A Brief History of Mexico: Corn, Conquest, Revolution, and the Long Road to Democracy

Follows: Mexico: A Condensed History of Empires, Revolution, and Identity (the six-minute version). Companion piece: If I Was Born in Mexico (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).

On 22 February 2026, Mexican soldiers killed Nemesio Oseguera, "El Mencho", the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the most wanted drug trafficker in the world, in the mountains of Jalisco. Within hours, roadblocks of burning cars, buses and trucks appeared across at least eight Mexican states. Four months later, Mexico, which had hosted the World Cup in 1970 and 1986, co-hosted it again with the United States and Canada. In between, on 1 July, Washington announced that it would not simply renew the trade agreement that ties the two economies together, and a week after the final it announced a new wave of tariffs on its sixty biggest trading partners.

A country that is at once a cartel battlefield, a global party host and a factory floor for North America can look baffling from outside. It is less baffling once you know the story. Mexico's arguments today, about who owns the land and the oil, how strong the president should be, how close to stand to the United States, and whose Mexico it is (Indigenous, mestizo, criollo, northern, southern), are the same arguments its history has been having for five hundred years.

This is that history, told at length. The condensed piece gives the outline in six minutes; here we slow down.

In this history

1. Before the state: corn, the Olmec, Teotihuacan and the Maya (to 900 CE)
2. The Mexica world and the conquest (900–1600)
3. New Spain: silver, saints and the casta order (1521–1810)
4. Independence, the young republic and the war with the United States (1810–1848)
5. Reform, empire and the Porfiriato (1855–1911)
6. The Revolution and its constitution (1910–1920)
7. Building the PRI state: Cárdenas, the miracle and 1968 (1920–1970)
8. Oil, debt, earthquakes and NAFTA (1970–2000)
9. Democracy, the drug war and Mexico in 2026 (2000–2026)
10. How to understand Mexico today

Part 1 — Before the state: corn, the Olmec, Teotihuacan and the Maya (to 900 CE)

Every Mexican meal has an ancestor older than writing. Maize was domesticated by Indigenous farmers in southern Mexico about nine thousand years ago, from a wild grass called teosinte whose cobs were barely the size of a thumb. Over thousands of years of patient selection, farmers turned it into the fat ears that feed the planet. Beans, squash and chiles followed. Once a reliable food supply existed, people could stay in one place, and villages appeared. By around 1500 BCE they were making fine pottery and clay figurines.

What came next makes Mexico one of the handful of places on Earth where civilisation, meaning cities, writing, calendars and states, arose on its own rather than being borrowed. Archaeologists call the cultural region that stretched from central Mexico into Central America Mesoamerica, and its peoples shared a family of ideas for thousands of years: maize as sacred, a 260-day ritual calendar, a ball game played on stone courts, pyramids as artificial mountains, and the belief that gods required offerings, sometimes of blood.

The Olmec

The first great Mesoamerican culture grew up in the hot, wet lowlands of the Gulf coast, in today's Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmec flourished from about 1200 to 400 BCE, first at San Lorenzo and later, after San Lorenzo declined around the 10th century BCE, at La Venta. Their most famous works are the colossal heads: basalt portraits of rulers, the largest more than three metres high, carved from boulders brought from the volcanic Tuxtla mountains. Seventeen have been found, ten of them at San Lorenzo.

Nobody knows what the Olmec called themselves; "Olmec" is a much later Nahuatl word meaning "people of the rubber country". Scholars still argue whether they were a "mother culture" from which later Mesoamerican civilisations descended, or one brilliant culture among several that grew up in conversation with each other. Either way, Olmec motifs (the were-jaguar, the ball game, jade as precious) turn up across Mesoamerica for centuries afterwards.

Teotihuacan, the city of the gods

Forty kilometres north-east of today's Mexico City stand the ruins of the largest city of the ancient Americas. People were settling there by around 600 BCE, and over the following centuries Teotihuacan grew into a planned metropolis laid out along the 2-kilometre Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. At its height, in roughly the 4th and 5th centuries CE, estimates of its population run from about 25,000 to as many as 200,000; many archaeologists settle around 100,000, which would have put it among the largest cities on Earth at the time.

We do not know what language its people spoke or what they called their city. "Teotihuacan" is the Aztec name, given centuries after it fell, and means something like "the place where the gods were born". Its influence reached hundreds of kilometres: Teotihuacan-style objects and even Teotihuacan envoys appear in the Maya cities of Guatemala. Then, around 550 CE, its central monuments were burned, probably in an uprising, and the city declined over the following century.

The Maya

In the south and south-east, in today's Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, as well as Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, the Maya built dozens of city-states. Their Classic period, roughly 250–900 CE, produced Palenque, Calakmul, Tikal (in Guatemala) and Copán (in Honduras). The Maya developed the most complete writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, a place-value number system with a symbol for zero, and astronomical tables precise enough to predict eclipses. The Spanish-language piece Antes de Colón in this library tells that story in more detail.

The Maya were never one empire. They were more like ancient Greece: rival kingdoms with shared gods and script, allying and warring. Between about 800 and 900 CE the great southern lowland cities emptied out. The causes are still debated (repeated droughts, warfare, overpopulation and soil exhaustion are all candidates, and most scholars now think several worked together), but the Maya did not vanish. Northern cities such as Chichén Itzá and later Mayapán flourished afterwards, and millions of people still speak Maya languages in Mexico and Central America today.

To the south-west, in the Oaxaca valley, the Zapotec built Monte Albán on a levelled mountaintop, a capital that lasted over a thousand years. Their descendants, Zapotec-speakers, include the most important Mexican of the 19th century, as Part 5 will show.

Mexico is one of the few places on Earth where cities, writing and states were invented from scratch, not borrowed. Its story does not begin in 1519; by then it was already some three thousand years old.

Part 2 — The Mexica world and the conquest (900–1600)

After Teotihuacan, central Mexico entered a more warlike age that archaeologists call the Postclassic. Cities built walls. Warfare became a way to take captives and collect tribute. The Toltecs of Tula, in today's Hidalgo, dominated part of the region for a time and became, in later memory, a golden age that every ambitious dynasty claimed to descend from.

The people from Aztlan

The last major arrivals in the Valley of Mexico were a Nahuatl-speaking people who called themselves the Mexica. ("Aztec", from their legendary homeland Aztlan, is a later label; here Mexica means the people of Tenochtitlan, Aztec the wider empire.) Their own account says they wandered for generations, guided by their war and sun god Huitzilopochtli, until they saw an eagle perched on a cactus on an island in Lake Texcoco, the sign that they had found home. That eagle, cactus and serpent are on the Mexican flag today. The traditional founding date of their city, Tenochtitlan, is 1325.

