History of Mexico: a timeline

32 moments in the history of Mexico, in order, each with what happened and why it matters.

Eras

  1. Before 1492 (15000 BC–1492)
  2. Empire and the colonial Americas (1492–1808)
  3. Revolutions and new nations (1808–1898)
  4. Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)
  5. Democracy and today (1975–)

Before 1492 (15000 BC–1492)

  1. c. 12th century BC–400 BC: The Olmecs, Mesoamerica's first cities — On the hot Gulf coast of today's Veracruz and Tabasco, between about 1200 and 400 BC, the people archaeologists call Olmecs built the first cities of…
  2. 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.
  3. between 100 BC and 650: Teotihuacan, city of the gods — Fifty kilometres from today's Mexico City, a planned city on a grid grew from about 100 BC into the largest in the Americas.
  4. 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…
  5. 1428: The Aztec Triple Alliance — In 1428 the Mexica ruler Itzcóatl, urged on by his nephew Tlacaélel, rebelled against the Tepanec overlords of Azcapotzalco together with Nezahualcóyotl of…

Empire and the colonial Americas (1492–1808)

  1. 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…
  2. 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.
  3. December 1531: The Virgin of Guadalupe tradition — According to the Nican Mopohua, a Nahuatl text attributed to Antonio Valeriano and printed in 1649, the Virgin Mary appeared to an Indigenous man, Juan Diego,…
  4. 1535: The Viceroyalty of New Spain is created — Fourteen years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Charles V replaced the quarrelling conquerors and the first Audiencia with a viceroy, a 'vice-king' who…
  5. 20 November 1542: The New Laws of the Indies — On 20 November 1542 Charles V signed the Leyes Nuevas, the New Laws 'for the good treatment and preservation of the Indians'.
  6. 1555–1571: Friars write the first grammars of American languages — To preach in the languages of the Americas, missionaries had to study them, and in doing so they wrote the first grammars and dictionaries of Nahuatl, Quechua…
  7. 1565–1815: The Manila galleon — In 1565 Miguel López de Legazpi's expedition from Mexico reached Cebu, and the friar-navigator Andrés de Urdaneta found the way back: north to the latitude of…
  8. c. 1568: Bernal Díaz writes his True History — Bernal Díaz del Castillo, born in Medina del Campo in the 1490s, sailed with Cortés in 1519 and fought through the conquest of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.
  9. March 1691: Sor Juana answers Sor Filotea — Juana Inés de Asbaje, born at Nepantla near Mexico City in 1648 or 1651, shone at the viceroy's court from 1663 and in 1669 entered the convent of San…
  10. c. 1765–1788: The Bourbon reforms — Under Charles III (1759–88) the Crown set out to govern the Americas more tightly and profitably.
  11. 1767: Charles III expels the Jesuits — In 1767 Charles III ordered the Society of Jesus out of Spain and all its American and Asian dominions, as Portugal and France had already done.

Revolutions and new nations (1808–1898)

  1. 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…
  2. 24 February – 27 September 1821: The Plan de Iguala and Mexican independence — After ten years of war the insurgency in Mexico had shrunk to guerrilla bands in the southern mountains under Vicente Guerrero.
  3. July 1847–1901: The Caste War of Yucatán — In July 1847 Maya communities in the south and east of the Yucatán peninsula rose against the creole and mestizo landowners and officials who had taxed them,…
  4. 2 February 1848: Mexico loses half its territory: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and, after a border clash on the Rio Grande, declared war on Mexico in 1846.
  5. 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…
  6. 5 May 1862: Cinco de Mayo: the Battle of Puebla — In 1861 Mexico, ruined by the War of the Reform, suspended payment of its foreign debts.
  7. 1876–May 1911: The Porfiriato: order, progress and inequality — General Porfirio Díaz, a hero of the war against the French, took power in 1876 and, apart from one four-year gap, held it until 1911 under the motto 'order…

Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)

  1. 20 November 1910–1920: The Mexican Revolution begins — Francisco I.
  2. 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…
  3. c. 1922–1926: Mexican muralism is born at San Ildefonso — After the fighting, the education minister José Vasconcelos wanted an art that would teach a largely illiterate country its history on the walls of public…
  4. 1951: The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language — In 1951 the president of Mexico, Miguel Alemán, convened the first congress of all the academies of the Spanish language in Mexico City.
  5. 2 October 1968: Tlatelolco, 2 October 1968 — In the summer of 1968, with Mexico City about to host the Olympic Games, a clash between schools and the police grew into a student movement demanding the…

Democracy and today (1975–)

  1. October 1982: García Márquez wins the Nobel: the Boom — In the 1960s a handful of Latin American novelists became world famous almost at once: the Argentine Julio Cortázar with Rayuela (1963), the Peruvian Mario…

Revolution, war and dictatorship (1898–1975)

  1. 19 September 1985: The Mexico City earthquake of 1985 — At 7:19 in the morning of 19 September 1985 an earthquake of magnitude 8.1, with its centre off the Pacific coast of Michoacán, shook Mexico City for about…

Democracy and today (1975–)

  1. 2009–2011: One grammar and one spelling for 22 countries — At the end of the 20th century the academies changed their way of working.
  2. 28 October 2025: Spanish today: almost 635 million speakers — According to the Instituto Cervantes's yearbook El español en el mundo 2025, presented in Madrid on 28 October 2025, almost 635 million people speak Spanish:…

Changes over time