The history of Mexico

Mexico is one of the places where civilisation was invented independently. Over three thousand years before Europeans arrived, the peoples of Mesoamerica domesticated maize, built cities and pyramids, devised writing and calendars, and created a succession of states from the Olmecs and Teotihuacan to the Maya kingdoms and the Aztec Empire. The Spanish conquest of 1519–1521 and the epidemics that followed destroyed much of that world and made the land the core of New Spain, the richest colony of the Spanish crown. Independent from 1821, Mexico lost half its territory to the United States, fought off a French invasion, endured the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and then the first great social revolution of the twentieth century. The single party born of that revolution ruled until 2000, and the country has since been a competitive democracy, a manufacturing partner of the United States and the scene of a long war against drug cartels.

People reached what is now Mexico at least 13,000 years ago, moving south from Asia through the Americas, and some contested cave sites suggest a far earlier arrival. Early bands hunted mammoth, horse and deer around the lakes of the Valley of Mexico, and as the climate warmed at the end of the last Ice Age they turned increasingly to wild plants.

Mexico became one of the world's centres of the Neolithic Revolution. In the Balsas River valley of the southwest, people bred a wild grass called teosinte into maize about 9,000 years ago, and squash, beans, chilli peppers, avocados, tomatoes and cacao followed. Maize, beans and squash, grown together, became the basis of every later Mesoamerican society. With no herd animals apart from the turkey and the dog, farming depended on human labour, and villages of pottery-making farmers had spread across southern Mexico by about 2000 BCE.

The first civilisation of Mesoamerica arose in the hot, wet lowlands of the southern Gulf Coast, in today's Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmecs, as archaeologists call them (their own name is unknown), built their first great centre at San Lorenzo around 1200 BCE. After San Lorenzo declined around 900 BCE, La Venta took its place, with an earthen pyramid more than 30 metres high. Their best-known works are the colossal heads, carved from basalt boulders dragged many kilometres from the Tuxtla mountains; seventeen are known, each apparently the portrait of a ruler.

Olmec art spread far beyond the Gulf Coast, from the Valley of Mexico to Guerrero and Central America, though whether this reflects trade, religion or political power is debated. Many features of later Mesoamerica appear first in Olmec contexts: the ball game played with a rubber ball, the jaguar and feathered serpent in religion, and early forms of the calendar and of writing. By about 400 BCE La Venta had been abandoned, but the Olmec legacy lived on in the cultures that followed.

Around 500 BCE the Zapotecs of Oaxaca levelled the top of a mountain and built Monte Albán, a capital of plazas, temples and ball courts that dominated the valleys of Oaxaca for more than a thousand years. Its carved stones include some of the earliest Mesoamerican writing and calendar dates. The neighbouring Mixtecs later produced some of the few painted books to survive from before the conquest.

In the highlands northeast of today's capital, Teotihuacan grew from about 100 BCE into the greatest city of the ancient Americas. Laid out on a grid along the Avenue of the Dead, it contained the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, and at its height in the fifth and sixth centuries perhaps 100,000 or more people lived in its multi-family apartment compounds. Its obsidian and pottery reached across Mesoamerica, and Maya inscriptions record that in 378 CE a warlord from the west, almost certainly linked to Teotihuacan, arrived at Tikal and installed a new dynasty there. Who the Teotihuacanos were is still uncertain. Around 550 CE the ceremonial centre was burned, possibly in an internal revolt, and the city slowly shrank.

The Maya civilisation spread across southeastern Mexico and neighbouring Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Maya farmers had lived in the region for millennia before kingdoms appeared in the late Preclassic period, and in the Classic period, roughly 250 to 900 CE, dozens of city-states ruled by divine kings competed for power. In what is now Mexico, Calakmul was the seat of the Snake dynasty, the great rival of Tikal, while Palenque reached its height under Kʼinich Janaab Pakal, who ruled from 615 to 683 and was buried in a jade mask beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions.

The Maya developed the most complete writing system of the pre-Columbian Americas, able to record any sentence of their language, and used it on stone monuments, painted pottery and bark-paper books. Their astronomers tracked the cycles of Venus, and their Long Count calendar used a symbol for zero. In the ninth century most southern lowland cities were abandoned in what is called the Classic Maya collapse, probably the result of warfare, overpopulation and severe drought acting together. In the northern Yucatán Peninsula, however, cities such as Uxmal and Chichén Itzá flourished, and after Chichén Itzá declined, Mayapán led a league of Yucatec lords until it fell in about 1441. The Maya were never united into one state, which made their conquest by Spain slow and piecemeal, and millions of Maya people live in Mexico today.

