For the people of the pueblito of Ocanahua, Jalisco, May 2 is Ocomo Day, a time for them to forget the modern world and celebrate their unique heritage.
In fact, once upon a time their pueblito was a grand city covering 500 to 600 hectares, where their ancestors ruled all of western Mexico from a magnificent edifice covering 15.6 square kilometers.
Today it’s known as El Palacio de Ocomo.
This year, the celebration was moved to the end of the month due to the H1N1 flu outbreak, but on May 30 Ocanahua’s plaza was filled with well-wishers, who had come to mark the 13th anniversary of a day in 1996 when art historian Acelia Garcia first proposed a public celebration of the glory that was once Ocomo.
Garcia’s husband, archeologist Phil Weigand, was at hand to guide visitors around his excavations of the palace. When asked how he first suspected there was something important hidden near the remote village of Ocanahua (located in the municipio of Etzatlan, 75 kilometers west of Guadalajara), Weigand replied: “Acelia was born near here, in the municipio of Amacueca and came here as a child. In 1958, local people told us that there use to be a building here called Ocomo, and we were curious. We took a look and were impressed how monumental this site was. The ruins of this one building measure 125 by 125 meters and encompass some 50,000 cubic meters.”
The full impact of what Weigand found did not hit him until seven years later when he first laid eyes on a copy of the Quinatzin Codex, a 16th-century pictorial document from Mexico originally written on paper made from the amate fig tree. The codex showed the plan of the Palace of Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. Such a palace is always a U-shaped, lavish, monumental building, also known as a tecpan. The codex was decorated with prehispanic glyphs as well as notes in Spanish. It shows the building full of people and describes what each one is doing. For example, it depicts King Quinatzin face-to-face with a Chicimeca, carrying on a conversation.
Weigand immediately realized that the ruins in Oconahua followed the same architectural plan as the tecpan shown in the codex, the only difference being that the Ocomo Palace – having been built between 500 and 1100 A.D. – was 1,000 years older than the one at Texcoco.
On the unusual size of Oconahua’s palace, Weigand says: “The only tecpan bigger than this one may have been the Palace of Moctezuma, which they say measured 200 meters on each side, but this can’t be verified because it’s buried underneath the Zocalo in Mexico City and we can’t get at it. That makes El Palacio de Ocomo the largest [visible] tecpan to be found anywhere. It’s about the same size as the Palacio de Gobierno in Guadalajara, indicating the highly important nature of the building. The Ocomo Palace is so big that you could fit the Tzintzuntzan Palace (of the Purepecha kings) inside its courtyard.”
Today the excavations are well underway and you can watch the archeologists slowly liberating the well-preserved foundations of the ancient tecpan. They now know that its core is made of adobe, faced with either stone and plaster on the outside or finished cantera on the inside. If you visit the site, be sure to stop at the plaza in Oconahua to see an artist’s conception of this monumental building. “The scale model is a bit imaginative,” says Weigand, “but it gives a good idea of what the magnificent Palacio de Ocomo must have looked like.”
After touring the excavations, visitors attending Oconahua’s festival made their way to the town’s picturesque plaza where they were entertained by folkloric dance troupes from all over western Mexico. The final dances were performed by Oconahua’s own troupe, “Lo Nuestro.” Despite the last-minute changes due to flu fears, the Weigands agreed that this year’s fiesta was “the best one in the 13-year history of the Día de Ocomo.”
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