Tancanhuitz

I came to Tancanhuitz because I got the timing wrong somewhere else. I had been circling the Huasteca Potosina chasing waterfalls with everyone else, and one afternoon, tired of parking lots, I turned up a side valley toward a town I only knew as a name on a sign. The road corkscrewed through coffee and banana and those impossibly green hills, and dropped me into a place with steep little streets, a market spilling out of a covered hall, and not a single other outsider that I could see. I parked badly, bought a coffee grown on a slope I could point to, and decided to stay.

A Town That Belongs to Its Market

Tancanhuitz organizes itself around its weekly market the way other towns organize around a church, and on market day the narrow streets simply fill — Teenek and Nahua families down from the surrounding hamlets, tarps and baskets, the smell of coriander and wet earth and roasting things. I am always suspicious of the word “authentic,” but there is a difference between a market that performs itself for visitors and one that is genuinely how a region feeds itself, and this was plainly the second kind. Women in embroidered blouses sold herbs I couldn’t name and quelites gathered that morning. Nobody was interested in me, which is the highest compliment a market can pay a stranger.

Xantolo, the Living Day of the Dead

I have seen Day of the Dead in a dozen places in Mexico, and most of it, if I’m honest, has been thinned out by photography. Xantolo in the Huasteca is different, and Tancanhuitz is one of its beating hearts. Here the dead are welcomed with arches of cempasúchil and stands of sugarcane, and the streets fill with dancers in carved wooden masks — the cuadrillas — who move through town for days in a rhythm that is joyful and menacing at once. A shopkeeper explained it to me the way you’d explain weather: the dead come back, you make them welcome, you dance so they know the way. She said it while restocking cigarettes, entirely matter-of-fact, and that was somehow the most convincing thing I heard all year.

Water in Every Direction

The great luxury of basing yourself in a town like this is that the famous Huasteca — the turquoise rivers, the waterfalls everyone drives hours to reach — is simply your neighborhood. A man at the coffee stand drew me a map on a napkin to a river pool his kids swim in, no name, no entrance fee, just a path down through the cane. I found it exactly where he said, water the color of bottle glass moving over pale stone, and I had it entirely to myself for an hour before a family arrived with a radio and a cooler and made it better. This is the Huasteca I keep coming back for: not the postcards, but the ordinary miracle of green hills leaking clean cold water everywhere you look.

Getting There

Tancanhuitz sits deep in the Huasteca Potosina, in the eastern lowland corner of San Luis Potosí. The nearest hub is Ciudad Valles, about an hour and a half northeast by highway, with bus connections onward; the state capital is a longer haul of four to five hours over the sierra. A car gives you the freedom the region rewards, but second-class buses do reach the town. Come outside of Xantolo and you’ll find a quiet, working market town; come at the end of October or start of November, book far ahead, and you’ll find something you won’t forget. Either way, slow down and let a local draw you a napkin map. It’ll be better than anything I can tell you.