The civilisations before Cortés
Mesoamerica produced some of the ancient world's great civilisations: the Olmec, the Maya with their writing and astronomy, Teotihuacan, the Zapotec, the Toltec, and finally the Mexica — the Aztecs — whose capital Tenochtitlan, built on a lake, was larger than any city in Spain when the Europeans first saw it.
Hernán Cortés reached it in 1519 and, with Indigenous allies who resented Aztec rule and with the smallpox the Spanish carried, brought it down in 1521. Disease did most of the killing: the Indigenous population of central Mexico is estimated to have fallen by anywhere from a half to more than ninety per cent within a century — one of the greatest demographic collapses in recorded history.
The third root
New Spain imported enslaved Africans in large numbers, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Indigenous workforce had collapsed — perhaps 200,000 in all, to work the mines, the sugar and the ports. And Mexico produced one of the first free Black towns in the Americas: in the early 1600s a formerly enslaved man named Gaspar Yanga led a rebellion in the hills near Veracruz, held out against Spanish forces, and in 1618 negotiated a free settlement that survives as the town of Yanga.
Over centuries the African presence was absorbed, renamed and written out of a national identity built around the idea of the mestizo — the mix of Spanish and Indigenous. The Afro-Mexican communities of the Costa Chica, on the Pacific coast of Guerrero and Oaxaca, kept their identity, and campaigned for decades to be seen. In 2020 the national census counted them for the first time: some two million people, around two per cent of the country.
Independence, and the Black hero of it
The war of independence began with Father Miguel Hidalgo's call to arms in 1810 and ended in 1821. One of its decisive leaders was Vicente Guerrero, a man of African and Indigenous descent who became the country's second president in 1829 and, in that year, abolished slavery outright — decades before the United States, and one reason enslaved people in Texas fled south across the border rather than north.
The century that followed was violent: war with the United States and the loss of half the national territory in 1848; the French intervention and the brief empire of Maximilian; and the long rule of Porfirio Díaz that ended in the Revolution of 1910.
Revolution, one party, and after
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 cost perhaps a million lives and produced the constitution of 1917 and, eventually, the party that governed for most of the twentieth century — the PRI, in power for 71 unbroken years until 2000. Mexico nationalised its oil in 1938, built a muralist tradition that put its history on public walls, and became one of the largest economies in the Americas.
The present is shaped by migration, by the border, and by the violence of the drug trade — but also by a cultural confidence that has made Mexican food, film and art global. In 2024 the country elected Claudia Sheinbaum, its first woman president. The recognition of its African root is part of the same widening of who counts as Mexican.