Venustiano Carranza

Venustiano Carranza lies to the east of Delegación/Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc. Before the Spanish began draining Lake Texcoco to protect Mexico City from flooding, the area was all lake, with a few islands. Two of the islands are still-functioning originally indigenous pueblos, one of them right next door to Mexico City's International Airport. Talk about a contrast in time and cultures!

 Santa Magdalena Mixhuca

Mixhuac was originally an island community southeast of Tenochtitlan. The Catholic Church was founded by Franciscans in 1528. Arriving for its patron saint fiesta, we are stopped in our tracks by a powerful representation of Mixhuca's indigenous heritage. Over the atrio entrance, instead of the usual floral portada arch, is a truly stunning work of indigenous art portraying ancient gods and created solely with beans and seeds. 

This portal, combined with the traditional one of flowers over the church entrance, which honors the pueblo's patron Catholic saint, Mary Magdalene, is a vivid example of the syncretism of belief systems has come to be called the Spiritual Conquest.

Peñon de los Baños, Hill of the Baths, Part I: Rebirth of a Pueblo

One day in the autumn of 2018, via Facebook, we received a message inviting us to visit an original pueblo we had not previously heard of, Peñon de los Baños, Rocky Mount of the Baths. The invitation came from a group that seeks to maintain and promote the history and traditions of el Peñon, We gladly accepted and arranged to visit on the Day of the Dead, Nov. 1-2.

We did not know its location or why baths were associated with it. Checking our maps of the delegacions/alcaldías of the city, we located it in Delegación Venustiano Carranza, east of Centro, the former Tenochtitlan. To our amazement, it was right next door to Terminal One of the Mexico City International Airport. What a combination, but a typical Mexico City contrast of epochs standing side by side: an original pueblo next to a major modern airport.

Researching further (in Wikipedia en español), we learned that el Peñon was a mount of solid volcanic rock that originally protruded from the middle of Lake Texcoco, some distance east of Tenochtitlan and the numerous islands of the southwest bay of the lake. In indigenous times it was known as Tepetzinco and was the site of hot water baths which  arer still in use and open to the public! 

Peñon de los Baños: The Battle of Cinco de Mayo

On el Cinco del Mayo, the Fifth of May, 1862, the Mexican Army defeated the French Army in the Battle of Puebla. The French, on the orders of Emperor Napoleon III and with the support of Mexican conservatives, had invaded the country to remove the Reform government of Benito Juárez and replace it with that of Emperor Maximilian I, a younger brother of the Hapsburg Emperor of the Austrian Empire. Unfortunately, reinforced French forces returned a year later and won the second battle of Puebla and then went on to take Mexico City. 

The occasion of the first, victorious Battle of Puebla is grandly celebrated in the City of Puebla, but not much elsewhere in Mexico. There is, however, we learned, a celebration in Pueblo el Peñon de los Baños, the Rocky Mount of the Baths. So, we attended the celebration of Cinco de Mayo in el Peñon in 2019. It turned out to be a delightful extravaganza.