My trip to Charco Hondo, Totatiche

I just arrived this morning from Los Angeles and finally have a moment to catch up on Nuestros Ranchos postings. I wanted to share a bit about my trip to Mexico this year. While I was down there for a wedding and therefore largely busy with family events, I did get some genealogy-related things done.

Perhaps the most interesting was a visit to a rancho in Totatiche, Jalisco named Charco Hondo. The rancho was perhaps the first permanent Spanish settlement in the region as all of the towns including Totatiche and Temastian were indigenous (mostly Tepehuan) settlements. The 1770 census of the rancho shows a population of more than 300 inhabitants which means it was quite a vibrant place at the time.

What drew me there was a mention in a book of a cornerstone in one of the old buildings on the rancho with an inscription describing the building as a school whose teacher was a certain Joseph Grano... who happens to be my ancestor 7 times over. I got to see and touch the stone with the date of August 1725... the building, made of stone is largely intact... the roof collapsed several decades ago and has been replaced but the walls and door are clearly the originals. There are many other ruins in the rancho, mostly adobe and therefore much more deteriorated. There are also the ruins of the original dam built on the rancho, also in the early 1700s. It was amazing too see, feel, touch and smell these lands of my ancestors.

I will share photos in the following days.

I also went to the Centro Universitario Norte of the Universidad de Guadalajara, which is located in Colotlan, Jalisco. It is a beautiful campus with a great bookstore of local microhistory, anthropology, etc. I bough several books which I will also inventory for the group in the coming days.