Mexico is formally the United Mexican States, a nation in the southern section of The United States and Canada. It is bordered to the north by the USA; to the south and west by the Pacific Sea; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and also the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico.

Mexico covers 1,972,550 square kilometers (761,610 sq mi), making it the globe’s 13th-largest country by location; with about 126,014,024 inhabitants, it is the 10th-most-populous nation and has the most Spanish-speakers. Mexico is arranged as a federation consisting of 31 states and Mexico City, its capital as well as largest city. Other significant urban locations consist of Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, Toluca, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and León.

Pre-Columbian Mexico traces its beginnings to 8,000 BC and is determined as one of the 6 cradles of human being; it was house to many sophisticated Mesoamerican human beings, most especially the Maya and also the Aztecs. In 1521, the Spanish Empire overcame and also conquered the region from its base in Mexico City, developing the nest of New Spain.

The Catholic Church played an essential duty in spreading Christianity as well as the Spanish language, while additionally maintaining some aboriginal elements. Native populaces were put down and also greatly exploited to extract abundant deposits of rare-earth elements, which added to Spain’s condition as a major world power for the following three centuries, as well as to an enormous increase of wide range and also a price change in Western Europe.

Gradually, a distinctive Mexican identification developed, based upon a blend of European as well as native customizeds; this added to the effective Mexican War of Independence versus Spain between 1810 and 1821.

Mexico’s early history as an independent country state was noted by political and socioeconomic turmoil, with liberal as well as conservative factions regularly transforming the type of government. The nation was attacked by two foreign powers throughout the 19th century: initially, after the Texas Change by American settlers, which brought about the Mexican– American War as well as huge territorial losses to the United States in 1848.

Liberal reforms were preserved in the Constitution of 1857, which sought to integrate indigenous neighborhoods and also cut the power of the armed forces and the church, granting religious freedom for the very first time. This set off an internal battle of Reform and intervention by France, throughout which conservatives mounted Maximilian Habsburg as emperor versus the Republican resistance led by Benito Juárez.

The last decades of the 19th century were noted by the tyranny of Head of state Porfirio Díaz, that looked for to update Mexico and bring back order. The Porfiriato age ended in 1910 with the decade-long Mexican civil war (Mexican Revolution), which killed approximately 10% of the population and after which the victorious Constitutionalist intrigue prepared a much more socially-oriented 1917 Constitution, which continues to be basically to this day.

The innovative generals ruled as a succession of presidents until the assassination of Alvaro Obregón in 1928. This caused the development of the Institutional Revolutionary Party the following year, which pseudo-democratically governed Mexico until 2000; initially under a paternalistic center-left model of substantial financial success, which transitioned into an extra US-aligned neoliberal model since the 1980s.