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.