Atolinga is the seat of Atolinga Municipality in the Mexican state of

Zacatecas Zacatecas, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Zacatecas, is one of the Political divisions of Mexico, 31 states of Mexico. It is divided into Municipalities of Zacatecas, 58 municipalities and its capital city is Zacatecas City, Zacatec ...

, located in its southwestern portion. The coordinates of the municipal seat of Atolinga are 21° 44’ 15” north and 103° 28’ 30” west. The town is located at above sea level and the municipality covers an area of . The municipality rests on a mesa that is the western border of the Tlaltenango Valley. The Atolinga River, which runs through the municipal seat is a tributary of the Bolaños River. A 2005 Census recorded 1,453 residents.

History

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish to the area, the region around Atolinga was inhabited by indigenous people of the

Caxcan The Caxcan are an ethnic group who are Indigenous to western and north-central Mexico, particularly the regions corresponding to modern-day Zacatecas, southern Durango, Jalisco, Colima, Aguascalientes, Nayarit. The Caxcan language is most often ...

and Tepecan ethnic groups. The first Spanish contact with these people must have been in 1530 when Pedro Almíndez Chirino went through the Valley of Tlaltenango on a northbound expedition. The first land grantee of the area was Pedro Sernosa, who later sold his land to Juan Fernández de Jara Quemada. The town formed part of the jurisdiction of Tlaltenango for both ecclesiastical purposes and governmental purposes until the beginning of the 1800s. In 1814, a plea was made by the citizenry that the community be granted its own town council and status as a municipality due to the long distance from the municipal seat and the ascending local population. The plea spells out that the town counted with nearly 700 "souls" and that within a radius of two leagues lived more than 3,700 people. In recent decades, Atolinga's population has decreased due to emigration. Migrants from Atolinga can be found throughout the United States, especially in

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

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Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

, and the

San Gabriel Valley The San Gabriel Valley (), sometimes referred to by its initials as SGV, is one of the principal valleys of Southern California, with the city of Los Angeles directly bordering it to the west and occupying the vast majority of the southeastern ...

region of

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. Journalist Sam Quinones has written about such migrants in his book ''Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration''.

Sources

Enciclopedia de los Municipios de Zacatecas, State of Zacatecas

Insituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática

www.samquinones.com
{{Zacatecas Populated places in Zacatecas