Mexico

México

Mexico has more Spanish speakers than any other country, and the accent of its capital is the one half of Latin America learned from films and dubbing. Its Spanish is softened by diminutives and by ahorita, salted with Nahuatl words that went on into English (chocolate, tomato, avocado, chilli), and still spoken alongside sixty-eight recognised indigenous languages.

The year is marked by family celebrations that whole neighbourhoods take part in: the altars and cemetery nights of Día de Muertos, the nine candlelit posadas before Christmas, a quinceañera paid for by a dozen godparents. Traditional Mexican cuisine and the mariachi music hired by the song in Plaza Garibaldi are both on UNESCO's lists.

History

History of Mexico: a timeline (32 moments of its history)

Start with

  • c. 250–900: The Classic Maya: Tikal, Palenque and the collapse — From about AD 250 to 900 dozens of Maya kingdoms flourished in the lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, Chiapas and Yucatán.
  • c. 1325: The Mexica found Tenochtitlan — According to their own histories, the Mexica were late arrivals in the Valley of Mexico, a wandering people from a homeland called Aztlan whose god…
  • 8 November 1519: Cortés meets Moctezuma — Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico in March 1519 with eleven ships and about 600 men, founded Veracruz to give himself legal cover against the…
  • 13 August 1521: The fall of Tenochtitlan — In 1519 Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba to Mexico with a few hundred men, defying the governor who had sent him.
  • 16 September 1810: The Grito de Dolores — Before dawn on 16 September 1810 Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores, in the Bajío north of Mexico City, rang his church bell and called the people of…
  • 1855–15 July 1867: Benito Juárez and La Reforma — Benito Juárez, born in 1806 to Zapotec parents in a village of Oaxaca and orphaned at three, learned Spanish as a boy and became a lawyer, governor and in 1858…
  • 5 February 1917: The Constitution of 1917 and Article 27 — Venustiano Carranza, having beaten Villa and sidelined Zapata, called a constituent congress to Querétaro in December 1916 to revise the liberal constitution…
  • 2009–2011: One grammar and one spelling for 22 countries — At the end of the 20th century the academies changed their way of working.

Culture

Culture of Mexico

Food and drink

  • Tacos al pastor — Pork on a spinning spit, a slice of pineapple caught on the tortilla, and a taquero's questions you need to be ready for. A midnight dish with a Lebanese grandfather.

Festivals and celebrations

  • Día de Muertos — The first days of November, when families build an altar for their dead, spend a night in the cemetery, and nobody is sad: the dead are back for a visit.
  • Las posadas and the Christmas season — From 16 December, nine nights of candlelit processions, a song at the door asking for shelter, hot ponche, tamales and a seven-pointed piñata, ending with Christmas Eve dinner at midnight.

Customs and etiquette

  • La hora latina: the elastic hour — An invitation for eight means you may arrive from eight. The skill is knowing when the time is literal — and there is a phrase for saying so.
  • The quinceañera — A girl's fifteenth birthday: a mass, a full-skirted dress, a waltz with her father, the last doll, and a party paid for by a dozen godparents. Many families spend more on it than on a wedding.
  • Customs and etiquette in Mexico

Identity and society

  • The Maya, then and now — Pyramids above the jungle, a real writing system, the zero and the calendar; and the six million people who speak some thirty Maya languages today, whose ancestors two travellers in 1839 proved had built it all.
  • Identity and society in Mexico

Music and the arts

  • Mariachi — Violins, trumpets, a vihuela and a guitarrón, silver-buttoned charro suits, and hundreds of musicians waiting at night in Plaza Garibaldi for someone to pay for a song.

Literature and storytelling

Places and landscapes

History

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