at the Izapalapa station, the first thing that strikes us are the men and boys dressed in purple robes, the color of penitence for the Season of Lent. These are the Nazarenes who participate in Holy Week processions as an act of penitence. Wending our way though the puestos around the plaza, on the far side we find a chuch atrium. It is the church of San Lucas, St. Luke. The atrio is full of people, some in costumes for the Passion play. Others wear orange T-shirts identifying them as volunteer security staff. Still others have come to watch the spectacle. Inside, Mass is in progress. 

Holy Week Passion Play: Part II - Good Friday

Captivated by the Palm Sunday initiation of Iztpalapa's Passion Play, we return on Good Friday for the climactic trial and crucifixion of Jesus the Christ. As we approach the site of the play on the west end of the plaza, we are anxious about whether too big a crowd has already gathered to make it difficult, if not impossible, to get into a good position to photograph the action. We are relieved to find we can get close to the side of the first of two stages, one where preparations for action appear to be taking place. We do not have long to wait. After a brief welcome is announced over the PA system, a cadre of Roman soldiers bearing trumpets takes the stage, which is an ornate Roman palace consisting of three levels. 

Culhuacán: Celebration of Unity of Holy Trinity Embodies Community Unity

Culhuacán, orginally located on the north shore of Lake Xochimilco, on the south side of the Iztapalapa peninsula, is one of the oldest settlements in the Valley of Mexico, originating about 500 B.C.E. The barrios composing the original  had been divided in two. The eastern half was incorporated as Pueblo Culhuacán into Delegación Iztapalapa. The western half was incorporated into Delegación Coyoacán and is named Pueblo San Francisco Culhuacán. Holy Trinity, celebrated eight weeks after Easter, is a major fiesta in all of Culhuacán. The day's events begin in the Barrio of Santa María Magdalena in the Pueblo of San Francisco Culhuacán. A procession goes from there to the other three barrios of Pueblo San Francisco, then on to Pueblo Culhuacán. We wonder why Holy Trinity is such major event for these two pueblos. Joining the procession, we learn why. 

Culhuacán's Fiesta Dancers on Parade 

Early in September, our primary source of information about fiestas in Mexico City, the Facebook page Fiestas Mágicas de los Pueblos y Barrios Originarios del Valle de México (Magical Fiestas of the Original Villages and Neighborhoods of the Valley of Mexico), posted an announcement, not of a typical patron saint fiesta but of a Desfile, a Parade of Comparsas (dance troupes that participate in fiestas), representing the various barrios of Culhuacán, that original pueblo that now lies divided between the western end of the Delegacion (Borough) Iztapalapa and the eastern end of Delegación Coyoacán. 

The parade was a lively, creative representations of one of the many traditions of Mexico, its cowboy culture that the Spanish brought. We asked one of the participants why there were cowboys in Culhuacan, when it was originally on the end of a peninsula between two lakes. He said that when Lake Texcoco was drained by the Spanish, haciendas, large estates owned by the Spanish, were established on the new, flat land and cattle raising became a major enterprise. So many of the indigenous had worked as vaqueros, cowboys, and taken on Spanish dress. 

In any case, it was a demonstration of the vitality and pride of a community of people who know their pueblo has a history going back more than 2,000 years. Although Culhuacán is no longer a dominate force in the Valley of Mexico, but a working-class area, it is still full of animo, the energy of life.

Pueblo San Andrés Tomatlán, Pt I - Fiesta Weaves a Neighborhood Together

Just south of Pueblo Culhuacán, along the main Avenida Tláhuac, there are two more pueblos with indigenous names, San Andrés (St. Andrew, the Apostle) Tomatlán and Santa María (St. Mary) Tomatlan. Curious to explore them, we kept our eyes out for their patron saint fiestas that would give us the opportunity to do so. Recently, San Andrés' feast day, on November 30, approached
An announcement of the fiesta appeared on Facebook. It stated that there would be a procession on November 30, a Thursday. Usually, such processions are held on the nearest Saturday or Sunday.

