Tuxtla Gutiérrez

Tuxtla Gutiérrez, commonly called Tuxtla, is the capital and biggest city in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. It serves as the seat of the municipality that shares its name, which is the most developed and heavily populated in the state. The city is a center for government, commerce, and services, and it experienced one of Mexico’s fastest growth rates over the past four decades. Unlike many parts of Chiapas, Tuxtla isn’t a major tourist draw; instead, it functions as a transit hub for visitors entering the state, featuring a large airport and a bus terminal.

The first pre-Hispanic settlement here was established by the Zoque people, who called the valley area Coyatoc, meaning “land or house of rabbits.” Between 1486 and 1505, the Aztecs moved into the region and renamed it Tuchtlan, which carries the same meaning in their language. After the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire and subdued the local Chiapan people in 1528, Dominican monks built a monastery in nearby Tecpatán. There’s no official founding date for Tuxtla, but it’s known that in the 1500s, the Dominicans gathered scattered Zoque groups into communities centered around churches. In 1560, they founded a church dedicated to San Marcos for one such community. While Tuxtla appears less often in regional history than Comitán Domínguez or San Cristóbal, it has a large number of adobe houses—around 800—far more than any officially declared historic site in Chiapas. These include Spanish colonial buildings from the 1800s in the downtown area and western parts near the Señor del Cerrito Hermitage, as well as traces of Zoque migration during the 19th century in the western and far southwestern areas.

The town of San Marcos Tuxtla was first recorded in 1748, and by 1768 it had become the seat of a mayoralty in Chiapas. In 1813, the King of Spain officially recognized it as a villa, with a population of about 5,000, three-quarters of whom were Zoques. In 1821, the villa’s authorities declared independence from both Spain and the regional colonial government of Guatemala, alongside other areas that would become Chiapas. Neither Guatemala nor Mexico accepted this declaration. Tuxtla, along with the rest of Chiapas, became part of Mexico by popular vote on September 14, 1824. On May 31, 1848, Governor Fernando Nicolás Maldonado officially renamed it Tuxtla Gutiérrez to honor Joaquín Miguel Gutiérrez, a former governor who had pushed for Chiapas’s annexation to Mexico. The municipality was first incorporated as a departamento on March 31, 1849. It replaced San Cristóbal de las Casas as the state capital on August 11, 1892. The first library in Chiapas was founded in Tuxtla in 1910.

During the Mexican Revolution, a battalion called “The Sons of Tuxtla” formed in 1911, and its member Captain Julio Miramontes was killed in 1912. Troops backing Venustiano Carranza, led by Agustín Castro, took over the city in 1914. In 1915, Chiapas was reorganized into a municipality system, with Tuxtla Gutiérrez becoming the head of a municipality and Noé Vázquez its first municipal president; the city stayed the state capital. The reaction against Carranza’s policies came from the Mapaches (“Raccoons”), a group of landholders who opposed losing their privileges and having their lands redistributed. They burned the state government building in 1915, destroying its archives. General Salvador Alvarado and 2,500 troops fought the Mapaches, commanded by General Tiburcio Fernández Ruiz. In 1934, Catholic churches in the city were closed and images of saints were burned.

In 1941, the municipal government moved from its old building on El Triunfo Street in the Santo Domingo neighborhood to the corner of Avenida Central and Calle 2ª Poniente, on land that had belonged to the city’s first municipal president. A new Neoclassical-style municipal palace was built there. However, the palace was moved again to its current location in 1982, and the Neoclassical building was given to the Federación de Trabajadores del Estado de Chiapas. The Diocese of Tuxtla was created in 1965, elevating the parish of San Marcos to a cathedral; it became an archdiocese in 2010. The city saw high population growth starting in the 1970s, leading to the annexation of the municipality of Terán in 1973. The first Feria Chiapas was held in 1980, and Pope John Paul II visited the city in 1990.

During the 1990s, parts of Chiapas were affected by the EZLN, or Zapatista uprising. While most activity was in rural areas, Tuxtla was also impacted. As many as 10,000 Zapatista sympathizers protested in the city in 1998, pushing federal officials to honor the 1994 San Andrés Accords and to call for new gubernatorial elections and other demands. The political instability drove many indigenous people into the municipality from more rural areas in the latter half of the decade. In 1998, Rubicel Ruiz Gamboa, a PRD politician, EZLN activist, and leader of the Asamblea Estatal Democrática del Pueblo Chiapaneco, was assassinated in the city. The act was believed to be in response to his work on land redistribution in the La Frailesca region. In the 1990s, Mexicana Airlines stopped service to Tuxtla, and a major crash that killed nineteen people led to protests and the reinstatement of service by Mexicana in 2000. In 2011, the government of Guatemala announced it would open a consulate in the city to support its nationals crossing through Mexican territory or living there, noting the problems many Guatemalans, especially those entering Mexico illegally, face.