Chipilo is a small city in the state of Puebla, Mexico. It is located 12 km south of state capital Puebla, Puebla, at a height of 2150 meters above sea level. Its official name is Chipilo de Francisco Javier Mina. The people of Chipilo are called chipileños.

History

Chipilo was founded on October 2, 1882 by immigrants from the northern Italian region of Veneto. Most of them came from Segusino and the surrounding towns in Treviso. Thus, the immigration to Chipilo is different from the Italian immigration to Buenos Aires, where most of the immigrants came from the southern regions of Italy.

The immigrants came to Mexico in search for fertile land, and running from the poverty that was plaguing Veneto at that time. Most of them decided to raise cattle, and the dairy products of Chipilo became famous in Puebla and other regions in central Mexico.

In 1982, the townspeople of Chipilo celebrated the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the city along with visitors from the Venet region. In this celebration the city of Segusino , Italy, was declared the twin city of Chipilo.

Language and culture

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 Venet or Venetian dialect of their great-grandparents. The variant of the Venet dialect 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 Venet, and even though the state government has not done so, the Venet dialect can be considered a minority language in the conurbation of Puebla.

There have been several attempts to establish a writing system for the Venetian dialect spoken in Chipilo. One such system was created by Carolyn McKay, an American linguist who conducted postgraduate research at the Universidad de las Américas. Her proposed system, based entirely on the Italian alphabet, was published in a book entitled Il dialetto veneto de Segusino e Chipilo. This system has been used in some publications made by chipileños, but it has not received wide acceptance. Most of the speakers use the Spanish system they learn at school, even though it does not have letters for specific sounds such as the voiced-S or the [θ]. Nevertheless, some native speakers have suggested the standarization of a writing system based on the Spanish alphabet.

External Links

• Description of the Venetian dialect of Chipilo, in Spanish
• Story of Chipilo, and old pictures of the city, in Italian
• Brief History of Chipilo and pictures of the city, in Spanish