So that Thursday morning, we set off, first by taxi and via Metro station to Estación San Andrés Tomatlán. As we step onto the glass-walled, elevated platform, we see the church—a strikingly modern structure with a multi-leveled cathedral ceiling—sitting directly across the avenue from the Metro station exit. In front of the church, we see a flower-bedecked anda (portable platform) bearing the statue of a saint; a banda, whose music we can hear, and a small group of people. Obviously, the procession is about to start. So we hurry down the escalator and cross the busy avenue. By the time we reach the entrance to the church, the procession has already left. An elderly woman seated at the base of the church stairs points to her left and tells us that the procession has just gone down a side street and around the corner. We thank her and hurry on.

San Andrés Tomatlán, Pt II - The Lord of Calvary, the Saint of Culhuacán-Tomatlán, Goes Visiting

As we kept track of the fiestas of Culhuacán, (via the Facebook), we noted that El Señor del Calvario, who, as a Santo Popular, a saint who has miraculously chosen the people of a particular pueblo rather than the saint assigned by Spanish monks) has his own chapel which is not a parish church, goes visiting to the various pueblos and barrios of Culhuacán. Thus, He is similar to his counterparts, El Señor de Misericordia, the Lord of Compassion, in central Coyoacán, and el Niño 'Pa in Xochimilco, but unlike these other two santos populares, His visits coincide with the fiesta patronal, the patron saint fiesta, of each community. 

Thus, when we saw on the announcement of the Fiesta de San Andrés Tomatlán that the final event was the transfer of the Lord of Calvary from Pueblo San Andrés to Pueblo Santa María Tomatlán, we were determined to return to San Andrés to witness this very significant act. Clearly, El Señor´s presence in the Church of St. Andrew during its fiesta and His transfer to St. Mary's for that parish's fiesta meant the Pueblo Tomatlán, just south of Pueblo Culhuacán, was part of the larger Culhuacán community, part of a larger pueblo. The transfer was scheduled for four o'clock, Tuesday afternoon. We made sure to be there early. 

Culhuacán's Barrio San Antonio Atípac, Part I: A Humble Barrio With a Big Heart

Culhuacán's Barrio San Antonio Atípac patron saint's fiesta in the weekend closest to January 20. It honors San Antonio Abad. St. Anthony the Abbot, an early Christian Coptic (Egyptian) hermit who lived alone in the desert in the third and fourth centuries CE. Barrio San Antonio Atípac is on the Iztapalapa side of the National Canal (aka La Viga, the Beam), which is the boundary between the two halves of the original Pueblo Culhualcan. Atípac is its original indigenous, Nahuatl name.  

The fiesta announcement lists a procession through the streets of the barrio scheduled for 5pm on Saturday afternoon. So at about 4:30 that day, we get a taxi and tell the driver our destination. Because of a viaduct crossing over the street that will take us to San Antonio, it takes us some time to find our way there. We arrive just in the nick of time! As we approach the church from the east, a banda arrives from the west. They enter the church. Before we can follow them in, some parish members exit, bearing the statue of San Antonio Abad. The band follows, playing, and the procession is underway.

Culhuacán's Barrio San Antonio Atípac, Part II: A Gathering of the Saints of Culhuacán 

Today, Sunday, there will be a reception of Saints from the the eight other barrios of Culhuacán and their respective parishioners at a major intersection near the church at noon. The attendance of saints from other barrios at a patron saint fiesta is a primary, symbolic way of expressing their shared identity as original communities of Mexico City. The community of saints and their parishioners will then proceed to the church for a Mass.

When we arrive at the designated corner, there is no one there, but shortly, people carrying the statues of their barrios' saints begin to arrive. Shortly after, a procession arrives from San Antonio, bearing their patron saint, to greet them and lead them to the church for a mass. 

