Where the pre-Columbian and the colonial were fused rather than replaced.
How Will the Wolf Survive? is Los Lobos’s major label debut (October 1984), composed informally at Louie Pérez’s brother-in-law’s home, drawing lyrical inspiration from a National Geographic article about survival and identity; musically, it fuses Mexican traditions with R&B, country, and blues, and centres immigrant experience in songs like 'A Matter of Time' and 'Will the Wolf Survive?'.
Felipe Cazals’s 1976 Mexican drama reconstructs the 1968 San Miguel Canoa massacre, where five university employees were lynched after a local priest branded them communists. Shot in documentary style in the actual town, with Alex Phillips Jr.’s restrained cinematography and Enrique Lucero’s chillingly calm performance as the priest, the film traces how fear, faith, and state rhetoric coalesce into mob violence — not as exception, but as logical outcome.
Arturo Ripstein’s 1996 Deep Crimson transposes the Lonely Hearts Killers’ crimes to Mexico, following Coral Fabre and Nicolás Estrella as their lonely-hearts scam hardens into serial murder. With no psychological exposition or moral framing, the film charts their descent through ritualised acts, understated performances, and a stark visual style. It won eight Ariel Awards and Sundance Honorable Mention, and was Mexico’s Oscar submission.
Alfonso Cuarón’s 1991 debut Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a tightly wound Mexican romantic comedy about a womanising ad man falsely diagnosed with AIDS, whose ensuing suicide pact with a disillusioned flight attendant becomes an accidental path to emotional honesty. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki and edited by him too, it balances farce, satire, and quiet realism across 94 minutes in Mexico City. Though it won Ariel Awards and international festival acclaim, it was delayed for domestic release until 1993. Its strength lies in formal control and moral unsentimentality — not in likable characters or tidy resolutions.
Emilio Fernández’s 1951 Víctimas del Pecado stars Ninón Sevilla as Violeta, a Cuban dancer who adopts an abandoned infant in Mexico City’s red-light district. Set in Churubusco Studios, the film blends mambo numbers by Pérez Prado and Pedro Vargas with a tightly wound melodrama of love, betrayal, and imprisonment. Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography carves space into zones of glamour, austerity, and quiet domesticity. Though structurally uneven and reliant on genre convention, its physical expressiveness, moral clarity, and studio craft make it a defining work of post-war Mexican cinema.
Set in 1999 Mexico, Y tu mamá también follows two teenage boys and a woman in her late twenties on a road trip to a mythical beach. Narrated with clinical detachment, the film observes their shifting alliances, sexual awakenings, and quiet confrontations with mortality and class — all shot in handheld, naturalistic style. It is a coming-of-age story that refuses to sentimentalise youth or simplify its contradictions.
John Huston’s 1948 adaptation of B. Traven’s novel follows two American drifters and an ageing prospector searching for gold in the Mexican wilderness. As the find is made, trust fractures, language fails, and morality simplifies to survival. With restrained cinematography by Ted McCord, sparse scoring by Max Steiner, and performances anchored by Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston, the film traces the slow, unsentimental collapse of shared reality under pressure. Shot on location in Mexico and California, it remains a benchmark of psychological realism — austere, exacting, and unyielding.
After nearly fifteen years working through Spanish colonial administration in the Caribbean, Hernan Cortes defied his own superior to lead an unauthorised expedition to Mexico in 1519, exploiting divisions among Aztec tributary peoples to conquer Tenochtitlan by 1521. His own letters to the Spanish crown, written to justify the illegal campaign, remain the central source for his career, supplemented by a soldier's later memoir and his chaplain's admiring biography. Several of his most flattering claims, including Aztec reverence toward him as a god, have not held up to modern scrutiny, and unresolved accusations, including his first wife's suspicious death, shadow his personal reputation.
Moctezuma II expanded the Aztec Empire to its greatest territorial extent, fought some seventy-three military campaigns, and reorganised imperial administration into centrally governed provinces before Spanish forces reached Tenochtitlan in 1519. Spanish and indigenous sources diverge sharply in their portrayal of him, and his death in June 1520 remains disputed between accounts of his own subjects stoning him and testimony that Spanish soldiers killed him directly. His decades of successful rule have been largely overshadowed in popular memory by the empire's collapse the following year, leaving no single settled portrait of the man behind either extreme characterisation.
Three Nahua city-states, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, formed the Triple Alliance around 1428 after a civil war, building an empire that dominated central Mexico by the early sixteenth century before Hernán Cortés and his indigenous allies destroyed it between 1519 and 1521. Much of the empire's own documentary record may have been deliberately destroyed by one of its own administrators, leaving historians dependent on a mix of surviving pictographic codices, Spanish conquistador accounts, and archaeology to reconstruct its history.
Hernan Cortes landed on the Gulf coast of Mexico in 1519 and, through alliances with Aztec tributary peoples resentful of imperial rule, marched on Tenochtitlan, where an initial peaceful reception collapsed into violence, a chaotic Spanish retreat, and a devastating smallpox epidemic before the capital finally fell after siege in August 1521. Spanish accounts dominate the surviving record, though indigenous testimony recorded after the conquest under colonial supervision offers a partial counterweight. Historians now doubt several staples of the traditional story, including the belief that Moctezuma saw Cortes as a returning god, tracing that idea only to European writing from the 1540s.
Maya civilisation developed across roughly two thousand years, from early farming settlements around 2000 BC through a Classic period of competing city-states between about 250 and 900, a still-unexplained ninth-century decline, and a Postclassic phase that lasted until Spanish conquest reached the last independent stronghold in 1697. Only three Maya codices survived the conquest, so much of what is known comes from decoded hieroglyphic inscriptions and archaeology, and no single explanation for the Classic collapse commands agreement among historians.
In August 1680, Pueblo communities across Spanish New Mexico, coordinated by the Tewa religious leader Po'pay after five years of secret planning, rose simultaneously and expelled Spanish colonists for twelve years, the longest sustained indigenous victory over a European colonial power in the Americas. Spanish colonial letters dominate the immediate record, while Po'pay's own character survives mostly through hostile testimony, leaving historians uncertain whether he ruled afterward as visionary or tyrant. When Spain returned in 1692, it permanently abandoned earlier attempts at religious suppression, making the revolt one of the rare cases of resistance producing lasting concessions.
Forza Horizon 5 is a racing game set in an open world modelled on Mexico. It was developed by Playground Games and published by Xbox Game Studios for Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
FEMSA is a Mexican multinational beverage and retail company headquartered in Monterrey, operating the largest independent Coca-Cola bottling group in the world and Mexico’s largest convenience store chain. It reports US$26.9 billion in revenue (2019), ranks fifth-largest company in Mexico, and operates across Latin America via bottling plants, convenience stores, drugstores, fuel stations, and third-party logistics—and in the US via jan-san distribution. Listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange since 1978 and NYSE ADRs since 1998. FEMSA is the holding company of Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery—the culmination of Eugenio Garza Sada’s industrial expansion from a single brewery into Grupo Valores Industriales, which included Fábricas de Monterrey (1920), HYLSA (1942), Empaques de Cartón Titán (1936), and multiple acquired breweries.
