A capital standing on a vanished lake
Mexico's heart lies on a lake that has almost disappeared. Around 1325 the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan on a small, swampy island in Lake Texcoco. Its farmers raised food on chinampas, man-made planting islands.
Spanish rule turned the lake into an enemy. Mexico City rose on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, and from 1607 a drainage system called the Desagüe set about emptying the basin. It did not spare the city the floods of 1629 and 1630, when buildings collapsed, but the lake was drawn off in the end and streets spread across its bed.
The bill is still arriving. Some 20 million people now live in the Mexico City area, above an aquifer pumped so hard that the old lakebed is compacting under them. Around 2000, parts of the metropolis were sinking by about 35 centimetres a year. The Angel of Independence, raised in 1910, has needed 14 extra steps at its base as the ground drops. The same soft sediments magnify earthquakes. The earthquake of 19 September 1985 struck off the Pacific coast, more than 350 kilometres away, yet it devastated the city. About 5,000 bodies were formally certified, and other estimates run many times higher.
Maize, conquest and catastrophe
An older foundation lies in a plant. A rock shelter in the Balsas Valley of southwestern Mexico holds maize remains and grinding tools at least 8,700 years old, from a crop bred out of a wild grass, Balsas teosinte. By about 2000 BCE corn was the region's staple, and it has stayed so ever since.
The Aztec state fell to a coalition as much as to Spain. Hernán Cortés fought alongside Tlaxcala, Texcoco, the Totonacs and other Indigenous peoples, many of them once subjugated by the Aztecs. Smallpox killed the Aztec ruler Cuitláhuac in 1520, and Tenochtitlan surrendered on 13 August 1521.
Then came demographic collapse. A 2002 study in a US Centers for Disease Control journal estimates that smallpox killed 5 to 8 million people in 1519 and 1520, and that the disease known as cocoliztli killed 5 to 15 million from 1545, up to 80 percent of the native population. Under the encomienda system, its authors write, Indigenous people were treated as virtual slaves. Mexico's population did not regain its pre-Hispanic level until the twentieth century. The colony also imported an estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans, and slavery did not definitively end until 1829.
A lost north and a long revolution
The priest Miguel Hidalgo began the first independence rising on 16 September 1810 and was executed the following year. Victory came only in 1821, after a former royalist commander, Agustín de Iturbide, allied with Vicente Guerrero. War with the United States followed in 1846, and the treaty of February 1848 took away what the US National Archives counts as 55 percent of Mexican territory, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico.
Porfirio Díaz held the presidency almost continuously from 1876. Revolution broke out in November 1910, the very year the Angel of Independence went up to mark 100 years of independence. Díaz resigned in 1911, his challenger Francisco Madero was overthrown and murdered in 1913, and peasants under Emiliano Zapata fought on for land. About one million people died, most of them non-combatants, and some estimates go far higher.
The constitution of 1917, amended many times but still in force, claimed the subsoil for the nation and opened the way to land reform. Between 1934 and 1940 Lázaro Cárdenas redistributed about 18 million hectares and, in March 1938, seized the assets of nearly all foreign oil companies. The party founded in 1929 held power without a break until 2000. On 2 October 1968, days before the Mexico City Olympics, a student demonstration at Tlatelolco ended in gunfire that left hundreds dead or wounded. The government blamed agitators, witnesses blamed its security forces, and declassified US files leave the question open.
Living with a neighbour and with the dead
The 2020 census counted just over 126 million people. About 7.4 million spoke an Indigenous language, and roughly one in five identified as Indigenous; a 2003 law gives those languages the same validity as Spanish. The census was also the first of independent Mexico to count Afro-descendants, who numbered about 2.6 million.
Modern Mexico leans north. About 80 percent of its exports are sold in the United States, whose top trading partner it became in 2024, and people abroad sent home US$61.8 billion in 2025. That bond is under strain: in July 2026 Washington declined to renew the USMCA trade agreement in its current form, leaving it in force through 2036 but subject to annual reviews. Criminal violence weighs heavily too. Preliminary official data recorded more than 33,000 presumed homicides in 2024, and although the government reports a steep fall in daily killings since late that year, critics point to extortion and continuing disappearances.
Older rhythms carry on. UNESCO recognises a cuisine founded on corn, beans and chilli, and a Day of the Dead held as October turns to November, when families lay petals, candles and offerings on the path from cemetery to home. That moment also closes the yearly maize cycle, so the dead return as the farming year ends. In Mexico, as in its capital, the distant past is never far beneath the surface.
