According to the World Association of Wind Power, Mexico grew its wind power sector faster than any other country during 2009, and now has more than 500MW of installed windpower capacity. Mexico’s goal is to have an installed capacity of 2,500 MW of wind energy by 2012, and to have 26% of the nation’s installed […]
This interesting graph comes from a report published earlier this year by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad, IMCO). The purple line shows Mexico’s oil consumption in thousands of barrels/day from 2005 to 2009, with predicted values for the period 2010 to 2025. The yellow line shows Mexico’s oil production for […]
We start this periodic round-ups of news items related to the geography of Mexico City with an update on Mexico City’s population. The preliminary results of the 2010 census show that the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA) has a population of 20,137,152. This includes the Federal District with its 8,873,017 inhabitants. The Federal District has […]
The map below shows the average number of inhabitants per household (“household size”) for each of Mexico’s states. The national average household size is 3.9 persons. The middle band on the map shows those states with household size between 3.7 and 4.0 inclusive. The darkest shade shows states with a household size of 4.1 or […]
Mexico’s economy, the world’s 11th largest, is growing rapidly and predicted by many analysts to become the world’s fifth largest by 2050. It is not, therefore, surprising that, according to a recent report on key emerging markets from Spanish bank BBVA, investments in emerging markets are assuming more and more importance. However, the all-encompassing term […]
The table shows the population figures for Mexico’s 14 largest metropolitan areas, according to the preliminary results of the 2010 census. Mexico currently has 11 metropolitan areas with a population in excess of one million inhabitants. Three other cities have over 900,000 inhabitants, and look set to join the million-plus club within the next few […]
The publication of the preliminary results from this year’s population census has allowed us to update our map of Mexico’s recent population change (Figure 8.3 of Geo-Mexico: the geography and dynamics of modern Mexico). We are delighted to bring you what may be the first map to be published anywhere in the world of Mexico’s […]
Cancún is Mexico’s premier tourist destination, attracting more than 3 million visitors a year. A recent Associated Press report by Mark Stevenson highlights the problems faced by the resort due to the erosion of its beaches. Cancún was developed on formerly uninhabited barrier islands on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. The islands were low-lying sand bars, held […]
In an earlier post – How many hurricanes are likely in the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season? – we reported on the predictions for this year’s Atlantic/Caribbean hurricane season How close to reality did those predictions turn out to be? The predictions were for 8 tropical storms, 5 moderate hurricanes (1 or 2 on the Saffir-Simpson […]
The 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference is now underway in Cancún, Mexico. It began 29 November and closes 10 December 2010. One of the objectives that Mexico hopes to achieve is the setting up of a Global Green Fund to help nations adversely affected by climate change to finance projects of mitigation and adaptation. […]
Thirty-one homes have been demolished due to structural damage resulting from subsidence in the colonia Benito Juárez. The subsidence, on 28 October 2010, occurred close to the Neza II garbage tip and affected more than 200 homes in total. Temporary accommodation has been found for the families affected, who will have their rents of up […]
According to the Environment Ministry, Mexico generates 94,800 tons of garbage a day, which equates to 34.6 million tons a year. Of this total, 53% is organic and 28% recyclable (paper and cardboard 14% of total garbage, glass 6%, plastics 4%, metals 3% and textiles 1%). The remaining 19% of total waste is comprised of […]
Mexicans migrate to the USA looking for work and higher salaries, but those workers pay 53 billion dollars a year in taxes, according to Ignacio Deschamps, head of the Fundación BBVA Bancomer. (The BBVA Bancomer Foundation has helped 20,000 young people in 143 municipalities complete their high school education.) Deschamps claims that for every dollar […]
The National Statistics Institute (INEGI) has released the preliminary figures from Mexico’s 2010 national population census. INEGI claims that its 190,000 census workers were able to visit 98.4% of all homes in the country. The lowest response rates were 91.3% and 91.5% respectively in the troubled northern border states of Tamaulipas and Chihuahua. Update: 2020 […]
In earlier posts in this Thanksgiving mini-series, we examined how several of the essential ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast—turkey, corn and potatoes—originated in Mexico. We round off this Thanksgiving series with a look at pumpkin pie. All varieties of pumpkin, whatever their size and shape, belong to the Cucurbita genus. While there are some doubts […]
