Mexico historical timeline

Chronology

c. 1200 B.C. The Olmec civilisation flourishes in what are now Veracruz and Tabasco from roughly 1200 to 400 B.C., centred first on San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán and moving to La Venta in the 10th century B.C. after San Lorenzo declined. Distinctive Olmec features appear at San Lorenzo from about 1400 B.C. The colossal stone heads are the most familiar Olmec work, and they are the reason the regional museums at Xalapa and Villahermosa hold objects older than anything in the Maya or Aztec collections.
c. 100 B.C. Teotihuacán is established around 100 B.C. and its major monuments are under continuous construction until about 250 A.D. At its height, perhaps between 1 and 500 A.D., it was the largest city in the Americas, covering 21 square kilometres with a population likely around 100,000 -- potentially the sixth-largest city in the world of its day. Its monuments were sacked and systematically burned around 550 A.D. The Aztecs, who named it, arrived a thousand years later and treated it as an ancient ruin; the name Teotihuacán is theirs rather than its builders'.
1325 Tenochtitlan is founded on an island in the shallow, brackish Lake Texcoco, the largest of five interconnected lakes in the Valley of Mexico. The exact date is unclear; 13 March 1325 was chosen in 1925 so that the 600th anniversary could be celebrated. At its peak the city covered 8 to 13.5 square kilometres and was the largest in the pre-Columbian Americas. The vision the Mexica reported seeing on that swampy island is on the Mexican coat of arms and therefore on the flag and every coin.
1521 Tenochtitlan falls after a siege, to a Spanish-led coalition composed mainly of Tlaxcaltec forces. A smallpox epidemic had struck the Valley of Mexico while Cortés rebuilt his alliances, killing much of the Mexica leadership; the Spanish, for whom smallpox had been endemic for centuries, were affected relatively little. Two facts about modern Mexico City follow from this entry: it stands on the Aztec capital, and it stands on a drained lake bed.
1535 The crown establishes New Spain as a viceroyalty, appointing Antonio de Mendoza as viceroy -- an aristocrat loyal to the monarch rather than to Cortés, who had named the territory and put his capital on the site of Tenochtitlan. Silver deposits discovered from the 1540s onward drew Spanish settlement north into country that had held no large cities, which is why the colonial silver towns of the Bajío exist at all.
1810 On 16 September the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rings his church bell at Dolores and gives the call to arms that begins the war of independence. Every year on the eve of Independence Day the president re-enacts the cry from the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City, ringing the same bell Hidalgo used -- which makes this the one date in the chronology a visitor can watch being performed.
1821 Independence is achieved after eleven years of fighting. Hidalgo did not live to see it. The three centuries of New Spain that ended here left the country its language, its dominant religion, its colonial cities and the racial hierarchy that the Revolution a century later was fought partly to dismantle.
1846 The United States invades Mexico on 25 April 1846, following the American annexation of Texas the year before, which Mexico still considered its own territory. President Polk had offered $25 million for the disputed land together with California; the offer was refused, and he sent troops to the Rio Grande instead.
1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 2 February requires Mexico to cede 55 per cent of its territory -- the present-day states of California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming -- and to relinquish all claims to Texas, recognising the Rio Grande as its southern boundary. The United States paid $15 million. No other single date explains as much about the relationship between the two countries, or about why the border cities are what they are.
1862 On 5 May Mexican forces under Ignacio Zaragoza defeat a better-equipped French army at Puebla, during the second French intervention. The victory did not hold -- a larger French force took Puebla and then occupied Mexico City -- but it supplied lasting patriotic inspiration. Cinco de Mayo is more popular in the United States than in Mexico, where it is primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, and it is frequently mistaken abroad for Mexican independence day, which is 16 September.
1876 Porfirio Díaz seizes power in a coup and governs until 1911 under the policy of "order and progress", inviting foreign investment and maintaining political order by force where necessary; after 1884 he was continuously re-elected and ruled as an authoritarian military dictator. The railways, the grand public buildings and the European styling of late 19th-century Mexican cities are the Porfiriato's, and so is the land concentration that produced what followed.
1910 Díaz, approaching his 80th birthday and with no plan for his succession, is forced to resign and go into exile, and Mexico experiences a decade of regional civil war -- the Mexican Revolution, one of the first great social revolutions of the 20th century. Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa fought for a land reform that reshaped the relationship between the state and the rural, largely Indigenous population, and the murals a visitor queues for in Mexico City are its official memory.
1938 On 18 March President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalises all petroleum reserves, facilities and foreign oil companies under Article 27 of the 1917 constitution, and establishes Petróleos Mexicanos. The anniversary is a civic holiday. It is the clearest single expression of the Revolution's economic nationalism, and the reason the state oil company is a political subject rather than merely a company.
1968 On 2 October, ten days before the opening ceremony of the Mexico City Olympics, the armed forces open fire on unarmed civilians protesting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco. The Games went ahead as scheduled. The massacre is the moment the PRI's claim to revolutionary legitimacy broke for a generation of Mexicans, and the plaza carries a memorial to it.
1985 At 07:17 on 19 September an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 strikes, 350 kilometres offshore along the Middle America Trench but devastating Mexico City because the city sits on an ancient lake bed. At least 5,000 people were killed, 412 buildings collapsed and 3,124 more were seriously damaged. The civilian rescue brigades that formed when the state response failed are widely treated as the beginning of modern Mexican civil society.
1994 On 1 January, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation begins a 12-day uprising in Chiapas, occupying towns, releasing prisoners and destroying land records; 100,000 people demonstrated in Mexico City against the repression that followed. The two events share a date because one was a protest against the other, and both shaped the Mexico a visitor now travels in -- the industrial north and the Indigenous south.
2000 On 2 July Vicente Fox wins the presidency with 43 per cent of the vote, the first opposition candidate to defeat the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 71 years and the first president from outside the party since 1911. Seventy-one years of single-party rule ended at a ballot box rather than in a rising, which is unusual enough to be the country's strongest political claim on itself.
2017 A magnitude 7.1 earthquake strikes at 13:14 on 19 September, killing 370 people, 228 of them in Mexico City. It fell on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 earthquake, and the annual national earthquake drill -- held every 19 September at 11 a.m. through public loudspeakers across Mexico City -- had taken place two hours earlier that same morning. A visitor in the capital on that date will hear the drill.

Verified against Wikipedia, September 2026.

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Checked against Wikipedia — The Olmecs flourished in the modern Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from roughly 1200 to 400 BC, were initially centred at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan and moved to La Venta in the 10th century BC following the decline of San Lorenzo, with distinctive Olmec features appearing at San Lorenzo around 1400 BC; the aspect most familiar now is their artwork, particularly the colossal heads, Teotihuacan is thought to have been established around 100 BCE with major monuments continuously under construction until about 250 CE; at its zenith, perhaps between 1 CE and 500 CE, it was the largest city in the Americas, covering 21 square kilometres with a population likely around 100,000, potentially the sixth-largest city in the world of its epoch, and its major monuments were sacked and systematically burned around 550 CE, Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325 on an island in the shallow, brackish Lake Texcoco, the largest of five interconnected lakes in the Valley of Mexico; the exact date is unclear and 13 March 1325 was chosen in 1925 to celebrate the 600th anniversary; at its peak it covered 8 to 13.5 square kilometres and was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas, and the vision the Mexica saw there is immortalised in Mexico's coat of arms, The siege of Tenochtitlan directly led to the fall of the Aztec civilization, fought by a Spanish-led coalition composed mainly of Tlaxcaltec men; a smallpox epidemic struck the natives of the Valley of Mexico including Tenochtitlan while Cortes rebuilt his alliances, killing much of the leadership, while the Spanish had acquired immunity and were affected relatively little, After the 1521 conquest Cortes named the territory New Spain and established the new capital, Mexico City, on the site of Tenochtitlan; the crown established New Spain as a viceroyalty in 1535, appointing Antonio de Mendoza as viceroy, an aristocrat loyal to the monarch rather than to the conqueror Cortes, On 16 September 1810 the Roman Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang his church bell at Dolores and gave the call to arms that triggered the Mexican War of Independence; every year on the eve of Independence Day the president of Mexico re-enacts the cry from the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City while ringing the same bell Hidalgo used, The Mexican-American War ran from 25 April 1846 to 2 February 1848 and followed the 1845 American annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered its territory; President Polk had sent a mission offering $25 million for the disputed territory together with California and everything in between, an offer the Mexican government refused, and then sent soldiers across the disputed territory to the Rio Grande, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo required Mexico to cede 55 per cent of its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming, to relinquish all claims for Texas and to recognise the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas, with the United States paying Mexico $15 million, The Battle of Puebla took place on 5 May 1862 during the second French intervention in Mexico, when French troops repeatedly failed to storm the forts of Loreto and Guadalupe and retreated to Orizaba; French troops later took the city, but the Mexican victory against a better-equipped force provided patriotic inspiration, and the anniversary is primarily celebrated in the Mexican state of Puebla, Cinco de Mayo is more popular in the United States than in Mexico and is sometimes mistaken for Mexican Independence Day, the most important national holiday in Mexico, which is celebrated on 16 September commemorating the Grito de Dolores of 1810; the city of Puebla marks the event with festivals and re-enactments of the battle, Porfirio Diaz seized power in a coup in 1876 and pursued a policy of "order and progress", inviting foreign investment and maintaining social and political order by force if necessary, ruling after 1884 as an authoritarian military dictator; as he approached his 80th birthday in 1910 he had put no succession plan in place, violence broke out, he was forced to resign and go into exile, and Mexico experienced a decade of regional civil war, the Mexican Revolution, The Mexican oil expropriation of 18 March 1938 nationalised all petroleum reserves, facilities and foreign oil companies in Mexico; President Lazaro Cardenas declared under Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution that all mineral and oil reserves belong to the nation, the government established Petroleos Mexicanos, and the anniversary of 18 March is now a Mexican civic holiday, On 2 October 1968, ten days before the opening ceremony of the 1968 Summer Olympics, which were carried out as scheduled, the Mexican Armed Forces opened fire on a group of unarmed civilians protesting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, The 1985 Mexico City earthquake struck at 07:17:50 local time on 19 September with a moment magnitude of 8.0, causing the deaths of at least 5,000 people; the epicentre was more than 350 kilometres away along the Middle America Trench but the city suffered major damage because of the ancient lake bed on which it sits, with 412 buildings collapsing and another 3,124 seriously damaged, On 1 January 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation coordinated a 12-day uprising in Chiapas in protest against the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, occupying cities and towns, releasing prisoners and destroying land records, and 100,000 people protested in Mexico City against the government's repression in Chiapas, At the Mexican general election of 2 July 2000 Vicente Fox won the presidency with 43.4 per cent of the vote, making him the first president elected from an opposition party since Francisco Madero in 1911 and the first in 71 years to defeat the then-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, The 2017 Puebla earthquake struck at 13:14 local time on 19 September 2017 with an estimated magnitude of 7.1, killing 370 people including 228 in Mexico City and injuring more than 6,000; it coincidentally occurred on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the national earthquake drill conducted every year at 11 a.m. through public loudspeakers across Mexico City had taken place as scheduled around two hours before (September 2026).