Re: [ranchos] My Nina is an ALTEÑA, and so are my Mamá, Abuelita, y Tías.

Los Altos basically means "The Highlands." Another term I've often seen is "Meseta de Los Altos," or "the Plateau of the Highlands." Los Altos is essentially located in the entire north-eastern corner of the state of Jalisco, east of Guadalajara, and north of the Laguna de Chapala. Now the map above is missing a few key towns which are also very Alteños, such as Tototlán, in the south near Atotonilco el Alto, as well as Teocaltiche and Mexticacán. As a matter of fact, Teocaltiche is mislabeled in this map as Totatiche, because Totatiche is much further north. Mexticacán is another town near Teocaltiche, Yahualica, and Nochistlán, which is on the other side of the border in Zacatecas.

The unofficial "Capital of Los Altos" is Tepatitlán, but Lagos de Moreno is also considered the secondary "capital." But that's just a little south-north Alteño rivalry I suppose. Lagos is a Colonial jewel though. Jalostotitlán is considered the "Heart of Los Altos," and Zapotlanejo is called the "Portal de Los Altos." In fact the term "Los Altos" did not even originate in any of these cities. The Parroquia of Ayo el Chico (now called Ayotlán) was where the first Hacienda de Los Altos was founded 350 or more years ago. There were also Haciendas called El Carrizal de Los Altos, La Huerta de los Altos, and Las Animas de los Altos, all located around Ayo el Chico, and these areas later passed to the town of Arandas, where my Hernández family came from. Over time other Ranchos also took the suffix "de los Altos" to their name like the Rancho del Alto, in San Miguel el Alto. San Miguel el Alto and Atotonilco el Alto are the only two cities in Los Altos that bear the "el Alto" ending, two towns where my ancestors came from.

Just as an aside, I would like to point out something very special about Arandas and Atotonilco el Alto, and that is their history of fine tequila making. Incredible fields of maguey plants surround the cities, which produce tequila of far better quality than that around the city of Tequila in western Jalisco. My family has a tradition of brewing tequila for generations. One of my many tíos, actually my grandmother Ma. Cruz Hernández Estrada's cousin, still owns, operates, and produces a world renowned tequila. My tío Julio González Estrada owns the label "Tres Magueyes," in Atotonilco el Alto, but everyone just knows him as "Don Julio," which is his special vintage stock.

In previous messages to Ranchos I have explained what makes Los Altos such a unique and interesting situation from several aspects, anthropological, linguistic, religious, genealogical, and cultural. Los Altos has historically been an isolated region, closed off from the rest of Mexico. Not that it exists in an absolute vacuum, completely detached from everything. But throughout Los Altos's history, what happened in Los Altos, stayed in Los Altos. The area was populated by early Spanish and Basque pioneers, pobladores, and descendants of the conquistadors. These people were very hardy pioneering folk, who had to battle fierce semi-nomadic Indian tribes that once lived in the region, such as the Guachichiles, Tecuexes, and Zacatecas Indian tribes. In 1541, there was a united Indian uprising near Nochistlán, which is now called the "Guerra del Mixtón," or "El Mixtón." During this uprising, the Spanish once and for all put an end to the Indian "rabble-rousers," using the strong fist, sword, cannon power, and full concentrated military might the Spaniards were known for, thus "pacifying" the region.

Then in the following years, the Indians fell victim to several waves of disease epidemics. The first one was a type of small pox or flu-like virus, which the Indians called the "Chahuistle" from where comes the phrase "Le cayó el chahuistle," which refers to some horrible misfortune befalling someone. What very little Indians WERE left, these were all rounded up and forced to live in selected towns. The remaining Spaniards thus secured for themselves a vast swath of land, free of threats from marauding Indians. They all divided the region into vast haciendas, exceeding thousands of acres, right around the Indian towns. The land therefore became the measure of someone's wealth, power, and status. Over time this tie to the land, began to shape the psyche of the Alteño people. In order to protect a land title, rancho, or hacienda, Alteños would frequently marry amongst their own family members, in a phenomenon called endogamy (basically a polite way to say "inbreeding"). Now this was done for several reasons, mainly because there were simply no Indians around, for all intents and purposes. Besides, it became a sort of no-no to even marry outside one's own race or class (but that's not to say that it did not happen). So the Españoles of Los Altos would only marry other Españolas, but because of a particular town's demographics and population, these spouses would inevitably be related to one another. Becuase of this, there are thousands upon thousands of marriage dispensations from Los Altos which clearly show the astronomical rates of endogamic marriages taking place. That's why a while back, some of us kept saying that we were our own cousins. It sounds funny, but it's the truth.

Alteños live a culture, speak a language, and practice a religion that is strongly Spanish/Hispanic. But all this is historically well known and documented. In fact, here's an expert from my B.A. Senior Thesis, entitled ¡Viva Cristo Rey! A Historical, Regional, and Cultural Analysis of the Cristero Rebellion in Los Altos de Jalisco (California Polytechnic University of Pomona, 2001).