Alongside turkey and/or corn at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the humble yet versatile potato is often eaten. That, too, was introduced to Europe from Mexico (though the plant appears to have originated in Andean Peru). A previous post delved into the connections between Mexico, the potato, and the Irish migration to North America following the potato […]
According to Ernst and Johanna Lehner in their Folklore and Odysseys of Food and Medicinal Plants, corn (which originated in Mexico) was misnamed as Turkish corn at the same time as turkey acquired its name, and for much the same reason. Europeans first saw corn, called maize or mahiz by the indigenous people, when Columbus […]
Geographers who are Hungary like to eat Turkey, provided it does not have too much Greece. The first in this Thanksgiving series of posts looked at how the first Thanksgiving was actually held in Mexico, and not the USA as more commonly claimed. Thanksgiving originated in Mexico, not in the USA! Many of the essential […]
If you live anywhere near Plimoth Plantation, Massachusetts, you may wish to stop reading right now… For the benefit of our many non-US readers, Plimoth Plantation, Massachusetts is commonly cited as the “birthplace of Thanksgiving”. The first Thanksgiving is said to have been held there way back in 1621. Well, has Geo-Mexico got news for […]
There are millions of Mexican workers in the USA who send a sizable portion of their wages back to their families in Mexico. On a per person basis, Mexico receives more worker remittances than any other major country in the world. An estimated 20% of Mexican residents regularly receive some financial support from workers abroad. […]
The map shows the 14 states in Mexico where less than 90% of the population has potable water in their homes. How does the distribution of state with relatively poor access to potable water compare with maps of: GDP/person and infant mortality ? Development indices of various kinds are discussed in chapters 29 and 30 […]
In 1970, the UN Law of the Sea Convention formally awarded each country the right to natural resources in its 200-mile (322 km) Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Where claims overlapped, the Law of the Sea requires the competing countries to negotiate separate bilateral or multilateral agreements. By 1979, the US and Mexico had agreed a […]
The city of Zitácuaro in the state of Michoacán had played an important part in Mexican history (hence its full official name of Heróica Zitácuaro) but was largely ignored by tourists until the early 1980s. Things changed, and tourists started coming, when the locations of the Monarch butterfly overwintering sites were first published. The Monarchs […]
Infant mortality is the number of deaths of infants (aged less than 1 year old) for every 1,000 live births. It is widely regarded as a very useful development indicator, and is one of the statistics used when calculating compound (multifactor) development indices. The Federal District has the lowest infant mortality rate in the county […]
Recent data indicate that between June 2009 and June 2010 foreign-born workers in the USA gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million jobs. Foreign-born Hispanics gained 392,000 new jobs, but their pay declined by 5.8%. The majority of foreign-born Hispanics are from Mexico. Assuming Mexicans obtained a big share of these employment gains, […]
In an earlier post, we looked at why ground subsidence has become such as serious problem in Mexico City. Why are some parts of Mexico City sinking into the old lakebed? The uneven subsidence poses a major challenge for engineering projects such as constructing (and maintaining) the city’s metro system.The Mexico City metro has 11 […]
In mid-2010, Mexico held a general census of its population and households. The majority of census respondents were required to complete a “basic questionnaire” of 29 questions, with a smaller number (2.7 million) asked to complete a “full questionnaire” with 75 questions. The questions asked in the basic questionnaire (with a summary of the options […]
The IMCO report on the competitiveness of Mexico’s states, which we briefly described in an earlier post, includes a significant section devoted to the sustainable management of Mexico’s natural environment. IMCO’s sustainable management factor incorporates 14 distinct variables. For almost every variable, the average of all 32 state values for that variable has improved between […]
Mexico City was built originally (ca. 1325) on an island in the middle of a lake, and eventually became the capital of the powerful Aztec Empire. The provision of potable water is a problem that has plagued the city for centuries. Deforestation in the 19th century depleted the springs that had supplied the city with […]
Mexicans have been migrating from Mexico to find better employment for decades. Virtually all of this migration, over 95%, is to the USA. Migration to the USA accelerated rapidly after about 1970. Throughout this period, there has been a strong current of return migration back to Mexico. At present there are about 12 million Mexican-born […]