Northern Mexico historical timeline

The north’s history is that of a frontier, and of the place where modern Mexico was largely decided.

Paquime

At Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Paquime was a trading city of multi-storey adobe flourishing from around 1200, with water channels, ball courts and pens for scarlet macaws brought fifteen hundred kilometres from the tropics for their feathers. It linked Mesoamerica with the pueblo cultures of the American south-west and was abandoned before the Spanish arrived. It is UNESCO-listed.

A frontier, not a conquest

The Spanish came north for silver — Zacatecas from 1546, then Durango and Chihuahua — and found no settled empires to absorb, only mobile peoples who fought them for two centuries. The Chichimeca War lasted longer than the conquest of the Aztecs, and Apache and Comanche raiding continued into the nineteenth century, which is why the north stayed thinly settled.

1848

The Mexican-American War ended with Mexico ceding roughly half its territory — what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — and the border moved south to where it now runs. Northern Mexico became a frontier region of a smaller country, and the towns that grew along the new line grew because of it.

The Revolution

The armies that made the 1910 Revolution came largely from here. Francisco Villa raised his Division del Norte in Chihuahua and Durango, and the northern generals — Carranza, Obregon, Calles — ran the country for the following two decades.

Industry and the border

Monterrey industrialised from the 1890s; the maquiladora assembly plants transformed the border cities from the 1960s.