After the decline of Teotihuacan, central Mexico was divided among regional powers such as Xochicalco and Cacaxtla, and new peoples speaking Nahuatl moved in from the north. From about 950 the Toltecs ruled from Tula, in today's state of Hidalgo, where columns carved as warriors still stand on top of a pyramid. Later Aztec tradition remembered the Toltecs as a golden people, and the word Toltec came to mean a skilled artisan. Strong similarities between the architecture of Tula and Chichén Itzá suggest close contact, though historians disagree about who influenced whom. Tula was sacked and abandoned around 1150.

In the centuries that followed, the Valley of Mexico was crowded with rival city-states. Further west, the Purépecha, or Tarascans, built a powerful kingdom based at Tzintzuntzan near Lake Pátzcuaro. They were skilled metalworkers, and in about 1479 they inflicted a heavy defeat on the Aztecs, who never conquered them.

The Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people who said they came from a homeland called Aztlán in the north, arrived in the Valley of Mexico in the thirteenth century as poor latecomers serving the more powerful Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco. According to their own history, they founded Tenochtitlan in 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco, where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus, the image now on Mexico's flag. They expanded the island with chinampas, raised fields built from lake mud, and connected it to the shore with causeways.

In 1428, under Itzcoatl, the Mexica overthrew Azcapotzalco and formed the Triple Alliance with Texcoco, whose king Nezahualcoyotl was renowned as a poet and lawgiver, and Tlacopan. This alliance created the Aztec Empire, which under rulers such as Moctezuma I and Ahuitzotl extended its reach from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific and south to the borders of Guatemala. It was a tribute empire rather than a centralised state: conquered city-states kept their own rulers but sent cotton cloth, cacao, feathers, gold and food to Tenochtitlan, recorded in tribute lists of some 38 provinces.

By 1519 Tenochtitlan had perhaps 200,000 inhabitants, more than any city in Spain. At its centre stood the Templo Mayor, the twin temple of the war god Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc. Aztec civilisation had schools for nobles and commoners and a rich poetry in Nahuatl. Its religion held that the gods needed human blood to keep the sun moving, and the Aztecs sacrificed captives, many taken in ritual "flower wars" with Tlaxcala, on a scale unmatched in the region. Heavy tribute and sacrifice left many subject peoples hostile, a weakness the Spanish would exploit.

Thirty years after Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean, Spanish expeditions from Cuba began exploring the Mexican coast. In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed near today's Veracruz with about 500 men, horses and cannon. With the help of Malintzin, a Nahua woman given to the Spanish as a slave who became his interpreter, he learned of the empire's divisions and won the Totonacs and then the Tlaxcalans as allies. At Cholula, Spanish and Tlaxcalan forces massacred thousands of people. On 8 November 1519 the Spanish entered Tenochtitlan, where the emperor Moctezuma II received them as guests, and they soon took him hostage.

In May 1520, while Cortés was away, his deputy Pedro de Alvarado massacred Aztec nobles during a festival at the Templo Mayor, and the city rose against the Spanish. Moctezuma was killed in the fighting, and on the night of 30 June the Spanish fled across the causeways, losing hundreds of men in what they called the Noche Triste. Then smallpox, brought from the Caribbean, swept through central Mexico and killed Moctezuma's successor, Cuitláhuac. Cortés regrouped in Tlaxcala, built boats to control the lake and returned with tens of thousands of Indigenous warriors. After a siege of nearly three months, during which much of the city was destroyed, the last emperor, Cuauhtémoc, was captured, and the fall of Tenochtitlan on 13 August 1521 ended the empire. The conquest was as much a revolt of Mesoamerican peoples against the Aztecs as a Spanish victory, but it was Spain that inherited the empire.

The catastrophe that followed was demographic. Smallpox, measles, typhus and the epidemics known as cocoliztli in 1545 and 1576, together with war, forced labour and the disruption of farming, reduced the Indigenous population of central Mexico by around 90 per cent within a century, by most estimates from many millions to little more than one million. The Columbian exchange brought wheat, cattle, horses and sheep to Mexico and sent maize, tomatoes, chocolate and chilli peppers around the world.

The conquered land became the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the jewel of the Spanish Empire, with its first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, arriving in 1535 to govern in the name of Charles V. Its authority eventually stretched from Central America to California and across the Pacific to the Philippines. Mexico City was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, its cathedral rising beside the remains of the Templo Mayor. Spaniards were granted the labour and tribute of Indigenous communities through the encomienda, a system the New Laws of 1542 tried to restrain, and Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars converted millions to Christianity, sometimes protecting Indigenous people and sometimes destroying their temples and books.

