San Pedro Xalpa

San Pedro Xalpa is an ancient Azcapotzalco neighborhood. Just south of the giant San Isidro Cemetery, perhaps most unusual is that San Pedro has maintained most of its old graveyard, in the church, atrium too. Over the centuries, this has been encroached upon in seemingly a hundred different ways. The old church building has too.

The “place on the sand,” the Nahuatl meaning of Xalpa, is very old. It’s one of the original settlements of Azcapotzalco. It was a part of heavily populated Azcapotzalco. The ancient Tepaneca neighborhood emerged from the Mexican Revolution with a significant land grant (ejido). This was so that residents, long the subjects of colonial-era haciendas, could farm land held communally. Today, most of the old land grant constitutes the two giant neighborhood extensions to the south and west of the present “town.”

From the same time period, much of what we see today of the church dates from 1936. Parts of the old church, though, still date from 17th century. The façade hosts statues of St. Peter and St. Paul. Most of the tombstones date from the 18th century.

Roughly 20-minutes walk west from Metro Camarones, the Mercado Jardín 23 de Abril is a 12-minute walk to the southwest.