The Mexica began as mercenaries and tribute-payers to stronger neighbours. In 1428 they joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in a war against their overlords in Azcapotzalco, won, and formed the Triple Alliance. Over the next ninety years the alliance pushed its armies and its tax collectors across central and southern Mexico, though never into the Maya lands and never into the stubborn mountain state of Tlaxcala, which stayed independent and hostile.

How the empire worked

The Aztec empire was not a territorial state with borders and governors in the modern sense. It was closer to a protection racket on a continental scale. Conquered cities kept their own rulers and gods but had to send tribute: cotton cloaks, cacao beans, feathers, jade, jaguar skins, maize, soldiers. The tribute lists painted for the Mexica rulers, some of which survive in the colonial Codex Mendoza, read like a treasury ledger. The arrangement was cheap to run but brittle, because subject peoples resented it and had every reason to switch sides if a stronger power appeared.

The island city

Tenochtitlan itself astonished the Spaniards who later saw it. It stood in the lake, linked to the shore by causeways, laced with canals, and fed by chinampas: raised fields built up from lake mud and anchored with willow trees, among the most productive farming systems ever devised. Estimates of its population run to 200,000 or more, which would have made it larger than any city in Spain at the time. Fresh water came by aqueduct from Chapultepec hill. At its centre the Templo Mayor, a twin pyramid to Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc, rose over a sacred precinct.

How ordinary people lived

Most people were farmers and artisans organised in calpolli, neighbourhood or clan units that held land in common, ran schools and supplied men for war. Every boy went to school; noble boys to the calmecac, a priestly school, commoner boys to the telpochcalli, a house of youth focused on war training. Markets were huge and orderly: Cortés reported that the great market at Tlatelolco, the Mexica's twin city, drew 60,000 people a day, with judges to settle disputes and cacao beans used as small change.

Sacrifice, honestly

Mexica religion held that the gods had sacrificed themselves to set the sun moving and needed nourishment in return. Human sacrifice was central to state ritual, and archaeology has confirmed it on a large scale: excavations at the Templo Mayor have uncovered racks of skulls (tzompantli) once displayed there. Numbers given in Spanish chronicles were often inflated to justify conquest, and historians argue about the true scale, but the practice was real. So was a sophisticated poetry, philosophy and law. Both facts belong in the same picture.

Conquest and catastrophe, 1519–1600

In February 1519, Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba with eleven ships and, by the Library of Congress country study's count, over 700 men, in defiance of the governor who had first commissioned him. He landed on the Gulf coast near today's Veracruz, founded a town there so that he could claim authority directly from the king, and scuttled most of his ships so that nobody could turn back.

How a few hundred men toppled an empire

The old schoolbook answer, that Spanish steel, horses and guns simply overwhelmed people who had never seen them, explains part of the first battles and very little of the outcome. Historians now stress three other things.

Allies. The decisive fact is that the conquest of Tenochtitlan was fought mostly by Indigenous armies. After fierce fighting, Tlaxcala chose to ally with Cortés against the Mexica, its old enemy, and other subject cities followed. Tens of thousands of Indigenous warriors marched with the Spaniards. From their point of view this was a war against the Triple Alliance in which some useful foreigners took part; many expected, wrongly, to be the winners.

An interpreter. Cortés's ability to negotiate rested on Malintzin, a Nahua woman given to the Spaniards as a slave in Tabasco, who spoke Nahuatl and Maya and soon Spanish. Mexicans have argued about her ever since. For generations "malinchista" meant a traitor who prefers foreigners; feminist and Indigenous historians have recast her as a survivor with no good choices who shaped events more than any Spaniard but Cortés.

Disease. The story told for centuries, that Moctezuma believed Cortés was the returning god Quetzalcoatl, is now doubted by many specialists; the earliest sources for it were written decades later, after the conquest, by people with reasons to tell it. What is beyond doubt is that smallpox arrived in 1520 and tore through the city.

The sequence

Cortés reached Tenochtitlan in November 1519 and was received as a guest by Moctezuma II, then took him hostage. In 1520, while Cortés was away fighting a rival Spanish force, his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado massacred Mexica nobles during a religious festival. The city rose. Moctezuma was killed (Spanish accounts say by his own people's stones, Indigenous accounts say by the Spaniards). At the end of June 1520, the Spaniards fled the city by night across the causeways and lost a large part of their force, the Noche Triste (Sad Night). Then the epidemic struck the city they had left behind, killing among many others the new ruler, Cuitláhuac.

In 1521, Cortés returned with his Tlaxcalan allies and boats built to control the lake, and laid siege to a city already weakened by famine and smallpox. It fell on 13 August 1521, when Cuauhtémoc was captured. He was later executed on Cortés's orders, in February 1525, and became in the 19th century Mexico's first national hero, the young emperor who resisted to the end.

The great dying

What followed was one of the worst demographic disasters in human history. How many people lived in Mexico in 1519 is genuinely disputed, and the range is enormous:

Whatever the starting figure, the losses were staggering. A study in the US Centers for Disease Control's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases summarised the reconstructions: smallpox in 1519–20 killed an estimated 5 to 8 million people; two later epidemics that the Nahua called cocoliztli ("pestilence"), in 1545–48 and 1576–80, killed perhaps 7 to 17 million more. The 1545 outbreak alone may have killed up to 80% of the surviving native population. Its cause is still debated: the authors argued for a native haemorrhagic fever made worse by megadrought, while later genetic studies have pointed to a form of Salmonella that causes enteric fever. Either way, it was not only the famous Old World diseases.

War, forced labour, famine, displacement and the shattering of communities made every epidemic worse. The Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas denounced the abuses, and the crown's New Laws of 1542 tried to rein in the worst, as the library's Spanish piece 1492: El choque de dos mundos describes. But the population of central Mexico did not recover to its pre-conquest level for centuries.

The conquest was fought mainly by Indigenous armies, won partly by a Nahua woman's words and decided above all by microbes no one could see. None of that makes it less a conquest.

Part 3 — New Spain: silver, saints and the casta order (1521–1810)

The Spaniards built their capital squarely on top of Tenochtitlan, using its stones. Mexico City's cathedral stands beside the excavated base of the Templo Mayor; you can see both from the same spot in the Zócalo. The new colony was called New Spain, and in 1535 the crown sent its first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, to govern it. At its greatest extent the Viceroyalty of New Spain stretched from today's New Mexico and California to Costa Rica, and also governed the Spanish Caribbean and, across the Pacific, the Philippines.