Silver was New Spain's great wealth. After strikes at Zacatecas in 1546 and at Guanajuato, Mexican mines became, with those of Peru, the main source of the silver that financed Spain's wars under Philip II and his successors and, through the Manila galleons that sailed between Acapulco and the Philippines from 1565, flowed on to China. Indigenous communities survived across the south and centre, often keeping their languages and village lands, while a new society of mestizos, criollos (American-born Spaniards) and people of African descent grew up around them. Tens of thousands of Africans were brought to New Spain through the Atlantic slave trade, and near Veracruz an African-born rebel leader, Yanga, won recognition of a free town for his followers in the early seventeenth century.

In the eighteenth century the Bourbon kings tightened control, raised taxes, expelled the Jesuits in 1767 and favoured Spanish-born officials over criollos, who resented their exclusion and were reading the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The crisis came from Europe. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and deposed its king, colonial authority was thrown into confusion. On 16 September 1810 Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores, called his parishioners to revolt under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Tens of thousands of peasants joined him and sacked Guanajuato, but the violence alarmed the criollo elite, and Hidalgo was captured and executed in 1811. Another priest, José María Morelos, led a more organised insurgency, called a congress that declared independence in 1813 and demanded the abolition of slavery and caste distinctions, but he too was executed, in 1815. Vicente Guerrero kept the rebellion alive in the south.

Independence finally came from a conservative officer, Agustín de Iturbide, who had fought the insurgents. In 1821 he allied with Guerrero under the Plan of Iguala, which promised independence, the Catholic faith and equality between Spaniards and Mexicans, and in September his Army of the Three Guarantees entered Mexico City. It was part of the wider Spanish American wars of independence. Iturbide had himself crowned emperor in 1822 but was forced out within a year. A federal constitution in 1824 made Mexico a republic, and in 1829 President Guerrero, himself of mixed African and Indigenous descent, abolished slavery.

The young republic was unstable and nearly bankrupt. Liberals favouring a federal, secular state fought conservatives who wanted central government and a powerful Church and army. The dominant figure was the general Antonio López de Santa Anna, who held the presidency on and off about a dozen times between 1833 and 1855. In 1835 American settlers who had been invited into Texas rebelled, while Comanche raids devastated the north. Santa Anna took the Alamo in March 1836 but was defeated and captured at San Jacinto a few weeks later, and Texas became an independent republic.

When the United States annexed Texas in 1845 and claimed the Rio Grande as its border, war followed. From 1846 American armies occupied California and New Mexico, advanced into the north and in 1847 landed at Veracruz and fought their way to the capital, which fell in September after the storming of Chapultepec Castle, defended in Mexican memory by the young cadets known as the Niños Héroes. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 gave the United States California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, in exchange for 15 million dollars: about half of Mexico's territory, counting Texas. At the same time, the Maya of Yucatán rose against the descendants of Spanish settlers in the Caste War, which began in 1847 and lasted in some form until 1901.

The defeat discredited the old order. In 1855 a liberal revolt drove Santa Anna into exile, and a new generation of liberals passed laws, known as the Reform, that abolished the special courts of the clergy and army and forced the sale of Church and communal lands, followed by the constitution of 1857. Their leader was Benito Juárez, a Zapotec from a mountain village in Oaxaca who had been orphaned as a child, learned Spanish only at the age of twelve and became a lawyer and governor. Conservatives rejected the constitution, and in the Reform War of 1858 to 1861 Juárez led the liberal government from Veracruz until it won. The forced sale of communal lands, however, also began to strip many Indigenous villages of their land.

Bankrupt after the war, Juárez suspended payments on foreign debts in 1861. France under Napoleon III, with the American Civil War preventing any American response, sent an army to install a friendly monarchy. The French were beaten at Puebla on 5 May 1862, the victory still celebrated as Cinco de Mayo, but they took Mexico City the next year, and in 1864 conservatives welcomed Maximilian, an archduke of the Habsburg family, as emperor of Mexico. When the American Civil War ended, the United States pressed France to leave, and Napoleon III, facing threats in Europe, withdrew his troops. Maximilian stayed, was captured at Querétaro and was shot in June 1867. Juárez governed the restored republic until his death in 1872.

In 1876 Porfirio Díaz, a liberal general and hero of the war against the French, seized power. Apart from a four-year interval when an ally held the presidency, he ruled until 1911, a period known as the Porfiriato. His government built more than 19,000 kilometres of railway, attracted British, American and French investment in mines, oil and plantations, and gave Mexico political stability for the first time since independence. The costs fell on the poor. Rural police suppressed dissent, elections were staged, and a vast transfer of land left most rural families without any. The Yaqui people of Sonora, who resisted, were deported in thousands to work on henequen plantations in Yucatán. Strikes at Cananea in 1906 and Río Blanco in 1907 were crushed.

