Aztec calendar stone

The settlement of New Spain: Mexico’s Colonial era

The fall of the Aztec Empire and capture of its ruler Cuauhtémoc (1521), left Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in charge of a vast and largely unfamiliar land. By 1522 his sovereign, Carlos V, had bestowed upon him the title Governor and Captain General of Nueva España (New Spain). Cortés promptly founded the Ciudad de Mexico on the ruins of the once-majestic […]

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Democrat to autocrat: The transformation of Porfirio Diaz

It is an ancient principle of politics that a revolution devours its children. Danton and Robespierre began as rebel leaders against France’s ancien régime but Robespierre ended by cutting off Danton’s head — and then being separated from his own. Kerensky led the bourgeois revolution that overthrew the Tsar — only to be replaced by […]

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Guadalupe Victoria: Mexico’s unknown first president

History has rarely furnished a more striking example of high-profile-low-profile than that of the first presidents of the United States and Mexico. George Washington was and is the quintessential household word — Father of his Country, leader of the Continental armies during the Revolutionary War and two-time president whose name is every bit as much […]

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Rebel, internationalist, establishmentarian: Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes was an internationalist from birth. Though one of Mexico’s best-known citizens, he was born on November 11, 1928, in Panama, where his father represented the Mexican government. Mexico played only a minor role in his early childhood, most of which was spent in Washington, DC. He also lived in Chile and Argentina. In […]

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Octavio Paz: Nobel winner and noble man (1914-1998)

1998 witnessed the passing of such diverse figures as Frank Sinatra, legendary boxer Archie Moore, two-term Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, cowboy star and entrepreneur Gene Autry, and Clayton (“Peg Leg”) Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who was so skilled with a wooden limb that he forged a career (including twenty appearances on the Ed Sullivan […]

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High hopes, baffling uncertainty: Mexico nears the millennium

The election that brought Miguel de la Madrid’s successor to power was clearly fraudulent. On July 6, 1988, when the first results began to arrive at the interior ministry’s office on Avenida Bucareli, a shockingly high proportion was marked for the main opposition candidate. He was Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, the […]

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Black gold, fool’s gold: The oiling of Mexico’s petroleum crisis (1938-1988)

Lázaro Cárdenas, the most left-wing president in Mexican history, became an international bogey man but a national hero by expropriating the foreign oil companies in 1938. Though even such political enemies as the Church and business conservatives applauded this nationalistic gesture, Mexico faced a grim period two-year period when the United States, Great Britain and […]

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