The Travels and Travails of La Virgen de la Bala, The Virgin Who Took the Bullet

When we attended the gathering of the saints in Barrio San Antonio Atípac, we noticed a saint that was new to us. It was a small version of the Virgin Mary, crowned as the Queen of Heaven and dressed in white. She was contained in a metal-framed glass box. Such small, encased versions of saints, we have learned, are called demanditas, literally 'little demands', i.e. little (therefore easily portable) 'petitions' or vehicles for prayers to the saint.

A young woman was holding her. We approached, introduced ourselves and asked what advocación of the Virgin this was. The word advocación (from the verb advocar, to advocate, to speak up on behalf of someone) is used in Spanish to describe each particular one of the many "forms" taken by the Virgin Mary to carry out her role as an advocate for the faithful, an intermediary speaking up for them to Her Son, the Christ, and God the Father, the father of Her Son.

The woman replied, "She is la Virgen de la Bala" — "the Virgin of the Bullet." Virgin of the Bullet? We were taken aback by the very peculiar name. In all our Ambles to saints' fiestas, we had never heard of this advocation of the Virgin and wondered how she came to have such a strange name and what advocatión it represented. The young woman added that this Virgin was not the original statue. The original, she said, resided in the Santuario del Señor de la Cuevita, the Sanctuary of the Lord of the Little Cave, in nearby Pueblo Iztapalapa.

It struck us that la Virgen de la Bala was evidently one of the many santos populares, a saint adopted by the common people, or from their point of view, who had adopted a pueblo rather than being assigned as their patron saint by Spanish monks. That motivated us all the more to try to find out her story and why she is associated with a bullet.

The contemporary miracle of the Internet led us to the tale. We found a website written by an art historian who had done his undergraduate thesis on la Virgen de la Bala. Naín Alejandro Ruiz Jaramillo now holds a Masters in Art History. Here we translate his telling of the origin, travels and travails of la Virgen de la Bala.

San Juanico Nextipac, a Stepping Stone to History

Nextipac was originally an island in Lake Texcoco, just north of the western point of the Iztapalapa Peninsula. When the Mexica/Azteca were looking for a place to settle, they stopped on the island for a few years, but were then driven out by the people of Culhuacan. When the Spanish drained the lake to prevent flooding of Mexico City, Nextipac, like other island villages, was left high and dry, surrounded by land that was divided into haciendas, large estates, mostly used for raising cattle or sheep. The la Viga Canal, built to provide a route for water transport of produce from the chinampas of Lake Xochimilco, ran past Nextipac. Now it is a small neighborhood, but one that vigorously maintains a series of traditional fiestas. 

San Andrés Tetepilco, Once an Island Village, Still a Pueblo Celebrating Its Identity

Tetepilco was another island just north of the Iztapalapa Peninsula, a little west of Nextipac. Tetepilco, assigned the patron saint, San Andrés (St. Andrew, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus) by Franciscan monks in the 16th century, still tenaciously holds onto its ancient identity as a village, and a community and it does so via the church founded by those monks and the celebration of its patron saint fiesta, along with other fiestas of the Catholic liturgical year. 

San Andrés' feast day is November 30. So on the Sunday of the closest weekend, the biggest day of such fiestas, which this year is December 2, we head off by taxi to San Andrés Tetepilco. When we arrive, the fiesta is in full swing, the atrio is today, by no means, a tranquil space. A center walkway leads to the church. Two other walks, near the sides, further divide the space. Entering, we find each of the three walks filled with a comparsa of Aztec dancers, a dance group that performs at fiestas, pounding their oil barrel drums, which gives the atrio more of the feeling of a three-ring circus than a quiet park. In the street to the side of the church, another large group of Aztec dancers drum and dance.

Discovering the Pueblos of Eastern Iztapalapa

Delegación Alcaldía/Iztapalapa is just east of where we live in Delegación/Alcaldía Coyoacán. Pueblo Culhuacán, with its eight barrios, at the southwest foot of Cerro de la Estrella (Hill of the Star) is about 2.5 miles away. 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. 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. 

