La Crónica
Taurino Arámbula Vázquez, the Town's Chronicler
If San José de Gracia's history survives in any detail, it is largely because one man decided, as a young teacher, to sit with the town's elders and write down what they remembered.
A seminary education, and a return home
Don Taurino Arámbula Vázquez was born on 23 September 1935, the eldest child of Taurino Arámbula Gutiérrez and Ignacia Vázquez de la Cerda. He studied first at the town school in San José de Gracia, then for a decade at the Seminario del Señor San José in Guadalajara, where his studies ran through Latin, philosophy and theology. He came home in 1957, not to the priesthood but to teaching.
Teaching, and a chapel of his own
Back in San José de Gracia, Arámbula taught the children of the La Santa Cruz ranchería. In 1958 he designed a small chapel there and helped raise it himself, the first of a lifetime of projects built to hold the town's faith and memory in place.
More than thirty years at the parish
For more than thirty-four years Arámbula served the parish church alongside its priests, as acolyte, bell-ringer, and painter of its festival decorations. The trust ran deeper than that: parishioners working in the United States sent donations home for the church, and it was Arámbula who was entrusted with them, a small but telling sign of how central he had become to the town's religious life.
Writing Rincón Alteño
It was Padre Gerónimo Macías who urged Arámbula to gather the testimony of the town's elders before it disappeared, chief among them Don Porfirio Hernández Valle, whose memories anchor much of the book. The result was Rincón Alteño, published first in 1974 in a run of a thousand copies, with a second part following in 2008. The copy that survives in the family's hands today carries a colophon dated 25 October 1995 and printed in July 1996 by Impresos San José in Guadalajara, a later printing of the same founding chronicle. In its pages Arámbula set down the trades, fiestas, legends and characters that make up the town's sense of itself, part transcribed record and part oral history gathered directly from the people who lived it.
What the book preserves
Rincón Alteño ranges far beyond genealogy. Arámbula used it to record the town's full fiesta calendar, from the May patronal feast of San José to Santa Eduwiges on 16 October and the peregrinaciones that bring the outlying ranchos into town for charreadas, jaripeos and bulls. He walked the old streets house by house, Real (now Hidalgo), Allende, Ramón Corona, Nicolás Bravo, Aldama, naming who lived where, and gave whole chapters to the town's futbol and beisbol clubs, teams with names like Las Águilas, Los Leones and the Simpáticas Oncenas. It amounts to a town's memory of itself, organized by one man's patience.
A life beyond the book
Arámbula kept a small personal museum of photographs and documents that the local schools would visit, wrote for the town paper 7 Días, and over the years served as municipal delegate, livestock inspector and a tireless promoter of local sport and culture. All of it went into the same project: keeping San José de Gracia's own record of itself.
"You will"
Asked once by a child who would write the town's history after he was gone, Arámbula answered simply, "Tú serás quien la escriba." That conviction, that history belongs to whoever picks it up rather than to any one man, runs through everything he wrote. The town named a street for him in 2011, and on 24 October 2025 it unveiled a bust in his honor and renamed its municipal auditorium after him, following a council vote that August. Neither the sculptor of the bust nor who spoke at the ceremony has surfaced in any source consulted for this article.
Sources
- Rincón Alteño (Arámbula Vázquez, 1st ed. 1974, rev. ed. 1996; 2nd part 2008) [local tradition]
- Juan Ramón Ramírez Andrade: biographical sketch, Museo Nacional Humanista, Atotonilco el Alto [secondary]
- Ayuntamiento de Tepatitlán: council record on the auditorium renaming (Dictamen No. 11, 7 August 2025) and the bust unveiling (24 October 2025) [primary]