Ecos de Lidice

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 " My Homeland "               

 

By Hector Cardenas Escobar (1945 - 2012).             
 

Catemaco, Veracruz, Mexico. A dreamland. Natural prodigy turned into landscape, with charm andmagic inherited from our most remote ancestors that at the contact of the resources provided by the vegetal exuberance, deposits and mineral waters deposits and mineral waters, formed a well-organized and functional herbal medicine, wich today as yesterday went beyond the limits of the nearby indigenous provinces and our current state. With such a number of followers that to date continues growing.

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The most distant antecedents of the municipality are located eighty years before the era and the vestiges indicate to have been populated initially by the propagators

of the mother culture: The Olmec. Since from time immemorial Spanish chroniclers, criollos and mestizos, have not agreed on the toponymic of Catemaco, have been given the most numerous meanings; from that romantic legend that says that an indigenous fisherman with Catemaxca surnames found the Virgin of Carmen, which is why they named it; passing through the indigenous of more credit, as the one that indicates that Tlemaco is the home of the censer, making reference to the existence of a shrine of regional veneration, or that which Catemaco refers to the "flat place" adducing the location of the first huts that were located in the esplanade known as "La Pesquería" (The Fishery) which occupies the lower part of the town. Even the credible and official from Nahuatl: Calli = House, Tematl = Burning and Co = Site or place where the houses were burned; relating this to the event that on some occasion in an explosion of the nearby San Martin volcano, the indigenous area of Catemaco, was burned by lava and volcanic sand.

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In the historical evolution, before the aggression of the conquest the present municipality is abandoned by its original inhabitants, to return later to reorganize a village of fishermen. Done this, of the abandonment of two generations, that have given margin to create the confusion of which Catemaco is the municipality of more recent formation in the Tuxtlas. Given its geographical conformation mountain, is involved in revolutionary events, for the ease that offered as hiding place to the rebels, even providing some values, as the case of Mr. Theodore Constantino, villager devoted to the struggle of 1910. Until later , not of a lethargy, but of an evolution, and of immediate communication, which has made us rediscover throughout the national territory and far beyond the homelands; with the consequent influx of visitors, lovers of cordial treatment, greenery and tranquility; who are always received not as outsiders, but as an integral part of the permanently touristy and welcoming Catemaco and whom we want them to know, that we are not only what they have at first sight, but essence, history, roots and traditions, so that in this way they feel more identified with us.

 

Legacy of a Chronicler.
© HCE