Silver

What made New Spain matter to Spain was silver. Between 1546 and 1552 prospectors found the great lodes of Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Pachuca, and by the late 16th century silver made up some 80% of New Spain's exports, according to the Library of Congress country study. Mexican silver, minted into the famous pieces of eight, flowed east to Seville and west across the Pacific: from 1565 to 1815 the Manila galleon sailed between Acapulco and Manila, trading American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain. For two and a half centuries, a coin struck in Mexico City was ordinary money from Boston to Canton. (How big Mexico's share of the world's silver was varied a lot by century: by one economic historians' reconstruction, about a quarter in the 1600s, when Peru and Bolivia led, more than half in the 1700s, after Mexico overtook them, and over 60% in the first decade of the 1800s. For the colonial era as a whole, Spanish America, Mexico plus Peru and Bolivia, is the safer subject of superlatives.)

The silver was dug by Indigenous and mixed-race workers, first under the encomienda (grants of the labour and tribute of whole communities to conquistadors), then under the repartimiento, a rotating forced-labour draft, and increasingly for wages, debts and contracts. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were also brought to New Spain, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, to work in mines, sugar mills, workshops and households. Their descendants are part of the Mexican population today, although for a long time the national story barely mentioned them; only in recent decades has Mexico begun counting Afro-Mexicans in its official statistics.

The casta order

Colonial society was ranked by birth and colour, though less rigidly than the famous paintings suggest. At the top were peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain), who held the highest posts. Below them, and resenting it, were criollos (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas), who owned much of the land and mines. Then came the castas, people of mixed ancestry (mestizos, mulattos and dozens of named combinations), then Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans.

The 18th-century cuadros de castas, series of paintings showing "from Spaniard and Indian, a mestizo" and so on through sixteen combinations, are often taken as a portrait of a rigid caste system. Historians now read them more cautiously, as the library's Spanish piece El virreinato explains: they were partly an exotic genre painted for European buyers, and archive records show people changing category in their lifetimes through wealth, marriage or simply how a priest chose to write them down.

Indigenous communities were legally a separate "republic", with their own councils, lands and courts, protected from the Inquisition and charged a head tax. That legal shield kept many villages and their common lands alive for three centuries, a fact that matters for the land battles of 1910.

Saints and syncretism

The Church was the colony's other great institution: it ran schools, hospitals and charity, owned vast estates and lent money like a bank. Its most enduring creation was the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Tradition holds that in December 1531 the Virgin appeared to an Indigenous man, Juan Diego, at Tepeyac hill and left her image on his cloak. Devotion at a chapel there is documented by 1556, when the archbishop praised it and the head of the Franciscans preached against it; the full written narratives were printed in 1648 and 1649. Historians debate how the story grew, and some argue the site continued an older devotion to the goddess Tonantzin, a link others dispute. For believers, none of this touches the heart of it. The library's Spanish piece La Virgen de Guadalupe takes the debate in full; what matters here is that the dark-skinned Virgin became the emblem of a people who were neither Spanish nor Indigenous but both, and in 1810 she would ride on the rebels' banners.

The colony also produced one of the great writers of the Spanish language, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1648–1695), a self-taught nun-poet whose defence of women's right to learn still reads as fearless.

The Bourbon squeeze

In the 18th century the new Bourbon kings of Spain tried to run the empire more like a business: more taxes, more Spanish-born officials, a standing army, and in 1767 the expulsion of the Jesuits, many of them criollos. In 1804 a forced loan made the Church call in its mortgages, ruining many landowners. Criollos, already shut out of top jobs, felt pushed out of their own country.

Part 4 — Independence, the young republic and the war with the United States (1810–1848)

In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother on the throne. Across Spanish America, people asked the same question: if the king is a prisoner, who rules in his name? In Mexico City the peninsulares answered with a coup against a viceroy they suspected of siding with criollos. The criollos began to conspire.

Hidalgo's cry

One of the conspirators was Miguel Hidalgo, a priest in the small town of Dolores, Guanajuato, known for teaching his parishioners to grow vines and make pottery. When the plot was discovered, he moved first. Before dawn on 16 September 1810 he rang his church bell and called on the people to rise: the Grito de Dolores, re-enacted every year by Mexico's president from the balcony of the National Palace on the night of 15 September. Hidalgo spoke in the name of the captive king Ferdinand VII and against bad government, under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

What followed shocked even him. Tens of thousands of peasants and mine workers joined, and the rising became a social war. At Guanajuato they stormed the granary where Spaniards had taken refuge and killed those inside. Criollos who had wanted autonomy, not revolution, recoiled. Hidalgo's huge, untrained army reached the edge of Mexico City in October 1810 but turned back; it was defeated, and Hidalgo was betrayed, captured and executed by firing squad on 30 July 1811.

Morelos and the long war

Leadership passed to another priest, José María Morelos, a mestizo and a far better general. In 1813 he wrote his Sentimientos de la Nación, and a congress he installed at Chilpancingo declared independence outright on 6 November: sovereignty of the people, abolition of slavery and of caste distinctions, Catholicism as the only religion. Morelos was captured and executed in 1815. By 1820 the insurgency had shrunk to guerrilla bands, the strongest led by Vicente Guerrero in the southern mountains.

Independence from the right

Independence finally came from the side that had fought against it. In 1820 a liberal revolt in Spain forced the king to restore a liberal constitution. Mexico's conservatives, fearing for their privileges, decided they were better off alone. A royalist officer, Agustín de Iturbide, made a deal with Guerrero, and on 24 February 1821 they proclaimed the Plan of Iguala: independence, Catholicism, and equality between Spaniards and Mexicans, the "three guarantees" still remembered in the green, white and red of the flag. On 27 September 1821 Iturbide's army entered Mexico City. Spain did not formally recognise the new country until 1836.

Empire, republic, chaos

Iturbide had himself crowned Emperor Agustín I in 1822 and was overthrown within a year. The 1824 Constitution made Mexico a federal republic of nineteen states and four territories. Its first president, Guadalupe Victoria, finished his term; for decades almost nobody else did. Vicente Guerrero, president in 1829, abolished slavery that September; within two years he had been overthrown and executed. The army, the Church and regional strongmen made and unmade governments. Spain tried to reconquer the country in 1829 and was forced to surrender at Tampico; France attacked Veracruz in 1838 over unpaid claims, in what is remembered as the Pastry War (one of the claims came from a French pastry cook).

The man who dominated the era was Antonio López de Santa Anna, a general who occupied the presidency eleven times between 1833 and 1855, completing none of his terms. He switched from liberal to conservative and back as convenient. In 1836 his supporters replaced federalism with a centralised constitution, the Siete Leyes, and several regions rebelled.

