Tehuacán history and signification the Tehuacán
Tehuacán: The meaning
of the name Tehuacán comes from the words: TEO = god; HUA = possessive; CAN =
place; which means "Place of gods". The shield of Tehuacán is made up
of four parts (more about the Shield).
Originally a Native
American settlement, it became officially a city in the Viceroyalty of New
Spain in 1660. According to the archaeologist Richard Stockton MacNeish, the
Valley of Tehuacán is the first place maize was ever cultivated by humankind.
He arrived at this conclusion when he found over 10,000 teoscintle cobs in what
is now known as the Cave of Coxcatlan.
In the late
nineteenth century, the city was well known for its mineral springs. In fact,
Peñafiel (now owned by Cadbury Schweppes), a well-known soft drinks
manufacturer, extracts water from these wells for use in their products.
Tehuacán also has an important cluster of poultry producers, making the city
and its surroundings one of the most important egg producing regions in Mexico.
[2]
After the NAFTA
agreement had been signed, Tehuacán saw a flood of textile maquiladoras established
in the city and surrounding areas. These textile factories principally put
together blue jeans for export to companies such as The Gap, Guess, Old Navy,
and JC Penney. At the height of the maquila (short for maquiladora) boom, there
were an estimated number of more than 700 maquilas in town, including those
that were operating from homes, often in secret. While this situation created a
negative unemployment (zero unemployment) and the maquilas sought workers as
far away as Orizaba and Córdoba in the neighboring state of Veracruz, it also
created an urban and environmental nightmare. In one decade, Tehuacán went from
being a town of 150,000 inhabitants to a city of 360,000. Although many
maquilas have closed today, in 2007 there were still over 700 of them found in
Tehuacán.[3] Due to the poverty of the families living in Tehuacán, child
labour in the maquilas is common, and worker's rights are often exploited
there. Additionally, chemicals such as caustic soda, chlorine, peroxide, oxalic
acid, sodium bisulphate, potassium permanganate, and sodium hexametaphosphate
are being discharged into the freshwater supplies by the jean laundries.
Despite having new purifying technologies available at certain large
facilities, they are still not being used the majority of the time. The water,
which contains heavy metals such as mercury, lead, copper, zinc, chrome,
cadmium and selenium is then used by the farmers to irrigate their land. The
cost of environmental deterioration in 2002 was estimated to be $63 billion per
year.[4]
Historically, the
Valley of Tehuacán is important to the whole of Mexico, as the most ancient
forms of cultivated maize known were found here by archeologists.