For centuries, Los Altos had been a fairly closed society, essentially isolated in a heavily traditional Spanish Catholic heritage, until events from outside threatened the Alteño way of life. Mexico contains many such unique regions, called patrias chicas (small fatherlands), and each with its own micro-history. Usually the term patria chica is applied to the territory occupied by isolated indigenous groups such as the Huichol, Cora, Lacandón, and Tarahumara peoples. These groups may be legally Mexicans, but live completely outside the Republic’s cultural mainstream and many never learn Spanish. Whites, mestizos, and Hispanicized Indians, on the other hand, are too assimilated to identify with a patria chica. Mexico is their patria grande and they haven’t the slightest desire to be associated with some lonely and primitive backwater.[1] Los Altos is a patria chica in every way but linguistically. In fact it has been documented that the Spanish spoken in Los Altos contains many words, sayings, and idiomatic expressions that have been preserved in their original sixteenth century Extremaduran and Andalusian dialect. According to linguistic experts, such as Luis Mateu Poch, in no other Spanish-speaking region, including Spain itself, has the language been kept as clean and pure.[2]

Indeed, the people of Los Altos—Alteños—belong to one of Mexico’s most unusual subcultures. They and the blacks of the of the Costa Chica, a strip along the Pacific shore of Guerrero and Oaxaca, are the only sizable ethnic groups found outside Mexico’s prevailing Indo-Hispanic mix.[3] Alteño heritage is Castilian Spanish, Basque, and Italian, as many notable historian/genealogists, such as José Ignacio Dávila Garibi, Jaime Holcombe Isunza, Mariano González Leal, and countless others, have proven via decades of meticulous archival research. For centuries the Creole descendants of the Spanish conquistadores and pobladores (settlers), have lived in this relatively isolated patria chica practicing the religion, customs, and traditions of their European ancestors. Remoteness from the “outside” world permitted Alteños to maintain a closed society where tradition played a crucial role, and the customs of their ancestors were the behavioral norm for the younger generations. Expert historians would not disagree that Alteños are “clannish, suspicious of outsiders, and conservative in an anarchistic, non-Hamiltonian way,” as Jim Tuck writes.[4] That is why, Alteños detest central authority of any kind, whether federal, state, or local.[5]

Another Alteño characteristic is a concept commonly associated with the United States and American culture—rugged individualism. Due to the isolation in which the Spaniards who came to Los Altos lived, and their descendant’s continued isolation from the Mexican mainstream, cooperatives and ejidos have never prospered. This is due to the rugged individualism of more than 400 years, where the principle of “You in yours, me in mine, and only God in ours” has prevailed.[6] Los Altos was settled by hardy pioneering folk who succeeded in creating an autarkical society. Alteños counted on the means by which to satisfy all of their basic needs of food and shelter, and could thus provide for themselves practically everything they could need—with the exception of textiles, farming implements, and other manufactured goods.[7] When the time came to support the Cristero cause, Alteños were quite capable of supplying men, leadership, medical care, food, and finding on their own, the means by which to procure rifles, guns, and ammunition.

Economic power lay in control of the land, which was ultimately the measure of one’s wealth. The early pioneers received vast tracts of land, once the hunting grounds of the Chichimeca, Caxcán, Guachichil, and Zacateca Indians, via royal land grants (mercedes reales) primarily during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The land was primarily used to raise livestock, as this required less effort than intensive agriculture. Subsistence agriculture was the norm and was indeed limited for feeding livestock, the peons and workers, and the landowner’s extensive family. Spanish families maintained control of the local agricultural economy by marrying only amongst families of the same status and race. As a result a very intricate network of interrelated aristocratic Spanish families was created. This custom of endogamy—only marrying one’s own kind—produced a very homogenous and family-centered society. They also maintained family control of their estates through the traditional practice of primogeniture—inheriting lands and titles unto the first-born son. However, with large families of ten children or so being the norm, landholdings became smaller and smaller generation after generation. The combined effect of these Alteño customs produced a society of small or landless subsistence farmers controlled by owners of large haciendas or ranchos. The landowners who controlled production, distribution, labor, and technology conformed to a conservative ideology that produced a social structure that did not favor change.[8]

In Los Altos, the Roman Catholic Church possessed an extraordinarily important position in society, not just as a viable belief system, but also as an institutional structure that preserved the status quo. As far as Alteños were concerned, the Catholic Church assured the existence of a divine and natural order that determined social balance and stability. The Church itself favored the formation and consolidation of the local oligarchies due to their common interests with the landowning and merchant elite.[9] In Los Altos, there was certainly no separation between the regional church and state. The Catholic Church and the regional juridical structures—such as alcaldías (mayorships), cofradías (congregations or brotherhoods of charity), and monastic orders—formed the basic infrastructure of the region, so any attack against the rights of the church meant an attack against the entire society.

