Mexican culture: a national identity the state commissioned

How the revolution commissioned a national culture

The Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1788, taught Neoclassicism. Mexican fine art from independence to the early twentieth century followed European models, and what broke that pattern was a government commission. The administration of Álvaro Obregón, which ran from 1920 to 1924, through its minister of education José Vasconcelos, put artists to work decorating colonial-era government buildings with murals depicting Mexican history, much of it the history of a revolution barely over. Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros produced those narratives, and in producing them fixed how the revolution would be remembered.

Vasconcelos supplied the theory as well as the budget. His La Raza Cósmica of 1925 defined Mexico and Latin America as the meeting point of all races, biologically and culturally, which extended the word mestizo from a description of ancestry into a description of everybody. Through the 1930s the government promoted the view that all Mexicans belonged to a mixed race, distinguished only by residence in or outside an indigenous community, by fluency in an indigenous language, and by adherence to indigenous custom. Britannica records indigenismo, pride in the indigenous inheritance, as a unifying theme of the country from that decade onward.

The commissioning continued long past the murals. Juan O'Gorman covered the Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in mosaics between 1951 and 1953, on a campus built in the mid-1950s that also carries work by Rivera, Siqueiros and José Chávez Morado and is now a World Heritage Site. Carlos Chávez, who lived from 1899 to 1978, wrote six symphonies on indigenous themes and founded the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. The Ballet Folklórico de México, founded in 1952, performs regional music and dance from the pre-Hispanic period to the revolution, in regional dress, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Each of those is a national institution performing an indigenous past to a national audience.

Why Mexico has never named an official language

Spanish is the de facto national language, spoken by the overwhelming majority of a population of 132,274,416 as of 2024. No statute makes it official. What the federal government does instead is recognise sixty-eight linguistic groups and 364 varieties of indigenous language and give all of them the standing of national languages, equal to Spanish, under the General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

That has a visible consequence in the constitution itself. Its official name exists in Nahuatl as Mexika Sentik Wexteyowalko and in Yucatec Maya as U Múuchʼ Péetluʼumiloʼob México, and by the legal equality of Spanish with the sixty-eight indigenous languages every one of them has a version of the country's name of its own.

An estimated 8.3 million citizens spoke an indigenous language in 2015. The speakers are concentrated in a handful of language groups and, with the exception of Nahuatl, in the south.

Nahuatl also travelled outward through Spanish. Tomato, chocolate, coyote and avocado are Nahuatl words that entered English by way of the colonial vocabulary, and a layer of everyday Mexican Spanish comes from the same source. Two settler languages persist beside the indigenous ones: Plautdietsch, spoken by a Mennonite population of about 80,000 in the northern states whose schools the federal government allows to run on their own terms, and the Venetian dialect of Chipilo in Puebla, spoken by roughly 2,500 descendants of late nineteenth-century migrants. English is the most commonly taught foreign language, studied by nearly 24 million people, though a high level of proficiency was limited to 5% of the population in 2015.

How the law was made to reverse itself

The apparatus that promoted a single identity was later turned round to protect the identities it had been built against, and the turn is datable.

Bilingual government radio broadcasting in Spanish and indigenous languages ran as an instrument of indigenous education from 1958 to 1965, and since 1979 the Instituto Nacional Indigenista has operated a national network of bilingual stations. In 1992 Article 2 of the constitution was amended to define Mexico as a pluricultural country and to state the position of indigenous Mexicans within it. That amendment preceded the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's campaign against the mestizaje ideology, which produced the San Andrés Accords of 1996 on autonomy, recognition and rights. The National Indigenous Languages Institute was created in March 2003 to promote and protect the languages the same state had spent decades discouraging.

The census records what the law has and has not changed. At the 2020 census 19.4% of the population identified as indigenous while 6.1% spoke an indigenous language, a gap that measures exactly the distinction Vasconcelos drew. Afro-Mexicans were 2.04% of the population at the same count, a category recovered by cultural and academic work from the 1960s onward after a long assumption that the group had dissolved into the mestizo identity. In practice indigenous people continue to meet discrimination and lack full access to public education, healthcare and the courts, because Spanish is the prevailing language of all three.

The clearest measure of the reversal is what the state now nominates for protection. Mexico accepted the World Heritage Convention on 23 February 1984 and holds 36 inscribed properties, most of them buildings. The most recent, added in 2025, is the Wixárika Route through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta, a pilgrimage route that is walked, and a living indigenous religious practice rather than a ruin.