When Díaz, aged nearly eighty, had himself re-elected in 1910, the wealthy northern landowner Francisco Madero called for an uprising on 20 November. Rebellions spread across the country, and Díaz resigned in May 1911. Madero became president, but he moved too slowly for land reform: in the southern state of Morelos, Emiliano Zapata, a village leader whose people had lost their land to sugar plantations, launched the Plan of Ayala demanding that land be returned to the villages. In February 1913 General Victoriano Huerta overthrew Madero, who was murdered. Northern revolutionaries led by Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón and the former bandit Pancho Villa rose against Huerta, and the United States occupied Veracruz in 1914. Huerta fled that July.

The victors then fought each other. Villa and Zapata briefly held Mexico City, but Obregón defeated Villa at Celaya in 1915 using trench warfare and machine guns learned from World War I. Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916 brought an American punitive expedition into the north. The constitution of 1917, still in force, gave the nation ownership of land and subsoil resources, authorised land reform, guaranteed workers' rights and imposed strict limits on the Church. Zapata was ambushed and killed in 1919, and Carranza in 1920. The revolution's death toll is usually estimated at up to a million, out of a population of about 15 million.

Obregón and then Plutarco Elías Calles governed in the 1920s. The education minister José Vasconcelos sent teachers into the countryside and commissioned the murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, which made the revolution and the Indigenous past into national myths. Calles's enforcement of anticlerical laws provoked the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929, a Catholic rebellion in the west that cost tens of thousands of lives. After Obregón was assassinated in 1928, Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party in 1929 to bring the revolutionary generals into one organisation; renamed in 1938 and again in 1946, it became the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI.

Lázaro Cárdenas, president from 1934 to 1940, carried out the revolution's promises more fully than anyone. He distributed about 18 million hectares of land, much of it as ejidos, communal farms, and on 18 March 1938 he nationalised the oil industry owned by British and American companies, creating Pemex. In the years after the Great Depression, Mexico also took in tens of thousands of refugees from the civil war in Spain, as well as Leon Trotsky, who was murdered in Mexico City in 1940. In World War II Mexico declared war on the Axis in 1942 after German submarines sank its tankers, sent a fighter squadron to the Philippines and supplied workers to American farms through the bracero programme.

From the 1940s to the 1970s the PRI presided over the "Mexican miracle", decades of growth of around six per cent a year built on industry protected from imports. The party absorbed unions, peasants and business, changed presidents every six years with no re-election, and won almost every election, by fraud when necessary. During the Cold War Mexico kept an independent foreign policy, refused to break with Cuba after the revolution there that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had planned in exile in Mexico City. Repression was real, however. On 2 October 1968, ten days before the Olympic Games opened in Mexico City, soldiers fired on a student rally at Tlatelolco, killing an unknown number of people, probably several hundred, and a "dirty war" against leftist guerrillas followed in the 1970s.

An oil boom in the late 1970s ended in a debt crisis in 1982, and the government's slow response to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which killed thousands, deepened public anger. In 1988 Carlos Salinas won the presidency in an election marked by a suspicious computer "crash" during the count. Salinas privatised state companies and negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. On the day it took effect, 1 January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, made up largely of Maya peasants, rose in Chiapas, demanding Indigenous rights and land; the fighting lasted days, but the movement endured. That year the PRI's presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated, and in December the peso collapsed.

Reforms in the 1990s gave Mexico an independent electoral authority, and in 2000 Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party won the presidency, ending seventy-one years of one-party rule. His successor, Felipe Calderón, sent the army against the drug cartels in December 2006, beginning a war that has since killed well over 100,000 people and left more than 100,000 missing. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa near Iguala in 2014, under the returned PRI government of Enrique Peña Nieto, provoked nationwide protests. In 2018 Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist, won the presidency for his new party, Morena, which has dominated politics since. The free trade agreement was renewed in 2020 as the USMCA.

Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador's successor and a former mayor of Mexico City, won the 2024 election in a landslide and took office on 1 October 2024 as Mexico's first woman president. A judicial reform passed in 2024 made judges, including the Supreme Court, elected by popular vote, and the first judicial elections were held in 2025. Her presidency has been shaped by relations with the second Trump administration, which threatened heavy tariffs on Mexican goods in 2025, and by continuing cartel violence. In 2026 Mexico co-hosted the football World Cup with the United States and Canada, becoming the first country to host the men's tournament three times. With some 130 million people, Mexico is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world and home to millions of speakers of Nahuatl, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec and other Indigenous languages.