Puebla (State)

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Puebla (State)

Located on the central plateau southeast of Mexico City, Puebla covers 13,096 square miles and contains 5,076,686 (2000) inhabitants. It has a generally mild climate with distinct rainy (May to October) and dry seasons.

Puebla is divided into three major regions. The Sierra (northern region) consists of a high plateau and mountains. It is the most isolated area of the state and contains the highest percentage of indigenous peoples. Its largest city is Teziutlán. The central region, ringed by four volcanoes, all with elevations over 14,600 feet, consists of rolling plains that are cut by low, rugged mountains. It is the most industrialized region, and its population is the largest, densist, and most urbanized. It includes the capital and largest city, Puebla City. The southern region, with an average altitude under 6,000 feet, is characterized by dry mountains and verdant river valleys. Its two most important cities are Tehuacán and Atlixco.

What is today called the state of Puebla has always played an important role in Mexican history. The Tehuacán Valley, for example, is the site of some of the oldest peoples in Mesoamerica. Cholula was one of the principal religious centers of pre-Columbian civilization. With the establishment of the Aztec Empire in the fifteenth century, the area assumed a strategic location between the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), and southeastern Mexico. This pattern continued after the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century, as Puebla straddled the main routes between Mexico City and the major port, Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico.

The state has always been important economically. The production of coffee, fruit, and lumber in the north, cereals in the center, and sugarcane in the south, as well as livestock in all three regions, have been significant. Hydroelectric generation in the north, at times, has supplied much of central Mexico with energy. A cotton and woolen textile industry, the nation's earliest and largest, began in the 1830s. Other nineteenth-century economic activities, including the manufacture of tobacco products and craftwork such as pottery, were subsequently complemented in the twentieth century by processed foodstuffs, steel, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and automobiles. Puebla City was the second largest population and commercial center in Mexico from its founding in 1532 until the twentieth century.

The state of Puebla, formed at the time of Mexican independence from Spain (1821), was created out of the much larger colonial viceregal intendancy of Puebla. Like much of Mexico, the political factionalism of the nineteenth century affected Puebla. Dominated by the proclerical and traditional Puebla City-Cholula area, the state, except for parts of the Sierra, generally sided with the Conservatives against the Liberals.

Because of its strategic and economic importance, then, competing domestic factions vied for control of Puebla from Independence through the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880; 1884–1911). Foreigners, too, realized the importance of the state; the U.S. army occupied portions of it during the Mexican War (1846–1848), and the French military did the same during the French Intervention (1862–1867).

Following the relative stability of the Porfiriato, factionalism and violence again dominated the state's politics during the 1910s and 1920s as a result of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Since the 1930s, Puebla has been under the aegis of the official party, which, through the brokerage of powerful families such as the Avila Camachos of Teziutlán, has been able to mediate the political divisions and modernize the state's economic sector.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jack A. Licate, Creation of a Mexican Landscape: Territorial Organization and Settlement in the Eastern Puebla Basin, 1520–1605 (1981).

David G. LaFrance, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: The Maderista Movement and the Failure of Liberal Reform (1989).

Wil G. Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–1987 (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Grosso, Juan Carlos, and Juan Carlos Garavaglia. La región de Puebla y la economía novohispana: Las alcabalas en la Nueva España, 1776–1821. Puebla, Mexico: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 1996.

LaFrance, David G. Revolution in Mexico's Heartland: Politics, War, and State Building in Puebla, 1913–1920. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003.

Lomelí, Leonardo. Breve historia de Puebla. México: Colegio de México, Fideicomiso Historia de las Américas: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001.

Pansters, W. G. Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–1987. Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990.

Tecuanhuey Sandoval, Alicia. Los conflictos electorales de la elite política en una época revolucionaria, Puebla, 1910–1917. México: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 2001.

David LaFrance

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture