Timeline: MEXICAN HISTORY form ancient times to now

MEXICO 3113 BCE – 2026 CE

by Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)

3113 BCE – 1521 CE: MEXICO’S CIVILIZATIONS BEGAN, GREW, AND DEGENERATED INTO TERROR REGIMES

100 BCE–550 CE – Teotihuacan rises as a metropolis of pyramids and trade.

250–900 CE – Classic Maya city-states dominate southern lowlands.

1325 CE – Mexica found Tenochtitlan.

1428–1521 CE – Triple Alliance Empire expands through tribute and military campaigns.

1521 CE – Fall of Tenochtitlan; Spanish-Indigenous coalition defeats Mexica capital.

1521–1821:  SPANISH CONTROL INVOLVED INDIAN SLAVERY & CATHOLIC CONVERSION OR PUBLIC BURNING 

1521–1700s – New Spain was structured around silver extraction, land grants, and Church authority.
1808 – Napoleon destabilizes Spain; legitimacy crisis spreads to colonies.
1810 – Miguel Hidalgo’s uprising begins the independence struggle.
1821 – Mexico achieves independence from Spain.

1821–1834: MEXICO INDEPENDENT, BUT FRAGILE

The Battle of the Alamo:  Mexico’s President Santa Anna massacred Texans 

Mexico emerged from Spain enormous on the map, yet fragile in finance and fractured in governance. Centralists and federalists clashed. Treasury coffers emptied. Generals treated power as a rotating prize. Though Mexico City’s dominant elite factions maneuvered, Mexican frontier families endured.

Peasants said, We won our independence from Spain, but the landlord is still the landlord.  Mexican Army recruits said, Generals feast, but we soldiers eat dust.

In Mexico’s North, an elder noted, the big shots in the Capitol only remember us when they want to tax us.

Below elite rivalry, partnership remained the survival mechanism.

1820s–1836 — TEXAS: INVITATION, SLAVERY, AND BREAKAWAY

Mexico invited Anglo settlers into the Mexican state of Texas to stabilize the frontier. But many arrivals brought slaves with them to Mexico, defying Mexican law, which forbade slavery.  Although the Anglo Texans were immigrants to Mexico, they maintained loyalty to the United States. Conflict followed. Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna (below) brought Mexican soldiers to Texas to control the immigrants, who revolted.  The revolt culminated in San Jacinto. Texas declared independence. Mexico refused recognition.

Sam Houston, leader of the Anglo Texans, calculated carefully: Texas alone is fragile; it must join the United States.

 Texans of Mexican descent living in Texas (Tejanos)  worried.  Tehano ranchers, among themselves, said, We’re families with graves here—not slogans.

Anglo planters who settled in Texas said, We came for land. Don’t tell us what labor we can use; our economy is based on slaves.

JACKSON’S PROTÉGÉ POLK AND THE SLAVE POWER QUESTION

James K. Polk was a protégé of Andrew Jackson. He owned enslaved people. He aligned with Southern Democratic expansionism.

By 1845, the balance between free and slave states was delicate. Southern leaders feared containment. Texas entered as a slave state. Expansion meant leverage. The Wilmot Proviso (1846), proposing to ban slavery in newly acquired lands, ignited an immediate sectional crisis. But Polk’s objectives were not only providing more territory for Southerners with slaves; more important to Polk was:

• Securing Texas for the United States, acquiring California, securing access to the Pacific Ocean, and pre-empting British influence on North America. 

• Acquiring California

• Securing Pacific access

• Preempting British influence

The war Polk wanted with Mexico reopened the specter of a civil war within the United States.

1846: CREATING THE CAUSUS BELLI INCIDENT AS EXCUSE TO STEAL IT NORTH (Domination framed provocation as defense)

Polk sent General Zachary Taylor into the disputed land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande and ran patrols against Mexican forces, which killed intruding Anglo soldiers.  Polk got what he wanted: an excuse to launch a full-on attack on Mexico. He got the Mexicans to kill Americans on what he said was American soil in an area that an agreement Santa Ana as a captive was forced into, with a change in which river was the boundary as an excuse that Polk used to send his troops to Mexico and steal Mexico’s Northern territory.

Irish laborers concluded: This is a rich man’s land deal dressed as patriotism.

Mexican border mothers wailed: We move our children because cannons don’t ask names.

1846–1847 — CONQUEST IN NORTH AND WEST

While Taylor fought major battles, U.S. columns seized New Mexico and moved into California.

Command rivalries flared. Glory competed with governance. Polk’s agents in California, Stephen W. Kearny and John C. Frémont, who captured Los Angeles, quarrelled over overall command in California. Polk concluded that Frémont was too noisy and controversial and therefore gave overall command of California to Kearny.

California’s Mexicans concluded, Gringos call it liberation. I call it strangers writing our law.

U.S. privates in California gossiped; generals argued over credit. We sleep in mud.

1847:— VERACRUZ AND THE MARCH TO THE CAPITAL

                    General Scott

Under Winfield Scott, the U.S. executed a large-scale amphibious landing at Veracruz. Artillery reduced the city. The army marched inland. Civilians became terrain.

Mexican mothers wailed, Our children are not collateral.

A U.S. soldier murmured, Orders say maintain discipline, but my buddies in camp say, Drink.

But elders in Veracruz say, We shall remember.  We bury people before we bury arguments.

SEPTEMBER 1847 — CHAPULTEPEC

In September 1847, U.S. forces under Scott launched a direct assault on Chapultepec Castle, the hilltop military academy guarding the western approaches to Mexico City. After heavy bombardment on September 12, American infantry stormed the heights on September 13, overwhelming Mexican defenders that included regular troops, militia, and teenage cadets later remembered as the Niños Héroes.

The fall of Chapultepec broke the city’s outer defenses; within days, U.S. troops entered and occupied the capital.

For Mexico, the loss marked the collapse of organized resistance at the republic’s center. For the United States, it signaled the decisive moment of the war’s final campaign—victory achieved not at a distant frontier but in the heart of the nation it had invaded. The fortress fell. Mexico City was occupied. Volunteers, drunk on stolen liquor, committed rape and murdered unarmed civilians in Mexico City during the occupation after its surrender.

Mexican Cadet: I am afraid—and I remain.

U.S. officer: History will call this inevitable.

City resident: I will remember your inevitability by its smoke.  The Gringos say it’s destiny, but I remember, they invaded us.

1847: REFUSAL: THE SAN PATRICIO BATTALION

Riley

Thousands deserted the U.S. Army. Among them, Irish Catholics formed the San Patricio Battalion under John Riley. They fought beside Mexico. During the U.S.–Mexico War, thousands of soldiers deserted the American ranks, many driven by harsh discipline, nativist abuse, and anti-Catholic prejudice. Irish Catholics among the turncoats organized as the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, led by Irish-born artilleryman John Riley. Fighting under a green banner emblazoned Erin go Bragh, they served Mexico as skilled gunners and saw heavy action at battles such as the Battle of Churubusco, where they resisted fiercely before being overwhelmed. Captured survivors were court-martialed by the U.S. Army; dozens were executed in one of the largest mass hangings in American military history. To U.S. commanders, they were traitors; in Mexico, they became symbols of refusal—men who crossed lines of nationality in protest against what they judged an unjust invasion. Captured after Churubusco, many were whipped, branded, or hanged—some forced to watch the U.S. flag rise before execution.

The deserters said, “We refuse to die for Polk’s ambition.“

1848: TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO

Mexico ceded vast territory: California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

The U.S. paid $15 million. Ink reframed conquest as purchase.

Mexican residents quipped, The border crossed me.

Gold discovered in 1848 accelerated the dispossession of Mexican people from their land in California, citing the authority laws they passed gave them.

WHAT THE WAR SET IN MOTION

The war expanded slaveholding leverage, intensified the sectional crisis, accelerated Indigenous dispossession, established precedent for “incident-driven” expansion, and trransformed the United States into a continental power.  The war also, within thirteen years, would lead to the Civil War. The Mexican War was a rehearsal.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Three precedents were cemented:

1. Manufacturing provocation to justify expansion.

2. Framing resource acquisition as destiny or defense.

3. Using the law to sanitize seizure.

The border did not begin as a culture war; it began as an artillery range.

Yet even then, partnership persisted. Mexican citizens living in the territories the U.S. stole, despite attempts by our current fascist regime to exclude them from voting, continue to maintain strong, supportive partnership patterns. Civilians learned to aid each other in times of oppression, Irish brotherhood organizations persevered, and those of us who love compassion, community, and care for the handicapped, homeless, and migrant communities still strive for minority and female rights and an end to the ever-more exploitive, temperature-harming policies of the dictatorship that currently eclipses our abilities to help each other.

History is never unanimous. Domination is ascendant, but partnership is stubborn, and the struggle between them continues.

1876–1911: DIAZ DICTATES

1876 — Porfirio Díaz took power and promised he would not seek re-election.

1876–1884 — Railroads expand rapidly; Diaz centralized central authority strengthened and subdued regional strongmen.

Under Díaz, Mexico achieved stability and visible modernization. Mexico’s Rail network grew to 20,000 miles by 1910. Mexico City became a modern metropolis.

But beneath the polished surface, land drained upward, labor tightened into debt, and political voice narrowed. The countryside felt dispossession more than progress. By 1910, pressure from below matched consolidation above.

1884–1911 — Díaz consolidated his long rule with managed elections, newspaper censorship, his “Order and Progress” doctrine, restriction of political opposition and terror.

U.S., British, French investors dominated railroads, oil, and mining. Mexico’s economy became increasingly export-dependent.

Land Concentration Intensified. 1883 land survey laws privatized communal holdings. By 1910, 1% of owners controlled most arable land, and bound millions of peasants in debt peonage.

Diaz suppressed strikes in 1906, Cananea and in 1970 crushed the strike in Río Blanco.

In 1906, miners in Cananea struck for wage parity and humane conditions in a system that privileged U.S. managers and foreign capital over Mexican labor. When they demanded cooperation and fairness, Díaz defended elite extraction: armed force restored “order,” and let Arizona Rangers cross into Mexican territory. The state aligned with the capitalist bosses against its own workers.

📍 Río Blanco, 1907

In January 1907, textile workers in Río Blanco struck against debt peonage, company-store exploitation, and crushing discipline. Díaz responded not with reform but with rifles: federal troops fired on crowds, pursued organizers, and executed alleged leaders. Domination was maintained through fear; cooperation from below was treated as rebellion.

These strikes exposed the structure of the Porfiriato: modernization without justice, growth without reciprocity. When workers asserted their right to balance giving and taking, the regime revealed its core allegiance — not to the Mexican people, but to hierarchy, foreign investors, and centralized control. Cananea and Río Blanco were not isolated labor disputes.

There were warning tremors before the Revolution. In 1910 — Díaz ran again; his opposition rallied behind reform. Zapata led a revolution against Diaz.

1910–1920: EMILIANO ZAPATA LED MEXICO’S UNDERCLASSES TO OVERTHROW THEIR TRUMP-LIKE DICTATOR

          
In 1910, Emiliano ZAPATA became the Voice of the Mexican Poor, “Tierra y Libertad.” [Land and Freedom]

Zapata demanded the restoration of village lands.

Revolutionary forces mobilized by rail during the Mexican Revolution (c. 1910–1915). Zapatista and allied troops crowded atop freight cars while steam locomotives pushed south through rural Mexico. Alongside the tracks, armed campesinos gathered in formation,  carrying the demand that land be returned to those who work it.

1917 The New Mexican Constitution provided communal land, labor rights, and limits on foreign ownership. Although Zapata had fractured oligarchic dominance, it led only to a partial redistribution of power downward.

1929–2000: THE PRI: REVOLUTION INSTITUTIONALIZED, CORRUPT & IN LEAGUE WITH CRIMINAL GANGS

After the violence of the Revolution, Mexico’s surviving generals and political brokers created what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1929. It called itself revolutionary but it became institutional and for seventy-one years, the PRI ruled Mexico without interruption.

The PRI did not crush every movement. Instead, it absorbed peoples’ movements. It  folded  labor unions were folded into the state, had party agents “supervise” fixed elections and co-opted or contained dissent. The PRI kept Zapata’s revolutionary language but continued to exploit and ignore the needs of the country’s poor. The party allowed some, cooperative partnership.  Local sharing was fostered by equalitarian Catholic Priests, led local versions of Mary [(as the Anunnaki Princess Ninmah was called in Mexico)-but only if routed through party channels. The PRE made clear the imperative, if people organized independently, they were in trouble, but if they organized under state-supervision, they were allowed.

AMERICAN CAPITALIST COMPANIES CONTROLLED MEXICO

Through the 20th century, U.S. capital remained deeply embedded in Mexico.  American money controlled Mexico’s oil companies before they were nationalized in  :

• Oil companies before nationalization.

• Mining and agribusiness interests.

• Manufacturing under the maquiladora system.

Mexican oil infrastructure during the 1930s — drilling and pipeline operations representing the foreign-owned petroleum industry nationalized in 1938 and later, under Mexican President Cárdenas, operated by Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX).

1938: MEXICO’S OIL NATIONALIZATION

Lázaro Cárdenas, President of Mexico (1934–1940), who decreed the oil expropriation 

Mexico nationalized foreign oil companies in 1938, under President Lázaro Cárdenas. The move followed years of labor conflict between foreign-owned oil firms—primarily U.S. and British—and Mexican workers, who demanded better wages and working conditions. After Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the companies to comply with labor rulings and they refused, Cárdenas invoked Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution (which affirmed national ownership of subsoil resources) and, on March 18, 1938, expropriated their assets. The government created Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) to run the industry.

The expropriation was popular inside Mexico—workers donated wages and jewelry to help compensate the companies. The United States and Britain protested and imposed economic pressure.

However, with the approach of World War II and President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, tensions eased, and Mexico retained control.

The 1938 nationalization marked a defining moment in modern Mexican economic sovereignty, symbolizing resistance to foreign control over strategic resources.

During the Cold War, Washington preferred a stable PRI regime to unpredictable reform movements. Stability meant predictability for investment. Even when Mexico nationalized oil, American capitalists reopened it in the 1980s–1990s.

After the Revolution consolidated into the long rule of the PRI, Mexico’s governing elite perfected a dual strategy: nationalist language at home, economic accommodation abroad. Publicly, they spoke of sovereignty, revolution, and social justice.  They ensured foreign investment flowed, debt was serviced, and strategic sectors remained stable enough to reassure Washington and global markets. This was not accidental improvisation but patterned behavior: elite consolidation, centralization of authority, and the disciplining of dissent. Domination-consciousness operated at the summit of the state. Harmony was projected; compliance was engineered. Labor unions were incorporated into the system, campesino leagues folded into official structures, and opposition parties tolerated—so long as they remained containable.

But the façade fractured at decisive moments:

1968 — Tlatelolco. At the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, student protestors were met with gunfire. The state revealed the limits of its tolerance. Negotiation gave way to force.

1970s — the Dirty War. Security forces pursued guerrillas, dissidents, and suspected sympathizers through disappearances, torture, and clandestine repression. Stability was preserved through silence.

1982 — Debt Crisis. Decades of state-led development collapsed under unsustainable borrowing, forcing austerity, privatization, and deeper integration into global finance. Nationalist rhetoric thinned as economic vulnerability surfaced.

1994 — NAFTA, Zapatistas, Peso Crash. On the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, Indigenous rebels in Chiapas declared that the promises of modernization excluded them. That same year, political assassinations and currency collapse exposed systemic fragility.

Each rupture clarified the operating rule: The PRI could negotiate with the organized sectors it controlled. It could not tolerate autonomous, uncontrolled dissent.1994 — NAFTA, Zapatista uprising, peso crash.

Each crisis revealed that the PRI could negotiate with unions but would not tolerate uncontrolled dissent.

THE RISE OF GANG POWER

As neoliberal reforms reduced state employment and weakened rural economies, informal markets expanded, drug trafficking networks professionalized, and police corruption deepened. The old PRI system had managed criminal networks through containment and selective tolerance. When political monopoly weakened after 2000, fragmentation followed.  Criminal cartels became militarized actors.  When centralized control erodes, violence decentralizes, governmental monopolies weaken, and parallel sovereignties emerge.

2000: VOTERS ELECTED VICENTE FOX OF THE NATIONAL ACTION PARTY (PAN), ENDING PRI’S CONTINUOUS HOLD ON THE PRESIDENCY

VICENTE FOX

AMLO centralized executive power while expanding direct social transfers, reasserted Mexico’s role in energy projects, provided cash pensions for the elderly, gave scholarships to youth, strengthened the role of the military in infrastructure and security, and developed infrastructure megaprojects. He created the Maya Train, which runs a 1,500+ kilometer loop across the Yucatán Peninsula (Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, Quintana Roo). He reduced the autonomy of regulatory agencies, cut bureaucratic salaries, and criticized independent institutions he saw as captured by elites.

His supporters viewed him as dismantling oligarchic privilege, though his critics saw him as concentrating authority and weakening institutional checks. During AMLO’s watch, crime rates fluctuated but did not dramatically collapse; cartel fragmentation persisted. Economically, Mexico benefited from nearshoring trends and the U.S. supply chain realignment, while remaining tightly integrated under the USMCA framework.

Why López Obrador Selected Claudia Sheinbaum

When constitutional term limits barred AMLO from reelection, succession became decisive. He publicly pledged to respect Morena’s internal selection process but clearly signaled a preference for Claudia Sheinbaum.  He switched party allegiance because Sheinbaum was closely aligned with AMLO’s core project: state-led development, energy sovereignty, social welfare expansion, and skepticism toward neoliberal privatization. As a former mayor of Mexico City and longtime collaborator, she demonstrated disciplined loyalty and technocratic competence. She was less polarizing than some rivals within Morena and projected managerial stability to business sectors wary of abrupt shifts and because as Mexico’s first woman president, she reinforced Morena’s reformist image and expanded coalition appeal.

The Voter Logic: Mexican voters did not simply “vote out the PRI” once; they dismantled the old monopoly in 2000, oscillated between parties, and in 2018 chose a movement promising structural reset. By 2024, many voters perceived continuity with AMLO as preferable to returning to PRI-era elites or PAN technocracy. Sheinbaum’s victory reflected voters’ loyalty to social programs, fatigue with traditional party structures, desire for stability amid insecurity, and acceptance of Morena as the new governing center of Mexico.

For seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party centralized power to such an extent that even corruption was institutionalized. Labor, peasants, business, police, and regional bosses operated inside a managed pyramid. When that pyramid weakened in the late twentieth century—through privatization, electoral reform, and economic integration with the United States—the old mechanisms of containment fractured. The state no longer mediated everything. Into those cracks stepped autonomous criminal networks that evolved into cartels, wielding territorial power once monopolized by the political machine. The question confronting modern Mexico—and leaders such as Claudia Sheinbaum—is whether authority can be re-centralized without resurrecting authoritarian control, and whether security can be restored without reviving the very domination structures that first hollowed the state from within.

Sheinbaum stands up to Trump without alienating him; she has been sending Mexican oil to Cuba, where the American embargo on oil is harming the hard-pressed people of Cuba, the probable next target of Trump and Rubio’s program of regime change MAGA used in Venezuela.

Sheinbaum says, “Mexico is not subordinate. We cooperate — we do not submit.

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