What Mexican cooking is built on

Maize was domesticated by 1200 BC, and by the same period Mesoamerican cooks had developed nixtamalization, treating the grain with alkali made from plant ashes to soften it for grinding and raise its nutritional value. The Nahuatl root of nixtamal is nextli, meaning ash. That one process produced masa, and masa produced tortillas, tamales, atole, pozole, sopes and most of what a Mexican meal is served with or wrapped in. Tortillas are made of maize almost everywhere, with wheat in the north and plantain, yuca or wild greens in parts of Oaxaca.

The Spanish contribution arrived on top of an intact system rather than replacing it. Pork, beef and chicken came with the colonists, along with peppercorn, sugar, milk and its derivatives, wheat, rice and citrus. Rice reached Veracruz in the 1520s, having come to Spain from North Africa in the fourteenth century. Out of the meeting came mole, pozole, barbacoa and the tamale in their present forms, the range of Mexican breads, and the convent desserts including rompope and cajeta. Chocolate and vanilla both originated in Mexico, vanilla first cultivated by the Totonacs of the east coast, and both went the other way.

How the food became a heritage listing

Mexico presented its gastronomy for World Heritage listing in 2005, the first country to submit a culinary tradition for the purpose, and the bid failed because the committee did not give maize the weight the submission claimed for it. Traditional Mexican cuisine was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in November 2010. The inscription rests on the social role of the food, not its flavour: mole is cooked for Christmas, Easter, the Day of the Dead, baptisms, weddings and funerals, it takes groups of cooks and a day to make, and preparing it is understood as an investment in the relationships it feeds.

Which regions cook differently

The north is arid and its cooking is beef, in the form of carne asada and asado. Central Mexico produces mole and tacos al pastor. The south, Oaxaca and Chiapas above all, keeps the strongest indigenous inheritance, with cochinita pibil and mole de olla. The Yucatán Peninsula cooks with achiote and Caribbean influence, and the two coasts cook fish, with the Gulf giving its name to the à la veracruzana treatment. The Bajío, the agricultural centre, is the home of carnitas. Chocolate, chili powder, cumin, oregano, cilantro, epazote and cinnamon are the common spices across all of them, and chipotle, a smoke-dried jalapeño, runs through the whole repertoire.

How the Catholic calendar absorbed what came before

At the 2020 census 77.8% of the population was Catholic, 11.2% belonged to Protestant and evangelical denominations, and 8.1% declared no religion. Church attendance is a different measure from affiliation: 47% of Catholics attended services weekly in 1997. The state is secular. The constitutions of 1857 and 1917 put limits on the church, the government makes no financial contribution to it, and the church takes no part in public education.

What the calendar shows is a set of Catholic dates carrying older material. The Day of the Dead falls on 2 November alongside All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day and combines pre-Columbian belief with Christian form. Families build private altars for the dead, use sugar skulls and marigolds, set out the food and drink the dead preferred, and take the same offerings to the graves. The sugar craft that makes the skulls, alfeñique, was itself imported from Spain. The belief behind the day is reciprocal: the living attend to the dead so that the dead protect the living.

Guadalupe Day on 12 December is regarded by many Mexicans as the most important religious date of the year, and it honours the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the country. It opens a run of festivals that continues through Las Posadas from 16 to 24 December, Noche Buena on 24 December, Christmas, and New Year, a sequence now referred to as the Guadalupe-Reyes marathon. Epiphany on the evening of 5 January adds the three wise men to the nativity, and it is they, not Santa Claus, who traditionally leave presents in children's shoes, marked by eating rosca de reyes. Towns and villages hold annual festivals for their patron saints with processions, fireworks, dance competitions and piñatas. Syncretism is not confined to the calendar: shamanic practice sits inside Catholic observance in parts of the country, and the cult of Santa Muerte has grown in recent decades outside the church entirely.

What Mexican music was assembled from

Pre-Hispanic music used the teponaztli and other drums, flutes, rattles, conches blown as trumpets and the voice, and accompanied ceremonial dance. European instruments arrived with the colony, and some of them stopped being European. The Mexican vihuela, the small round-backed five-string guitar at the centre of a mariachi ensemble, evolved out of its Old World counterpart into a distinctly Mexican form. A mariachi group pairs it with violins, guitars, the deep guitarrón and trumpets. Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, established in 1897, is the group the genre's development is usually traced through.

The regional forms are numerous and hold their ground: banda and tambora in Sinaloa, norteño with its accordion and redoba in the north, son huasteco with a violin and two guitars in the north-east, son jarocho on the Gulf, jarana across the Yucatán, marimba in the south. Corridos, narrative folk ballads, became a significant form in the early twentieth century, carried stories of the revolution of 1910 to 1920, and continue now in the narcocorrido. The Jarabe Tapatío, danced in regional dress with heel and toe work, is the dance the state chose to stand for all of them.