Texas

One of them was Texas. Spain, and then Mexico, had invited American settlers to populate the province, on condition they become Catholic Mexican citizens; they soon far outnumbered the Tejanos. By 1834 an estimated 30,000 Anglo settlers lived there, against about 7,800 Mexican-born residents. Many had brought enslaved people, though Mexico had abolished slavery. When Santa Anna moved to impose central control, the Texans revolted. His army destroyed the defenders of the Alamo in March 1836 and executed several hundred prisoners at Goliad, then was routed at San Jacinto on 21 April 1836. Santa Anna, captured, signed away Texas; Mexico's congress refused to recognise it. The question would explode a decade later.

Mexico won independence in 1821, but it took another half-century to settle what kind of country it would be: monarchy or republic, federal or central, Catholic state or secular one.

The war with the United States, 1846–1848

In early 1845 the US Congress voted to annex Texas, and Mexico broke off relations. The two countries also disagreed about where Texas ended: the United States claimed the Rio Grande, Mexico the Nueces River further north. President James K. Polk, a firm believer in expansion to the Pacific, sent General Zachary Taylor's army into the disputed strip. On 25 April 1846 Mexican cavalry clashed with an American patrol there, and Polk told Congress that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil". A young congressman named Abraham Lincoln challenged the claim and later called it "a bold falsification of history"; the war went ahead anyway.

The fighting

The war was lopsided. American armies took New Mexico and California almost without resistance and won a string of battles in the north. In March 1847 General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz, shelled it into surrender, and marched inland roughly along Cortés's route. Mexico City fell in September 1847 after the storming of Chapultepec Castle, then the military college. Mexican memory holds on to the Niños Héroes, six young cadets said to have died defending it, one supposedly wrapping himself in the flag and leaping from the walls; historians treat the leap as legend, but the cadets' deaths were real.

Mexico's politics never stopped fighting during the war, and Santa Anna, back from exile, lost battle after battle. In the US the war was bitterly contested too, as a war for land and, critics said, for the expansion of slavery. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in it as a lieutenant, wrote in his 1885 memoirs that he regarded it as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation".

The price

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on 2 February 1848, set the border along the Rio Grande and then westward to the Pacific. The US National Archives describes it this way: Mexico ceded 55% of its territory (counting Texas, which it had never recognised losing), including present-day California, Nevada and Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of other states. The United States paid US$15 million and assumed about US$3.25 million of debts Mexico owed to American citizens. Gold was discovered in California just days before the treaty was signed. In 1853–54 Santa Anna, back in power once more, sold another strip in southern Arizona and New Mexico (the Gadsden Purchase) for US$10 million.

The tens of thousands of Mexicans living in the ceded lands were promised citizenship and property rights; many lost their land over the following decades through courts, debts and fraud. "We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us" is still said in the American Southwest.

For Americans the war is a footnote between independence and the Civil War. For Mexicans it is a wound: the moment the country learned how dangerous its northern neighbour could be, and that lesson shapes every negotiation since.

Part 5 — Reform, empire and the Porfiriato (1855–1911)

Defeat discredited the old order. In 1854 liberals in exile and in the provinces proclaimed the Plan of Ayutla against Santa Anna; in August 1855 he resigned for the last time. The generation that took over set out to remake Mexico into a secular republic of citizens equal before the law. They called their project simply La Reforma.

Benito Juárez

Its central figure was Benito Juárez, born on 21 March 1806 in the Zapotec village of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca. Orphaned young, he spoke only Zapotec as a child, moved to the city of Oaxaca at twelve to work as a servant, learned Spanish, trained for the priesthood, switched to law, and became governor of his state. He remains Mexico's most revered president, and his most quoted line still appears on public buildings: "Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace."

The Reform laws

The liberals passed a series of laws aimed at the two great corporate powers of the old Mexico, the Church and the army, and at the communal property that, in their view, kept the economy frozen.

The Ley Lerdo is the hardest to judge. Liberals meant it to create a nation of small private farmers. In practice, when applied to Indigenous villages' common lands, it let speculators and haciendas buy them up, a process that accelerated under Porfirio Díaz and helped light the fire of 1910.

Civil war and a European emperor

Conservatives and the Church hierarchy rejected the 1857 Constitution, and Mexico fell into the War of the Reform (1858–61), which the liberals won; Juárez was elected president in 1861. The treasury was empty, and Juárez suspended payments on foreign debts. Spain, Britain and France sent forces to the Gulf coast to collect. Spain and Britain soon withdrew. France stayed: Emperor Napoleon III wanted a Catholic, Latin, French-aligned empire in the Americas while the United States was paralysed by its own civil war.

On 5 May 1862 a Mexican army under General Ignacio Zaragoza beat the French at Puebla. Cinco de Mayo is a bigger party in the United States than in most of Mexico, but in Puebla it is a matter of pride. The French came back with more troops, took Mexico City in 1863, and invited an Austrian archduke, Maximilian of Habsburg, to become emperor. He and his wife Carlota arrived in June 1864.

Maximilian turned out to be more liberal than the conservatives who had invited him; his embrace of liberal policies cost him his own side's support. Juárez never surrendered, keeping the republic's government alive on the move, as far as the northern border. When the US Civil War ended in 1865, Washington pressed France to leave and let arms flow to Juárez; Napoleon III, facing a threat from Prussia at home, withdrew his army in 1866–67. Maximilian stayed, was captured at Querétaro, and, despite pleas for clemency from across Europe, was shot by firing squad on 19 June 1867.

The Restored Republic

Juárez returned to Mexico City in 1867 and governed until he died of a heart attack on 18 July 1872. The Restored Republic was a time of comparative peace, and the liberal idea of the nation, secular and republican, became the official one. One of Juárez's generals, a hero of the war against the French, rebelled against presidential re-election, first against Juárez and then, under the Plan of Tuxtepec in 1876, against his successor Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. The second time he won. His name was Porfirio Díaz.

Juárez, a Zapotec shepherd boy who became president, defeated an emperor from the most famous royal family in Europe. Every later Mexican government has claimed his inheritance.

The Porfiriato: order and progress, for some

Porfirio Díaz occupied Mexico City on 21 November 1876. Apart from one four-year term (1880–84) when a loyal ally held the presidency, he ruled until 1911. The historian Daniel Cosío Villegas named the period the Porfiriato.

The bargain

Díaz offered Mexico what it had lacked since independence: peace and a functioning state. His slogan was "order and progress", and his method was "pan o palo", bread or the stick: jobs and favours for those who cooperated, the army and the rural police (the rurales) for those who did not. Elections continued to be held and were managed. Díaz was re-elected again and again, first by amending the very no-re-election principle he had rebelled for.

