Sebastian Medina-Tayac Photo
Second in a series.
San Francisco Tetlanohcan—When Francisca Morales Rosette visited New Haven, she kept running into long-gone neighbors, friends, and relatives who had moved from their humble agricultural town, San Francisco Tetlanohcan, in the tiny state of Tlaxcala.
Rosette has lived her whole life in San Francisco Tetlanohcan. But she has seen many other people leave to move to New Haven, its sister city, to pursue a new life. Tetlanohcan shares about 10 – 15 percent of its population with New Haven, playing a role Amalfi, Italy, played in the mid-20th century in reshaping the Elm City’s population and culture.
Rosette made the trip in New Haven in 2008. She came to to see her nephews and children for the first time in up to 20 years.
When they took her to Puerto Vallarta, a Mexican restaurant in Orange, she did a double take. Behind the bar was a face she hadn’t seen in a long time: Francisco Mendieta, another nephew with whom she’d lost touch when he left their town 11 years prior at the age of 16.
And so it continued, one chance encounter after another with a familiar face.
The highest concentration of Tetlanohcan’s large migrant population lives in New Haven. They come seeking stable jobs to send remittances home to build their houses, pay for their children’s education, and invest in their businesses or farms. Tlaxcala’s economy and job market, concurred everyone interviewed during a recent week in Tetlanohcan, is so bad that many cannot provide for their families without going to the U.S.
Why New Haven, specifically?
When deciding where to go in the U.S., migrants predictably went to where they had friends or family. Almost everyone interviewed mapped out a tangle of blood, marriage, and neighborhood ties that eventually led to New Haven.
Early migrants
Oscar De La Rosa came to New Haven from San Pedro Muñoztla, adjacent to Tetlanohcan, in 1991. He traces the genealogy of his connection to New Haven through his brother-in-law, whose brother moved there from Tetlanohcan the year before in 1990. From there, “like a tree, we branched out into New Haven.”
He was one of the earlier migrants from the region, but certainly not the first. Another town in Tlaxcala called Zacualpa has been sending migrants to Connecticut and New Haven for the past 40 years at least.
De La Rosa has friends from another town, Santa Cruz, who have been in New Haven for over 30 years. Though their numbers are smaller than the Zacualpan population, migrants from Santa Cruz are more organized and celebrate their patron saint every year at Santa Rosa de Lima church in Fair Haven.
In 1987, Tetlanohcan resident Benjamin Cuapio moved to the U.S. After struggling with limited and low-paying jobs in California and New York, he moved to New Haven where, he said, the pay was better.
With a robust labor movement, a friendly policy climate for immigrants, and accessibility to New York, New Haven does have an economic appeal to Tetlaohquences looking for work. But culture too is a huge draw for migrants, and allowed the initial cluster of families and friends following each other to develop into a true transnational community.
One Town, Two Carnivals
A shipping service allows families in Tetlanohcan to send products and gifts to their migrant relatives in New Haven. Most of the year, they use the service to send food. The tortillas they sell in the U.S., “even at the Mexican markets, they taste like cardboard,” Jacquelin Mendieta said.
In May, the boxes coming from Tetlanohcan contained feather crowns, wooden masks, and elaborate embroidered clothes for New Haven’s annual carnival celebrating San Francisco de Asis, their parochial saint.
They also celebrate the carnival in Brooklyn, where the second-largest concentration of Tetlanohquences live in a neighborhood by Kings Highway: Mexican bodegas sandwiched between Chinese restaurants and smoke shops.
In a parking lot under cars roaring down I‑95, in a city park, and in the central plaza of their forefathers, beside corn vendors and heavily-armed police, Tetlanoquences concurrently ate, danced, and paid homage to their traditions, many of which predate San Francisco himself.
Whips cracked, drums thumped, and horns shimmered again the next week in Hamden as a neighboring town celebrated its eponymous patron saint San Cosme.
In Orange County, California, migrants from another Tlaxcalan town, San Sebastian Atlanapa, rent out a gymnasium and host a similar carnival for their community, said Gustavo Cabrera Zampoalteca, a resident of San Sebastian who lived in Orange County for three years before returning to start a business in his home state.
“It’s common that people from one town in Tlaxcala go to one specific place in the United States,” he said. “These carnivals originate in Tlaxcala, and they hold the communities together.”
Tlaxcaltecas Together
Tlaxcaltecas, De La Rosa said, will look for any excuse to get together and have a party. Tetlanohcan, an agricultural and traditional community, has a vibrant, often family-based, social life. It is also far from remote — the entire state is accessible by combis, large white vans which either fly over untended roads, tossing unfazed old ladies against the wall, or crawl so inexplicably slowly that you can see the corn grow.
Over four centuries later, from Cuapio’s hilltop patio where the paved road ends, one can see the entire valley that Tlaxcala is tucked into. Orange fireworks burst over one of the brightest clusters of lights: Santa Ana Chiautempan.
The closest urban center to Tetlanohcan celebrated its annual fair with rickety rides, artisanal craft vendors, cotton candy, banda music, a slimy fermentation of maguey called pulque, and a half-hearted attempt at a history exhibit by the entrance, which constituted little more than four dioramas that could have been made by an ambitious middle schooler.
During the Spanish invasion, Tlaxcala allied with the conquistadors to topple the Aztec, a rival kingdom. Out of this cooperation, Catholic evangelists entered the state before any other, and Tlaxcalan sovereignty and indigenous culture were left more intact than others during the Colonial period. Their strong carnival tradition comes from this history, and carries over wherever they go.
The third-densest populated state in Mexico, with a population of just over a million, Tlaxcala sends a large chunk of New Haven’s migrant population. Tlaxcala Grocery on State Street and a prominent garden in West Rock stand testament to the state’s influence on our city.
The Tlaxcalteca community in New Haven is so tight-knit it does feel like a family, which many migrants miss so badly, said Susana Lopez Garcia, who lived on Howe Street for eight years before moving back to Tlaxcala.
Garcia came to New Haven with a friend whose cousins lived here because her family was struggling to make ends meet and couldn’t afford her education. Her favorite part of living in New Haven was her two jobs — full-time at a factory and part-time cleaning offices and bathrooms. The opportunity to earn and spend money, and to eat until she was full, was new and “fun” for her.
She returned home briefly after three years, but soon went back.
“My father cried when I said I was going back but I liked New Haven so much because there were a lot of people from Zacualpan [in Tlaxcala],” she said. “It was like one family. We were from different towns but we were all Tlaxcaltecas — all working together and coexisting, and we supported each other.”
Food, music, and holidays held them together, Garcia said, and created an atmosphere that made even more Tlaxcaltecas want to come, even if they didn’t have family in New Haven.
Tlaxcala produces so many migrants because unemployment is high and the economy is unstable, said Jeronimo Garcia Pais, another Tlaxcaltecan who lived in New Haven for many years. In states like Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Merida, many people are able to provide for their families without leaving them. Tlaxcala and other more depressed states suffer from high rates of family separation.
But for him, it’s where family started. He and Garcia met in New Haven, and after returning to Tlaxcala briefly, returned to the Elm City as a married couple. They’ve since moved back to Tlaxcala, where they’ve been able to find jobs as schoolteachers.
It’s uncertain why Tetlanohcan, and countless other towns in Tlaxcala, produced so many migrants to New Haven. Friend and family networks, better wages, a little love — maybe.
But it is certain that they had to go somewhere, and from Tlaxcala, they go together.
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