Rock and roll was taken up by young Mexicans in the 1960s and 1970s and merged into the political counterculture of the period, culminating in the protests of 1968 and afterwards in the rebellion known as La Onda. The composers of the popular songbook include Agustín Lara, José Alfredo Jiménez, Consuelo Velázquez, who wrote Bésame Mucho, Armando Manzanero and Juan Gabriel. The Vive Latino festival in Mexico City is where the current spread of genres is heard in one place.

How the screen carried the culture outward

The Golden Age of Mexican cinema ran from 1935 to 1959, with an industry large enough to export across Latin America and into Europe. María Candelaria, directed by Emilio Fernández in 1943, took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1946, at the first festival held after the Second World War. Luis Buñuel, Spanish-born, made some of his central films in Mexico between 1947 and 1965, among them Los Olvidados in 1949. Cantinflas, Pedro Infante, María Félix, Dolores del Río and Jorge Negrete were its faces, and several of them were singers as well, which is how ranchera and mariachi reached audiences that had never been near a Mexican bandstand.

Television took over the same job. Telenovelas are exported and dubbed worldwide, and Mexico pioneered a use for them: the producer Miguel Sabido built serials for social change in the 1970s, and the government ran a telenovela to promote family planning against a high birth rate. The Sabido method was subsequently adopted in India, Peru, Kenya and China. A telecommunications reform in 2013 created new broadcast channels and opened the market that Televisa had dominated with TV Azteca and Imagen Televisión.

The current generation of directors works largely abroad while the reputation remains Mexican: Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, with the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and the cinematographers Emmanuel Lubezki and Guillermo Navarro. The written canon runs in parallel, from the pre-Columbian poet Nezahualcóyotl and the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Mariano Azuela's novel of the revolution, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Carlos Fuentes, and Octavio Paz, whose The Labyrinth of Solitude is an essay on the same national character the murals were painted to establish.

Which sports the country actually plays

The traditional national sport is charrería, a series of equestrian events performed on the Azteca, the national horse breed. Bullfighting came with Spain and remains established, with rings in almost every large city. Organised sport otherwise dates from the late nineteenth century: baseball arrived from the United States and by way of Cuba in the 1880s, and the stability of the Porfiriato is when structured competition became a public diversion. After the revolution the government sponsored sport deliberately, to set something against the country's international image of turmoil.

Association football is the most popular team sport. Each state supports its own clubs, and Chivas de Guadalajara, Club América, Cruz Azul and Pumas de la UNAM carry the largest followings. Hugo Sánchez, Rafael Márquez and Guillermo Ochoa are the players whose careers ran through European leagues. Boxing is the country's strongest combat tradition, with more than 110 world champions across the weight divisions and fourteen Olympic medals, and taekwondo is the next most practised sport, with seven Olympic medals. Lucha libre draws crowds through the CMLL and AAA promotions.

The hosting record follows the same logic as the murals. Mexico City held the Summer Olympics in 1968, the first Latin American city to do so, and the spending on facilities fed the discontent that ended in the Tlatelolco massacre days before the opening. Mexico hosted the FIFA World Cup in 1970 and 1986 and co-hosted the 2026 tournament with Canada and the United States. Each was a stage built for an audience outside the country.

Where the culture lives outside the country

An estimated 11.7 million Mexicans lived outside Mexico in 2019, with 98 to 99% of them in the United States, and an estimated 37.2 million United States residents, or 11.2% of that country's population, identified as being of full or partial Mexican ancestry. Between 1965 and 2015 more than 16 million Mexicans migrated north. The largest communities abroad are in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

That has a cultural effect running in both directions. In the northern states and the larger cities the Santa Claus tradition and Halloween now sit beside the local calendar, producing a gift-giving season that runs from Christmas Day to 6 January. In the other direction, the food, the music and the Day of the Dead have become legible far outside the borders of the state that standardised them.

The pattern holds across every part of the subject. A government set out after 1917 to manufacture a shared culture, chose indigenous material to build it from, and pressed the people that material came from to assimilate. The manufacture worked: the murals, the ballet, the songbook and the cuisine are recognisable anywhere. The assimilation did not, and the same state now protects sixty-eight languages by statute and nominates a walked pilgrimage route for World Heritage listing. Mexican culture is the record of both halves of that project, still legible in which parts of it were commissioned and which parts were simply kept.