The progress

The economy changed faster than at any time since the conquest. Foreign capital, American, British, French and German, poured into railways, mines, oil and banks. Legal reforms in 1884 allowed foreigners to own subsoil resources. Railways reached the US border and opened the north to cotton and cattle; cotton production doubled between 1887 and 1910. Manufacturing output doubled between 1877 and 1910. Mexico City got electric light, grand avenues and a marble opera house (now the Palacio de Bellas Artes), begun under Díaz and finished long after him. Oil began flowing from the Gulf coast in the early 1900s.

For whom?

The bill was paid in the countryside. Land laws invited private companies to survey "vacant" public land and take a share of it; by 1888 such companies held more than 27.5 million hectares, and by 1894 about a fifth of the national territory. By 1910, according to the Library of Congress country study, most villages had lost their communal lands, a few hundred wealthy families held some 54 million hectares of the best land, and more than half of all rural Mexicans worked on their haciendas, often tied by debts passed from father to son. Despite growth averaging 2.6% a year, real income per head in 1911 was only back to the level of before 1821.

Resistance was crushed. In 1906 striking copper miners at Cananea, Sonora, were put down by Díaz's rural police with help from Arizona Rangers called in from across the border; in 1907 textile strikers at Río Blanco, Veracruz, were shot.

Mexico on paper and in fact

The Porfirian elite looked to Paris for style and to positivist "scientists" (the científicos) for policy, and some of them openly regarded Indigenous Mexicans as an obstacle to progress. Yet the period also produced a national culture: José Guadalupe Posada's satirical prints, including the skeletal Catrina that now leads every Day of the Dead parade, were made for the cheap broadsheets of Díaz's Mexico City.

"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." The line is popularly attributed to Porfirio Díaz, though there is no firm evidence he said it. That it sticks to him makes sense: few rulers did more to tie Mexico to American money.

In 1908 the ageing Díaz told an American journalist, James Creelman, that Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would welcome an opposition party. Mexicans took him at his word. It was a mistake he would not survive politically.

Part 6 — The Revolution and its constitution (1910–1920)

The library's Spanish piece La Revolución Mexicana tells this decade in close detail; here is the arc, and what it left behind.

From an election to a war

In 1910 Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy landowner from Coahuila, ran against Díaz on the slogan "effective suffrage, no re-election". Díaz had him jailed and declared himself the winner. Madero escaped to Texas and issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling for an uprising on 20 November 1910, the date Mexico still commemorates. In the northern state of Chihuahua, Pascual Orozco and a former bandit and cattle rustler named Francisco "Pancho" Villa took up arms; in Morelos, south of the capital, the peasant leader Emiliano Zapata was already leading villagers to retake land from the sugar haciendas. The regime proved hollow. On 25 May 1911 Díaz resigned and sailed for Paris.

Madero became president in November 1911, but for many of his followers elections were not enough. Zapata broke with him within weeks and in November 1911 proclaimed the Plan of Ayala, demanding the return of stolen lands: "Tierra y Libertad". In February 1913 a military coup in the capital, the Decena Trágica (Ten Tragic Days), brought General Victoriano Huerta to power with the help of the US ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson. Madero and his vice-president were murdered on 21 February 1913.

Everyone against Huerta, then everyone against everyone

Almost the whole country rose against Huerta: Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, as "First Chief" of the Constitutionalist army; Álvaro Obregón in Sonora; Villa in Chihuahua; Zapata in the south. The US occupied Veracruz in April 1914. Huerta resigned on 8 July 1914 and fled into exile. Then the winners split. Villa and Zapata stood on one side; Carranza and Obregón on the other. In 1915 Obregón, who had studied the trench warfare of Europe, destroyed Villa's cavalry at Celaya with machine guns and barbed wire. In March 1916 Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and the US Army chased him through Chihuahua for eleven months without catching him.

The people of the Revolution

The Revolution was also a mass migration and a social upheaval. The soldaderas, women who cooked, nursed, carried and fought, followed every army. Hundreds of thousands of people fled north to the United States; many Mexican-American family histories begin there. The war had dark chapters the murals leave out, such as the massacre of more than 300 Chinese residents of Torreón by Maderista troops and a mob in May 1911.

The Constitution of 1917

Carranza's faction won, and it summoned a constitutional congress that opened in Querétaro on 1 December 1916. Villistas and Zapatistas were excluded, yet the delegates, many of them young radicals from the Constitutionalist army, wrote a text far bolder than Carranza wanted. Promulgated on 5 February 1917, it is still Mexico's constitution, amended hundreds of times.

The killing of the leaders

Carranza was sworn in as constitutional president on 1 May 1917, but the killing went on. Zapata was lured into an ambush and shot at Chinameca on 10 April 1919, in an operation planned by Carranza's government. Carranza himself was killed in 1920 while fleeing a revolt by Obregón, who became president that November, the moment many historians take as the end of the armed Revolution. Villa was assassinated in 1923; Obregón, re-elected in 1928, was shot by a Catholic militant before he could take office.

The cost

No one knows exactly how many died. The most-cited figure is about one million. The demographer Robert McCaa estimated about 1.4 million excess deaths between 1910 and 1921, within a plausible range of 0.8 to 1.7 million, plus hundreds of thousands of births that never happened and a large emigration. Mexico's census shows its population falling from 15.2 million in 1910 to 14.3 million in 1921, the only drop in its modern record. Most victims died not in battle but of hunger, epidemics (including the 1918 influenza) and displacement.

Historians still argue whether it was a genuine social revolution or, in one historian's phrase, "a great rebellion" whose northern winners built a new authoritarian state. Probably both are true: the land was eventually redistributed, and the regime that did it used the Revolution's name to stay in power for seventy years.

Part 7 — Building the PRI state: Cárdenas, the miracle and 1968 (1920–1970)

The 1920s belonged to the victorious generals from Sonora. Álvaro Obregón (president 1920–24) began to apply the 1917 Constitution carefully, so as not to provoke the United States: he handed out about 1.2 million hectares to landless villages, a fraction of the eligible land, and his government opened more than 1,000 rural schools and 2,000 public libraries. Its education ministry, under the philosopher José Vasconcelos, also commissioned painters to cover public walls with Mexico's history. Out of that commission came the muralists: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose crowded, angry, heroic frescoes taught a mostly illiterate nation a new story about itself, with Indigenous people and peasants at its centre.

The Cristero War

Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) enforced the Constitution's anticlerical articles strictly. In 1926 the Church answered with an economic boycott, churches closed, and Catholic peasants in the centre-west rose under the cry "¡Viva Cristo Rey!". The Cristero War (1926–29) was brutal on both sides; estimates of the dead run to about 250,000 including civilians, though such figures are uncertain. It ended in a negotiated truce in 1929, in which the laws stayed on the books but were not fully enforced.