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. Another group is on the eastern end of the Delegación, near the border with the State of Mexico. There are five pueblos grouped near one another: Santa Martha Acatitla, Santiago Acahualtepec, San Sebastián Tecoloxtitla, Santa María Aztahuacan and Santa Cruz Meyehualco.

We wanted to know more about them, but could find nothing on the internet, either in Spanish or English, about these eastern pueblos. So, we decided to do a search on the history of the Iztapalapa Peninsula. 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! We had hit another gold mine!

Santa Martha Acatitla's Carnaval

We had heard that carnavales (carnivals), usually held just before Ash Wednesday, which begins Season of Lent, a time of penitence and self-evaluation, were not held in Mexico City. However, we discovered that there are actually several carnavales, mostly held in the more traditional, formerly rural delegaciones (boroughs), in the south and west of the city. And these are not restricted to the days before Ash Wednesday. Instead, they run from early February until after Easter, primarily on weekends, a two-month-long period.

A Facebook announcement informs us that the first Carnaval in Iztapalapa is to be held in Pueblo Santa Martha Acatitla, virtually on the border with the State of Mexico. The main event will be at 4 PM, a desfile (des-FEE-leh, parade) of many comparsas (marching groups) in various styles of disfrazes (disguises, costumes). It sounds wonderful, so we arrange with one of our regular taxistas to drive us the eight miles to get there.

When we arrive at the entrance to the pueblo, we find the street blocked off, which is typical for fiestas, so we get out and walk for what turns out to be about a mile, to the center of the pueblo. The effort is worth it. The Carnaval turns out to be a grand, colorful and animated, with motor-driven floats decorated in various themes carrying princesses, comparsas (troupes) in many styles of consumes and a banda for each one. We have so much fun we stay until darkness falls.  

Pueblo San Sebastian Tecoloxtitla: Charros, Charros and More Charros

We first encountered the Pueblo San Sebastian Tecoloxtitla by accident. We were on our way to the carnaval in neighboring Santa Martha Acatitla. The street into the pueblo was closed off for the fiesta, so we were walking to find the church. Almost immediately, we encountered a group of charros, fancy dressed cowboys whose costumes are embroidered with elaborate symbology. At first we assumed they were part of the Santa Martha fiesta and took many photos of their elaborate costumes. but then they headed away from Santa Martha, which puzzled us, so we asked one of the charros and found they were headed to meet another group of charros in Santa Maria Aztahuacan. So we left them and returned to Sana Martha. 

It was nearly a year later when we were able to attend the fiesta of San Sebastian in Tecoloxtitla, where we encountered even more charros.  

Carnaval in Santa María Aztahuacan

In April 2019, we hit the jackpot. We learned that three of the pueblos in eastern Iztapalapa, Santa María Aztahuacan; San Sebastián Tecoloxtitla and Santa Martha Acatitla, were joining together to hold un gran cierre, a grand closing or finale to the Carnaval season in April. We just had to attend. It was to start in Santa María Aztahuacan and march on to San Sebastián Tecoloxtitla and Santa Martha Acatitla. 

There was no way we could follow it that whole way, but we could witness its start. So on the appointed Sunday morning, we called a taxi and headed off. Now somewhat familiar with these pueblos, we quite easily found the parade participants gathering on Avenida México in Santa María Aztahuacan. Santa María Aztahuacan has been a village almost continuously for some 3,000 years, making it one of the oldest in the Valley of Mexico. 

When we arrive, we find huge carros alegóricos, motorized floats, decorated with all kinds of themes ready to carry elegantly dressed princesses representing the various pueblos and their comparsas (parade marching troupes). The sheer number and variety are almost overwhelming to our senses. But then, that's what Carnaval is supposed to be — taking us to the limits of stimulation. We hope our photos convey that.