Editing Chipilo (section)

==History==
[[File:1897Map(Chipilo-Zentla).jpg|thumb|left|A 1897 map with marked present-day Chipilo location shows present-day settlement near the railway station of Puebla.]]
[[File:Chipilo church night 1.JPG|thumb|left|Parish of Immaculate Conception, built by Italians]]
Chipilo in 1879 was a community named by locals ''Colonia Fernández Leal'', and on October 2, 1882, immigrants from the northern [[Italy|Italian]] region of [[Veneto]] began to settle there. Most came from the town of [[Segusino]] and other surrounding towns in the province of [[Treviso]]. These immigrants arrived in Mexico in search of fertile land, leaving behind the poverty that was plaguing the Veneto at that time. Most of them took up cattle raising, and the dairy products of Chipilo became famous in Puebla and other regions of central Mexico. In 1899, Chipilo was declared to be a town and the "de Francisco Javier Mina" was added by an administrative order in memory of [[Martín Javier Mina y Larrea|Martín Francisco Javier Mina y Larrea]], but the locals continued to call it simply "Chipilo".<ref>[http://catarina.udlap.mx/u_dl_a/tales/documentos/lac/reyes_k_ac/ "Etnicidad, tierra y poder en Chipilo"], p. 62</ref> Some Italian-Mexicans there continue to speak the  [[Chipilo Venetian dialect]] derived from the [[Venetian language]]. They fiercely defended themselves from the attack of Mexican revolutionaries in 1917.<ref>[http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/351/35103612.pdf La battaglia per difendere Chipilo. (p. 7)] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071217124011/http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/351/35103612.pdf }}</ref>

Although the city of Puebla has grown so far as to almost absorb it, the town of Chipilo remained isolated for much of the 20th century. Thus, the "Chipileños", unlike other Italian immigrants that came to Mexico, did not blend into the Mexican culture and retained most of their traditions and their language. To this day, most of the people in Chipilo speak the Venetian of their great-grandparents. The variant spoken by the Chipileños is the 'northern Feltrino-Bellunese'. Surprisingly, it has been barely altered by Spanish, as compared to how the dialect of the northern region of Veneto has been altered by Italian. Given the number of speakers of Venetian, and even though the state government has not done so, the Chipilo Venetian can be considered a minority language in the conurbation of [[Puebla]].

In 1982, the townspeople of Chipilo celebrated the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the city along with visitors from the Veneto region. During the celebration the city of [[Segusino]], Italy, was declared Chipilo's [[Town twinning|Twin city]].