The party is born

After Obregón's assassination in 1928, Calles, now the power behind the presidency, created the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) in 1929 to settle succession inside one big tent instead of by rebellion. It was renamed the Party of the Mexican Revolution in 1938 and in 1946 the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The six-year presidential term, the sexenio, was first served in full by Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934. One rule became sacred: the president, however mighty, served a single term and then left, having chosen his successor by the famous dedazo (the tap of the finger).

Lázaro Cárdenas

The general who did more than anyone to make the Revolution's promises real was Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). He broke with Calles and sent him into exile in 1936. He distributed almost 18 million hectares of land, more than all his predecessors combined, mostly as ejidos, communal farms whose members held use rights but could not sell. He organised workers into the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and peasants into their own confederation, and folded both, with the army and the "popular" sector, into the ruling party.

His boldest act came on 18 March 1938, when he expropriated the foreign oil companies, mostly British and American, after they defied a Supreme Court labour ruling. The new state company, Pemex, became a symbol of sovereignty; crowds lined up to donate jewellery, money and even chickens towards the compensation. Cárdenas also gave refuge to tens of thousands of exiles from the Spanish Civil War, who enriched Mexican universities, publishing and science, and to Leon Trotsky, assassinated in Coyoacán in 1940.

The "Mexican miracle"

After Cárdenas, the party turned steadily more pro-business. Mexico joined the Allies in 1942 after German submarines sank two Mexican tankers, and the bracero programme sent hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to American farms from 1942 into the 1960s. Behind high tariffs, and later with a stable peso, industry grew under "import substitution". From the 1940s to around 1970, the economy grew strongly year after year, a run later called the Mexican miracle; World Bank figures, which begin in 1961, show growth averaging almost 7% a year through the 1960s. President Miguel Alemán (1946–52) quadrupled the paved road network and built the great campus of the National Autonomous University (UNAM). In 1953 women won the vote in federal elections, and in 1958 they voted for president for the first time.

Mexico became a different country. Its population more than doubled in less than thirty years, from about 16 million in the mid-1930s to 34.9 million in the 1960 census, as death rates fell faster than birth rates. Millions moved from villages to cities, above all Mexico City. Life expectancy rose from about 54 years in 1960 to 59 by 1970.

The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called it "the perfect dictatorship" in 1990: a dictatorship disguised as a democracy, which changed its dictator every six years. Its defenders answer that it gave Mexico seventy years without coups, while most of Latin America suffered military regimes, and built schools, clinics and a middle class.

1968

The system's mask slipped in the summer of 1968. Student protests against police brutality in Mexico City grew into a mass movement for political freedoms, with a rally in late August that drew an estimated 500,000 people. The Olympic Games, the first held in Latin America, were due to open on 12 October. On 2 October 1968, at a rally of about 5,000 people in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, soldiers and plain-clothes agents opened fire. The government admitted to a few dozen deaths; estimates, as the Library of Congress summarised them, range from several dozen to more than 400. Ten days later the Olympics opened as planned. For a generation, "2 de octubre no se olvida" ("2 October is not forgotten") was the rallying cry of the Mexican left, and the massacre marked the beginning of the regime's long loss of legitimacy.

Part 8 — Oil, debt, earthquakes and NAFTA (1970–2000)

Luis Echeverría (1970–76), interior minister at the time of Tlatelolco, tried to win back the young and the left with spending and Third-World rhetoric. State subsidies ballooned, the government bought stakes in more than a thousand companies, and public foreign debt rose by 450% in six years. In 1976 the peso was devalued for the first time since 1954. Behind the scenes, his government waged a "dirty war" against leftist guerrillas and activists, especially in Guerrero, with disappearances that Mexico has only recently begun to investigate.

The oil boom and "the crisis"

Then came luck, or what looked like it. In the mid-1970s vast oil reserves were found under the Bay of Campeche and in Chiapas and Tabasco. President José López Portillo (1976–82) built his plans on oil. Production tripled between 1976 and 1982, and by 1981 Mexico was the world's fourth-largest oil producer. Foreign banks, flush with petrodollars, lent freely against the oil. When oil prices fell in 1981 and US interest rates soared, the bill came due all at once.

In August 1982 Mexico told its creditors it could not meet its payments, setting off the Latin American debt crisis. In September López Portillo nationalised the banks, blaming them and wealthy Mexicans for capital flight. Inflation passed 100%. The 1980s became Mexico's "lost decade": between 1982 and 1988, the Library of Congress country study reports, real incomes fell by about 40%.

Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) answered with austerity, the first privatisations and a start at opening the economy to trade. Then, on 19 September 1985, a magnitude 8 earthquake struck Mexico City. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people died and some 300,000 lost their homes. The government's slow, secretive response contrasted with the speed with which ordinary citizens dug neighbours out of the rubble, and many historians date the rise of Mexican civil society to those days.

1988: the computer that "crashed"

In 1987 a group of the PRI's left wing, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro, broke away. In the July 1988 election the official count was interrupted by a "system failure", and when it resumed the PRI's Carlos Salinas de Gortari had 50.36%. The opposition, and many observers, believed the election was fraudulent. Cárdenas's supporters founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989, and in the same year the PRI for the first time lost a state governorship, to the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

Salinas, NAFTA and 1994

Salinas, a Harvard-trained economist, ran the most ambitious liberalisation in Mexico's history: hundreds of state firms sold, including the banks and the telephone company; foreign investment welcomed; and in 1992 a reform of Article 27 that allowed ejido land to be sold, formally ending land redistribution. The crowning achievement was the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, in force from 1 January 1994.

That same day, in the jungles and highlands of Chiapas, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), mostly Maya peasants led by a masked spokesman calling himself Subcomandante Marcos, seized several towns, declaring that NAFTA was a death sentence for Indigenous farmers. The fighting lasted about twelve days before a ceasefire; the Zapatistas' communiqués, mixing Maya tradition with sharp humour, made them a global cause. Then, on 23 March 1994, the PRI's presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was shot dead at a rally in Tijuana. In September the party's secretary-general was assassinated too.

The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, took office on 1 December 1994. Nineteen days later, on 20 December, his government devalued the peso, which then collapsed. The "Tequila crisis" forced a rescue of about US$50 billion led by the United States and the IMF, and the economy shrank by about 6% in 1995, according to World Bank figures. Millions of families lost savings, homes and jobs.