[1] Jim Tuck, The Holy War in Los Altos: A Regional Analysis of Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 4.

[2] Tepatitlán de Morelos: Historia. (http://icarus.cc.uic.edu/~pnavar1/historia.html)“Mención aparte merecen las hablas rurales alteñas, que poseen una riqueza incalculable de vocablos, dichos y expresiones idiomáticas, que se han conservado en su primitiva pureza, a pesar de la invasión de palabras sacadas del inglés, que han sido acarreadas por nuestros braceros, que emigran por tradición familiar a los Estados Unidos. Según algunos catedráticos, entre ellos don Luis Mateu Poch, en ninguna región de habla hispana, incluida la España misma, se ha conservado tan limpio el lenguaje.”

[3] Tuck, The Holy War in Los Altos, 3.

[4] Ibid., 5.

[5] Ibid., 5.

[6] Tepatitlán de Morelos: Historia. (http://icarus.cc.uic.edu/~pnavar1/historia.html) “Como fruto del aislacionismo en que vivieron los españoles que vinieron a estas tierras, no han podido prosperar las cooperativas ni las sociedades anónimas, por el acendrando individualismo de más de 400 años, en los que ha regido el principio de ‘Tú en lo tuyo, yo en lo mío, y nomás Dios en lo de todos’.”

[7] José Díaz Estrella & Román Rodríguez Cruz, El Movimiento Cristero: Sociedad y confilcto en los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico City: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1979), 96.

[8] Díaz & Rodríguez, El Movimiento Cristero, 224.

[9] Ibid., 225.

Anyone with Alteño roots out there can vouch for me and verify that what I'm saying is true. I once read somewhere describing Los Altos as "a white birthmark on the brown body of Mexico." Interesting phrase to say the least. Just ask anyone out there who has ancestors from Los Altos if they are light-skinned and fair, or have family that is. Many alteños have brown or blond hair, and green or blue eyes, and could pass for white, just as many who have black hair and brown eyes, and alabaster skin. Another feature is abundant hair growth. Men would sport thick mustaches or beards, a clear sign of European blood, in opposition to the Indians who had very little body hair.

In Los Altos, there was very little mixing of Indian and Spanish blood, mestizaje. But to say that no mestizaje took place is completely false, there were Alteño Mestizos as well as Alteño Indios, but to a much lesser degree than the Alteños Españoles. Some of us also have Mestizo and Indian ancestors. There were even Alteños Mulatos, who were originally used as forced labor, since there so very few Indians. I've seen records of these Mulato slaves out there, so I imagine that descendants of these Mulatos libres y esclavos are still around.

Mariano González Leal in his book Retoños de España en la Nueva Galicia (1982), listed 117 distinct surnames, which by the way is an incomplete list. Since then, he and I have identified and included many other surnames to the upcoming editions of Retoños. Many of the surnames, which are compund surnames, are essentially all related or just off-shoots of other surnames. For example, once upon a time there was the Hermosillo surname, but over time other branches of the family began to appear, such as González de Hermosillo, Ramírez de Hermosillo, García de Hermosillo, Gutiérrez de Hermosillo, Muñoz de Hermosillo, and others.

Joseph, your Nina's surname, Márquez, is one of those very Alteño names, just like de Anda (which used to be de Anda Altamirano). Those are names you'll commonly see in Jalos, San Juan de los Lagos, San Miguel el Alto, and of course in other neighboring towns. Márquez, de Anda, González (González Rubio, González de Hermosillo, González de Rubalcava, González del Castillo, González de San Román, etc), Gutiérrez (Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Gutiérrez de Hermosillo), Padilla (Padilla Dávila), Gómez (Gómez Hurtado de Mendoza), de la Torre, Maciel, Barba (Muñoz de la Barba), Muñoz de Nava, Romo (Romo de Vivar), Macías (Macías Valadéz), Aceves, Casillas, Camarena, Hernández-Gamiño, López-de los Reyes, López de Elizalde, Navarro, Orozco (Tello de Orozco, Orozco-Agüero), Enríquez del Castillo, Temblador (Pérez Temblador), Alvarez (Alvarez Tostado, Alvarez del Castillo, etc), Marentes (Marentes de Otadui y Avendaño), Franco (Franco de Paredes), Hurtado de Mendoza, Estrada, Lomelín, Lozano, Martín (Martín del Campo; Martín de Sotomayor), Moreno (Moreno de Ortega), Gómez and Rodríguez de Portugal, de la Mora (de la Mora Hurtado de Mendoza), Sáinez/Sáenz (Sáinez de Santiago; Sáenz de Vidaurre), Ruiz de Esparza, Pérez-Franco or Pérez de Paredes, Valdivia, Vásquez de Lara or Vásquez-Zermeño, just to name a few.