I just got off the phone and it turns out that my Nina who married my
Nino, Jose Refugio Puentes, is an Alteño. If anyone comes across any of
these names from San Miguel el Alto please let me know.

For centuries, Los Altos had been a fairly closed society, essentially isolated in a heavily traditional Spanish Catholic heritage, until events from outside threatened the Alteño way of life.  Mexico contains many such unique regions, called patrias chicas (small fatherlands), and each with its own micro-history.  Usually the term patria chica is applied to the territory occupied by isolated indigenous groups such as the Huichol, Cora, Lacandón, and Tarahumara peoples.  These groups may be legally Mexicans, but live completely outside the Republic’s cultural mainstream and many never learn Spanish.  Whites, mestizos, and Hispanicized Indians, on the other hand, are too assimilated to identify with a patria chica.  Mexico is their patria grande and they haven’t the slightest desire to be associated with some lonely and primitive backwater.[1]  Los Altos is a patria chica in every way but linguistically.  In fact it has been documented that the Spanish spoken in Los Altos contains many words, sayings, and idiomatic expressions that have been preserved in their original sixteenth century Extremaduran and Andalusian dialect.  According to linguistic experts, such as Luis Mateu Poch, in no other Spanish-speaking region, including Spain itself, has the language been kept as clean and pure.[2]

Indeed, the people of Los Altos—Alteños—belong to one of Mexico’s most unusual subcultures.  They and the blacks of the of the Costa Chica, a strip along the Pacific shore of Guerrero and Oaxaca, are the only sizable ethnic groups found outside Mexico’s prevailing Indo-Hispanic mix.[3]  Alteño heritage is Castilian Spanish, Basque, and Italian, as many notable historian/genealogists, such as José Ignacio Dávila Garibi, Jaime Holcombe Isunza, Mariano González Leal, and countless others, have proven via decades of meticulous archival research.  For centuries the Creole descendants of the Spanish conquistadores and pobladores (settlers), have lived in this relatively isolated patria chica practicing the religion, customs, and traditions of their European ancestors.  Remoteness from the “outside” world permitted Alteños to maintain a closed society where tradition played a crucial role, and the customs of their ancestors were the behavioral norm for the younger generations.  Expert historians would not disagree that Alteños are “clannish, suspicious of outsiders, and conservative in an anarchistic, non-Hamiltonian way,” as Jim Tuck writes.[4]  That is why, Alteños detest central authority of any kind, whether federal, state, or local.[5] 

Another Alteño characteristic is a concept commonly associated with the United States and American culture—rugged individualism.  Due to the isolation in which the Spaniards who came to Los Altos lived, and their descendant’s continued isolation from the Mexican mainstream, cooperatives and ejidos have never prospered.  This is due to the rugged individualism of more than 400 years, where the principle of “You in yours, me in mine, and only God in ours” has prevailed.[6]  Los Altos was settled by hardy pioneering folk who succeeded in creating an autarkical society.  Alteños counted on the means by which to satisfy all of their basic needs of food and shelter, and could thus provide for themselves practically everything they could need—with the exception of textiles, farming implements, and other manufactured goods.[7]  When the time came to support the Cristero cause, Alteños were quite capable of supplying men, leadership, medical care, food, and finding on their own, the means by which to procure rifles, guns, and ammunition.

Economic power lay in control of the land, which was ultimately the measure of one’s wealth.  The early pioneers received vast tracts of land, once the hunting grounds of the Chichimeca, Caxcán, Guachichil, and Zacateca Indians, via royal land grants (mercedes reales) primarily during the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The land was primarily used to raise livestock, as this required less effort than intensive agriculture.  Subsistence agriculture was the norm and was indeed limited for feeding livestock, the peons and workers, and the landowner’s extensive family.  Spanish families maintained control of the local agricultural economy by marrying only amongst families of the same status and race.  As a result a very intricate network of interrelated aristocratic Spanish families was created.  This custom of endogamy—only marrying one’s own kind—produced a very homogenous and family-centered society.  They also maintained family control of their estates through the traditional practice of primogeniture—inheriting lands and titles unto the first-born son.  However, with large families of ten children or so being the norm, landholdings became smaller and smaller generation after generation.  The combined effect of these Alteño customs produced a society of small or landless subsistence farmers controlled by owners of large haciendas or ranchos.  The landowners who controlled production, distribution, labor, and technology conformed to a conservative ideology that produced a social structure that did not favor change.[8]

In Los Altos, the Roman Catholic Church possessed an extraordinarily important position in society, not just as a viable belief system, but also as an institutional structure that preserved the status quo.  As far as Alteños were concerned, the Catholic Church assured the existence of a divine and natural order that determined social balance and stability.  The Church itself favored the formation and consolidation of the local oligarchies due to their common interests with the landowning and merchant elite.[9]  In Los Altos, there was certainly no separation between the regional church and state.  The Catholic Church and the regional juridical structures—such as alcaldías (mayorships), cofradías (congregations or brotherhoods of charity), and monastic orders—formed the basic infrastructure of the region, so any attack against the rights of the church meant an attack against the entire society.

Estanislao Marquez (dob: 1857) married Teodora Jimenez and had a Mateo
Marquez who later married a Juana Peragon who was born in Spain.

Yes I realize this is not much to go on but if it rings a bell let me know.

Joseph

ps: she mentioned misc. stuff like another cousin of mine who is from
San Juan de los Lagos was a De Anda.

pps: Is San Miguel el Alto the only Pueblo/Rancho in Los Altos area that
has "el Alto" in its name?

My Nina said, "my grandparents were from 'el
Alto' and it seems that i remember 'San Miguel el Alto' " but then she
was talking about San Juan de los Lagos so I didn't get a 100%
confirmation on San Miguel el Alto only a "pretty sure." She did go on
to say that when her grandmother died that her grandfather went to San
Juan de los Lagos and 6 months later came back to California with a new
bride that was a Marquez and a second cousin.