Tetlanohcan Comes to Town - article from New Haven Independent

New Haven’s newest sister city in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala has sent an estimated 10 percent of its entire population, about 1,000 people, to live in New Haven’s Fair Haven and Hill neighborhoods.

So reported Marco Castillo. On Thursday night he teamed up with Claire Criscuolo at her eponymous Corner Copia, where locals from Tlaxcala came out of the shadows to celebrate with photographs and music from home and to drum up support for a first-time delegation of New Haveners to visit next spring.

Castillo is the organizer for a new branch in town of IIPSOCULTA, a group that supports families affected by migration to the United States.

When the village of San Francisco Tetlanochan became the seventh sister city of New Haven in April, IIPSOCULTA teamed up with New Haven Sister Cities to mount the exhibition, called Ciudades Hermanas,” It opened at Claire’s Thursday.

Photos on the walls of the restaurant like this “Hombre y Maize” by Gonzalo Perez are all by artists from Tlaxcala. Their sale will go to support IIPSOCULTA’s Migrant Family Support Center in Tlaxcala.

Click here for an article by the Independent’s Melissa Bailey on her visit to San Francisco Tetlanohcan

Is the purpose of the center in Tlaxcala to end migration?

No, replied Castillo. He described after-school programs and handicraft development training. The center also reunites long separated spouses and families.

Castillo said that the state of Tlaxcala, west of Mexico City, has about a million people. Although numbers are hard to estimate, he estimated that nearly a quarter million were migrants in the United States, with many, in New Haven, including 10 percent of the population of San Francisco Tetlanochan.

“The ultimate goal is how can we find ways to make migration a choice, not a necessity,” he said.

“Who wouldn’t want their family to visit!” Claire Criscuolo added,.

She opened her doors to this event, she said, because it was important, through the music and photographs, “to meet the 9,000 who are separated from the 1,000 who are in New Haven.”

One of her employees returned to Mexico after 17 years working at the restaurant. Criscuolo said she payed Social Security and the employee paid into the system too. She said that in Mexico he will never collect that money that went into U.S. government coffers. “We should be sending people like that a thank you note,” she added.

Those interested in traveling to Tlaxcala in the spring as part of what organizers are billing as “Sister City’s First Witness Delegation on Mexico-U.S. Relations should call 203-479-2959 or email here.

The dates of the tour are April 14 to 23, 201. The exhibition is up through February.