The opening

Zedillo, a technocrat with little taste for the old party machine, made a choice with lasting effects: he let democracy happen. Electoral reforms in 1996 made the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) fully independent of the government. In 1997 the PRI lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies for the first time. On 2 July 2000, Vicente Fox of the PAN, a former Coca-Cola executive in cowboy boots, won the presidency with about 43% of the valid vote. Zedillo went on television that night to acknowledge Fox's victory before his own party's candidate had conceded.

After seventy-one years, the PRI handed over power peacefully, without a shot fired. It is one of the quietest revolutions of the twentieth century.

Part 9 — Democracy, the drug war and Mexico in 2026 (2000–2026)

Fox's victory raised hopes that alternation would bring rapid change. It mostly brought gridlock: the PRI and PRD still controlled Congress, and Fox's big reforms stalled. The 2006 election showed how fragile the new democracy was. The PAN's Felipe Calderón beat the PRD's Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, by 0.58 percentage points, about 244,000 votes out of more than 41 million. López Obrador alleged fraud, refused to accept the result, had himself sworn in as "legitimate president" before a huge crowd, and occupied central Mexico City with protest camps for weeks. The electoral tribunal upheld Calderón's win after a partial recount.

The war

Drug trafficking was not new. Mexican growers had supplied American marijuana and heroin for decades, and in the 1980s and 1990s Mexican organisations took over much of the route for Colombian cocaine. Under the PRI, critics and some later testimony say, traffickers operated with arrangements of tolerance and payment with officials. Democracy and the fragmentation of power broke those arrangements, and gangs fought for routes and towns.

In December 2006, days into his term, Calderón sent thousands of soldiers and federal police into his home state of Michoacán, the start of what became known as the war on drugs. Troops were deployed across the country; capos were killed or extradited. The cartels split and multiplied. The violence that followed is measured in a grim series of numbers.

Sources: World Bank / UNODC series; INEGI for 2022.

Behind the homicide figures stands a second toll: the disappeared. Mexico's official register counted more than 130,000 missing people in 2025, a total that includes cases since 1952 but is overwhelmingly from the drug-war years, according to Human Rights Watch. Groups of mothers, the madres buscadoras, now search hillsides with shovels and iron rods for clandestine graves. In 2025 one such group found a ranch near Teuchitlán, Jalisco, with hundreds of shoes and human remains.

The case that became a national symbol was Ayotzinapa: on the night of 26 September 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, local police detained 43 students from a rural teachers' college and handed them over, according to the official investigations, to a criminal group. They were never seen alive again. The government of Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI, 2012–18) announced a "historical truth" that international forensic experts later discredited, and the case is still open.

Peña Nieto's term also brought the Pacto por México, a cross-party deal that passed major reforms, including a 2013 energy reform that opened oil and gas to private and foreign investment for the first time since 1938. It also brought corruption scandals, including the "White House" affair over a mansion built for his wife by a government contractor, that sank the PRI's credibility.

López Obrador and the "Fourth Transformation"

In July 2018 López Obrador won the presidency at his third attempt, with about 55% of the valid vote, at the head of a new party he had founded, Morena. He called his project the Fourth Transformation, the successor to Independence, the Reform and the Revolution. He gave daily morning press conferences (the mañaneras), raised the minimum wage sharply, created universal pensions for the elderly and scholarships for students, built a new airport, refinery and the Tren Maya railway around the Yucatán, and reversed much of the 2013 energy opening in favour of Pemex and the state electricity company. Human Rights Watch credits his government with lifting 13 million people out of poverty; the World Bank's figures show the share living below the national poverty line falling from 43.9% in 2020 to 29.6% in 2024.

His critics, including Human Rights Watch, describe the same years as democratic backsliding: attacks on the electoral institute, the courts and independent regulators, the National Guard placed under army command, and the military given control of ports, customs, airports and railways. On security his slogan was "abrazos, no balazos" ("hugs, not bullets"), meaning attacking the social causes of crime; homicides stayed near record levels throughout his term.

Mexico's two big stories of the 21st century, democracy and violence, arrived together. Political scientists still argue how far one caused the other.

Mexico in 2026

On 2 June 2024, Morena's Claudia Sheinbaum, an energy and climate-change scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering and a former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with nearly 36 million votes, about 60% of the total, and took office on 1 October 2024 as the first woman to lead Mexico. Her coalition won 73% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and soon a two-thirds majority in the Senate as well, enough to amend the constitution.

The judicial reform

The most consequential change of the new era was passed in September 2024 at the end of López Obrador's term: a constitutional amendment requiring all federal and state judges, including Supreme Court justices, to be chosen by popular vote. The first judicial elections took place on 1 June 2025, with turnout of about 13%, the lowest in Mexico's democratic history. Supporters say the old judiciary was elitist, corrupt and unaccountable and that voters should choose judges. Critics, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges, warn that elections dominated by the governing party undermine the courts' independence and public confidence in justice.

Security

Sheinbaum's government, with Omar García Harfuch as security chief, reported in mid-2025 that the daily average of homicides had fallen by about a quarter since she took office. Human Rights Watch put the official 2024 homicide rate at more than 25 per 100,000, among the highest in the world, and disappearances remained a grave problem. Fighting between factions of the Sinaloa cartel, after one of its kingpins was taken to the United States and detained in July 2024, killed more than 1,800 people in Sinaloa within about a year, according to official figures. On 22 February 2026 the military killed El Mencho in the mountains of Jalisco, triggering roadblocks across central Mexico.

The United States, again

The second Trump administration made Mexico the test case of its trade and security policy. It designated the major cartels as terrorist organisations in February 2025, pressed Mexico to hand over dozens of suspects, and wielded tariffs; in July 2026 it imposed new 10–12.5% tariffs on its sixty largest trading partners. On 1 July 2026, the date of the USMCA's six-year joint review, it announced it would not renew the agreement and would instead open a decade of annual reviews and renegotiation; the treaty stays in force unless a member withdraws, and is due to expire in 2036 if not renewed. By February 2026, under US pressure, Mexico had halted oil shipments to Cuba, while continuing humanitarian aid. Sheinbaum's style has been to negotiate quietly, concede on security cooperation and avoid open confrontation, a stance that has kept her approval high at home.

The country in numbers

The year of the World Cup

From 11 June to 19 July 2026 Mexico co-hosted the World Cup, its third, with the United States and Canada. For a few weeks the country's image abroad was football, not cartels, and the government made the most of it. The structural questions did not pause: how independent the newly elected courts will be, whether the security gains will last, and whether the annual USMCA reviews will turn into a slow renegotiation of the North American economy.

