Perhaps the greatest pleasure of writing a blog is hearing from people I don't know. Some have written with questions and then come to visit and then become friends. Some have written with new information as has Carlos Martínez Luengas to tell about his ancestors' ownership of the hacienda in La Gloria which I wrote about in May 2009, during and after the swine flu scare. This link will take you to some pictures of the hacienda today, and it will also introduce the bit of history we got from a couple of people who live in La Gloria. Señor Martinez´s narrative, which gives some earlier history of the hacienda starts below.
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Here goes a bit of history on the hacienda Cuautotolapan. In 1838, my great great grandfather, Manuel de los Angeles Morales owned the whole hacienda. He married twice but his eldest son, my great grandfather, MANUEL MORALES, asked his step mother, PERFECTA GARCIA for his share of the property when his father died later in the XIX century.
PERFECTA was a woman of her time, she couldn't read or write, but she was well known. She asked for a loan from a certain Mr.VILLEGAS in order to meet her stepson's demand. Although she was a wealthy woman, the papers Mr Villegas had her sign or thumb print were such that she could not meet the monthly payment. It was a scam she couldn't foresee since supposedly, her late husband and Mr Villegas were good friends. She lost the entire hacienda to nepharious Mr. Villegas sometime by the end of that century.
In 1907, President PORFIRIO DIAZ ordered confiscation and distribution of the land to small farmers across the conuntry. In the Official Federal National Diary ( I do not know its equivalent in English) the government took 16,000 hectareas of the hacienda Cuautotolapan to give to those farmers as can be consulted in its web page. The "casco" where the houses and chapel are like you show in the web page was still property of the Villegas family which finally lost it during the Mexican Revolution war somewhere between 1915 and 1925. It is now owned and run by the descendants of the former laborers of the Villegas family.
I hope you find this info interesting and useful for your research.
yours Truly
Carlos Martinez Luengas