Chato
A Jalisco-rooted descriptive folk name (Spanish for "flat" or "snub-nosed") most reliably attached to angustifolia-lineage agaves in the orbit of traditional Los Altos and Valles producers such as Caballito Cerrero. Informal market use can stretch the name to other materials, so producer attestation matters.
Regions: Jalisco, Los Altos de Jalisco, Valles de Jalisco
Chato is a Jalisco-rooted folk name for a regional agave. The word in Spanish means "flat" or "snub-nosed," and as a plant descriptor it points at the silhouette of the rosette: a shorter, more compressed plant with broader and flatter leaves than the tall, upright forms that dominate the modern blue-agave fields of Tequila. The name is descriptive, not Linnaean, and like most descriptive folk names it travels imperfectly across regions.
In Jalisco. The best-supported attachment in the available research is to angustifolia-lineage agaves in the orbit of traditional producers in Los Altos and the Valles de Jalisco. The canonical reference bottle is the Caballito Cerrero Blanco Chato, a long-running expression from a family producer that has maintained heirloom agave varietals outside the dominant Agave tequilana Weber azul monoculture. Caballito Cerrero's "Chato" varietal is a shorter, broader-leafed form that the house has propagated for decades, and the distillate profile drawn from that material trends toward a cleaner cooked-agave core, citrus, gentle pepper, and medium body, with less of the high herbality found in cliff-dwelling species such as tepeztate.
Beyond Jalisco. Earlier informal market chatter occasionally attached "chato" to other agave materials in adjacent regions, but those uses are thinly attested and do not cohere into a stable second mapping the way that, for example, the cenizo name splits cleanly between Durango and Sonora. Outside Jalisco, treat "chato" as unverified until a producer attestation or species line on the label resolves it.
Editorial guidance. When the producer is in Jalisco, default to an angustifolia reading and accept that the underlying material may be a heritage cultivar within the broader Agave angustifolia complex or, less commonly, a non-standard form of A. tequilana. Outside Jalisco, demand explicit species attribution before mapping the name to a taxon. The botany chapter works through the broader pattern of descriptive folk names (chato, largo, sierrudo, tripón) and how they sit alongside region-specific names in the four-layer naming system.