Part 10 — How to understand Mexico today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. Mestizaje is a story Mexico tells about itself, and a contested one. After the Revolution, thinkers like Vasconcelos (La raza cósmica, 1925) made the mixed-race mestizo the national ideal, and murals and schoolbooks spread it. It celebrated the Indigenous past while often expecting living Indigenous people to assimilate. Today Mexico officially recognises dozens of Indigenous languages and its Afro-Mexican population, and many Mexicans now describe their identity as plural rather than blended. The argument between "one mestizo nation" and "a nation of many peoples" runs through politics, schooling and the census.

2. The land question never closed. From the calpolli to the Ley Lerdo to the haciendas, to Zapata, Cárdenas's ejidos and Salinas's 1992 reform, who owns the land and on what terms has been the single most persistent fight in Mexican history. In Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, disputes over communal land, mining concessions and water still drive conflict.

3. Sovereignty is a reflex, and the United States is the reason. The 1848 war, the US role in Madero's murder, the 1914 occupation of Veracruz and the 1916 Punitive Expedition taught Mexicans to guard their oil, their soil and their dignity. Yet the two economies are welded together by trade, by some US$65 billion a year in remittances, and by tens of millions of people of Mexican origin living in the United States. Every Mexican leader has to be both close and proud.

4. Strong presidents, weak checks, recurring pendulum. Santa Anna, Díaz and the PRI each answered chaos with concentrated power; Madero, the 1990s reformers and the electoral institute tried to spread it out. Morena's supporters see their reforms as finally putting power in the hands of the majority that votes for them; critics see the PRI's old dominance returning in new form. Which way the pendulum swings next is the central question of Mexican democracy.

5. Death and memory are part of everyday life. The Day of the Dead, with its marigolds and sugar skulls, mixes Mesoamerican and Catholic traditions; Posada's Catrina mocks the vanity of the living. Mexico remembers out loud: 2 October 1968, 19 September 1985 (and the second deadly earthquake on the same date in 2017), the 43 of Ayotzinapa. It is a country that keeps its dead close, which is one reason the disappeared are such an open wound.

Mexico is not a country that has a history so much as a country made of several histories at once, Mesoamerican, colonial, liberal, revolutionary, democratic, still talking over each other at the same dinner table.

The takeaway

Mexico was a cradle of civilisation for three thousand years before Cortés, and its conquest was fought mainly by Indigenous armies and won above all by epidemics that killed most of its people. Three centuries of New Spain built a silver economy, a Catholic and mixed-race society and a ranked order of castas. Independence (1810–21) opened half a century of war over what kind of nation to be, including the loss of half its territory to the United States, before Juárez's Reform and the defeat of a French-imposed emperor settled it as a secular republic. Díaz's modernisation dispossessed the countryside; the Revolution of 1910–20 killed perhaps 1.4 million people and wrote a constitution promising land, schools and labour rights; the PRI delivered much of it while ruling for seventy-one years. Since 2000 Mexico has been a democracy, and a country fighting cartels whose violence has killed and disappeared hundreds of thousands. Its arguments today, about land, power, identity and the United States, are the ones its history keeps returning to.

Try this: next time you eat a tortilla, a taco or a bar of chocolate, trace it backwards through this piece: the Mesoamerican farmers who bred the maize and cacao, the Spanish wheat and pork that joined them, the 1940s migration that took the taco north. Then find one thing in your own city named after a person in the "Who's who" table. Mexico's history is usually closer than it looks.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Tim L. Merrill and Ramón Miró (eds.), Mexico: A Country Study (Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1996), historical chapters, via countrystudies.us: ancient Mexico, the Aztec, conquest (eleven ships, over 700 men), encomienda and colonial administration (silver as 80% of exports), independence, Texas and the 1846–48 war, the Reform and French intervention, the Porfiriato (land figures, growth), the Revolution, Obregón, Calles, Cárdenas (18 million hectares; oil expropriation), Alemán, Tlatelolco (estimates from several dozen to more than 400 dead), the 1976 and 1982 crises, the 1985 earthquake (5,000–10,000 dead) and the 1988 election.
- US National Archives, "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)", Milestone Documents (55% of territory ceded, counting Texas).
- A. Calderón, R. Dobado, A. García-Hiernaux and J. Flores Zendejas, paper for the III Seminar in Economic History, Bank of Spain (5 October 2017; a preliminary version), table of world silver output by century (New Spain about 24% in 1601–1700, 57% in 1701–1800 and 62% in 1801–1810).
- Rodolfo Acuña-Soto et al., "Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico", Emerging Infectious Diseases 8(4), 2002 (CDC): epidemic death estimates.
- Robert McCaa, "Missing Millions: The Demographic Costs of the Mexican Revolution", Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19(2), 2003.
- INEGI, Defunciones por homicidio, enero a diciembre de 2022 (press release 418/23, 25 July 2023).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026): population, GDP, growth, life expectancy, fertility, homicide rate (UNODC), national poverty headcount, personal remittances.
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Mexico chapter (judicial reform and elections, homicide rate, Sinaloa, disappearances, poverty reduction).
- 2026 events: El País English (killing of El Mencho, 22 February 2026); NBC News and CNBC (US decision not to renew USMCA, 1 July 2026); BBC News (new US tariffs, 24 July 2026); The Guardian (roadblocks after El Mencho's death); Anadolu Agency (halt of oil shipments to Cuba, 10 February 2026). Estimates of pre-conquest population follow the scholarly table compiled from Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492; Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya and Mexica details cross-checked against the World History Encyclopedia and the Library of Congress study.

Go deeper
- 📘 Mexico: Biography of Power — Enrique Krauze (the lives of Mexico's rulers from 1810 to 1996, told by its leading liberal historian)
- 📘 Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs — Camilla Townsend (the Mexica told from their own Nahuatl-language annals; overturns many conquest myths)
- 📘 The Mexican Revolution — Alan Knight (the definitive two-volume modern history; demanding but unmatched)
- 📘 The Labyrinth of Solitude — Octavio Paz (the classic essay on Mexican identity, masks and the fiesta of death)
- 📘 Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans — Alan Riding (a journalist's portrait of the PRI-era country, still sharp on the US relationship)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Mexico: A Condensed History of Empires, Revolution, and Identity; If I Was Born in Mexico: Family, Tacos, and the Living Memory of Ancestors; A Brief History of Venezuela in this series; and in Spanish, Antes de Colón: Las Grandes Civilizaciones, 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos, El Virreinato: Cómo Se Gobernaba un Imperio, La Revolución Mexicana: La Guerra que Hizo el México Moderno, La Virgen de Guadalupe: Historia, Fe y Debate Histórico and México: Historia Condensada de Imperios, Revolución e Identidad.