Textitlán Light Rail

The Textitlán Light Rail station is named for the street that begins here and snakes its way across most of the north of Santa Ursula Coapa. The street in turn is named for the town of Santiago Textitlan in Oaxaca. It’s a historic Zapotec town of some 850 people about four hours drive southwest of the Oaxaca state capital.

The Nahuatl name comes from the words for “rock,” texcalli and titlan, meaning “between.” So the name gets translated to mean something like “between the rocks.” The station logo thus refers to the maguey plants common across the Oaxacan landscape including in the region of Santiago Textitlán. The town though is better known for logging and timber cultivation.

The Textitlán Light Rail station is near the Coyoacán Campus of the Universidad del Valle de México (UVM) and the “Prepa 5” high school. Students will nearly always make up a good number of people boarding or disembarking here. The Santa Ursula church is a bit further along, but visible from the light rail before the El Vergel station. On the other side of the tracks, the neighborhood of Ex-Hacienda Coapa extends to the east. This is a reminder that the original settlement of Santa Ursula Coapa actually predates, and today outlasts, the once-great hacienda of Coapa.