Mexico

The Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan

Mexico was home to the most advanced civilizations in the Americas in pre-colonial times. These go back as far as the Olmecs who in the second millennium BCE developed writing systems and idiosyncratic artistic styles. They were eclipsed, though, in their achievements by the Mayans who in the early first millennium CE built up the enormous Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon at the great city of Teotihuacan. Further great powers followed, notably the Toltec people of the ninth and tenth centuries and the Aztecs, whose civilization came to dominate Central America in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

By the time the Spanish arrived to the region in the early sixteenth century, the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, a sprawling city of islands, lakes, canals and enormous causeways and bridges, was probably the largest urban center in the world. But disease proved the undoing of the Aztecs, and as smallpox and measles introduced by the Europeans ran like wildfire through their people in the early 1520s the Aztec Empire was conquered and the Spanish established control of the area. Thereafter Mexico became the center of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, a source of considerable mineral wealth for the Spanish which was controlled by Madrid for the next three centuries.

Porfirio Díaz

Mexico, like most of Spain’s American empire, achieved independence in the early nineteenth century during the crisis of imperial rule created by the Napoleonic Wars back in Europe. It finally achieved independence in 1821, but thereafter went through a century of torturous political instability, including the Second Mexican Empire of the 1860s, when France largely controlled the country and it was ruled by an emperor of the Austrian House of Habsburg. The military dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz followed between the mid-1870s and 1911, at the end of which the Mexican Revolution led to a decade of immense bloodshed and unrest, but out of it modern Mexico began to emerge.

Mexico in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has had a mixed history. On the one hand, the development of a form of political stability in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution allowed for El Milagro Mexicano, ‘the Mexican Miracle’, a period of immense economic growth during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Yet the country suffered a number of economic crises thereafter in the 1970s and 1980s and has also had to grapple with its position of economic dependence on its wealthier northern neighbor, the United States. Finally, since the 1980s Mexico has become the center of the drug trade in the Americas and internecine conflict between rival cartels has often led to spiraling violence and lawlessness in many parts of the country. Thus, while Mexico is predicted to become one of the world’s ten biggest economic powers by 2050, it still suffers from considerable instability.

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Geography

Mexico dominates the southern parts of North America, stretching from the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts in the north along the border with the United States south as the continent narrows towards Central America, only finally giving way to a bunch of smaller countries like Honduras and Nicaragua near the southern end of the North American continent. From east-west it runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The country exhibits a wide range of geographical regions and climates as a result of its great size, with very warm and arid deserts in many parts of the country and tropical regions of intense vegetation in others. Much of the country is dominated by the Continental Divide of the Americans and is such Mexico is very mountainous, though with lower-lying regions dominating the Pacific coast and the coastal regions around the Gulf of Mexico. There are over 125 million in Mexico, of which one-in-six live in the Greater Mexico City region. There are many cities with in excess of one million people, the most notable being Tijuana, Ecatepec, León, Puebla, Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara and Monterrey.

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Family history and genealogical studies

The first major census of Mexico for which records survive did not take place until the very late date of 1895. An earlier census for the Viceroyalty of New Mexico, when the region was still under Spanish rule, was undertaken in 1793/4. However, the full records for this have not survived, although some abstracts are still extant today, though they are primarily of use for statistical demographers and of limited use for family historians and genealogists. Efforts to undertake censuses by the Mexican government in 1868 and 1878 were abandoned after widespread opposition by people who believed (probably quite correctly) that the information gathered would be used for more efficient taxation. The remaining abstracts of the 1793 census and other major demographic records for Mexican history are housed today in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Researchers looking for family history and genealogical records pertaining to Mexico stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will find many of these in archives in Spain, the colonial power, rather than in Mexico.

See also

• Mexican ethnicity
• Mexican surnames
• The Mexican Revolution
• Chiapas conflict

Explore more about Mexico

• Mexico, Baptisms, 1560-1950 record collection on MyHeritage
• Mexico, Deaths, 1680-1940 record collection on MyHeritage
• Padrones of the Past: Colonial-era Censuses of Mexico at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Newspapers in Mexico at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Architect Surprises Mother with Stunning Wedding Photo Restored by MyHeritage on the MyHeritage blog
• Spanish Names: the Origins of Spanish Given Names and Surnames on the MyHeritage blog

References

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