Early video of Mexico is rare, but always interesting to watch. This post features early examples of home movie footage, some of which was taken more than eighty years ago. The Stefan Hirsch and Elsa Rogo papers, in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, include nine short reels of film shot in […]
Remittances sent home by Mexican migrants (almost all of them residing in the USA) rose to $24.8 billion last year, up 4.75% compared to 2014. The average remittance sent to Mexico in 2015 was $292.00, a slight decline. Almost all remittances (97%) are now sent via electronic transfer. Low oil prices have led to a […]
The name “Distrito Federal” (Federal District) has been replaced by “Ciudad de México” (Mexico City). This is bad news for cartographers who need to relabel all those maps that say “Mexico D.F.”! The abbreviated form for the city’s name in Spanish will be CDMX. The constitution for the new administrative entity, which will eventually enjoy […]
Mexico has a long history of honey (miel) production. Honey was important in Maya culture, a fact reflected in some place names found in the Yucatán Peninsula, such as Cobá (“place of the bees”). Faced by the arrival of Africanized bees – The diffusion of the Africanized honey bee in North America – Mexico’s modern […]
A new highway linking Mozimba and Pie de la Cuesta has been formally inaugurated in Acapulco. According to the SCT (Communications and Transportation Secretariat), the $37 million highway will benefit 860,000 people living in Acapulco and Coyuca de Benítez. On average, 18,000 vehicles are expected to use the highway each day. The highway reduces travel […]
Environmentalists are denouncing the recent overnight destruction of mangroves in the Malecón Tajamar area of Cancún. Malecón Tajamar is a tourist complex with infrastructure financed by Mexico’s federal tourism development agency Fonatur, which has form when it comes to environmental destruction. (See, for example, Conflict at Cabo Pulmo: mass tourism meets ecotourism.) Mexico is one […]
The El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve covers 119,177 hectares in the southern state of Chiapas, in the municipalities of Acacoyagua, Angel Albino Corzo, La Concordia, Mapastepec, Villa Corzo, Pijijiapan and Siltepec. The reserve ranges in elevation from 450 meters above sea level to 2550 meters (8370 ft). El Triunfo is part of the mountain range known […]
Geo-Mexico has repeatedly lamented the sad state of the Juanacatlán Falls, the “Niagara of Mexico”, near Guadalajara. More than a century ago, they were considered a national treasure. Indeed, in 1899, they were among the earliest landscapes to be featured on Mexican postage stamps. In 2012, we reported that Greenpeace demands action to clean up […]
On 9 January 2016, the Google search pages in some countries (including the USA and Mexico but, curiously, not Canada) featured a Google Doodle about the amazing Monarch Butterflies. That day was exactly 41 years from when Ken Brugger and his partner Cathy Trail finally located the exact site of a major overwintering group of […]
The state of Quintana Roo is Mexico’s youngest state (together with Baja California Sur), though this is set to change when Mexico City is formally declared a state, probably later this year. Quintana Roo, established in 1974, is well known to tourists because its largest city is the tourist mega-resort of Cancún, on Mexico’s Caribbean […]
The World Trade Organization (WTO) issued a final ruling at the end of 2015 favoring Mexico in its long-running trade dispute with the U.S. over the labeling of tuna products. The acrimonious dispute began, more than 20 years ago, because the USA refused to allow Mexican fishermen to use the coveted “dolphin‑safe” label. The “dolphin […]
For the fifth year in a row, Mexico was the world’s leading exporter of beer in 2014. The final tally shows that Mexico exported 1,700 million liters of beer in 2014, worth 1.6 billion dollars. (Export figures for 2015 are not yet available but will show that Mexico remains well in the lead over Belgium […]
This short PostandFly.com.mx video, by Enrique de la Cruz and Tarsicio Sañudo, shows the spectacular inland scenery of the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The highlights are views of the Sumidero Canyon (near Tuztla Gutierrez, the state capital) and then some magnificent shots of the Lagunas Montebello, near the border with Guatemala, and the […]
The National Statistics Institute (INEGI) has released the results of its inter-census study carried out in March 2015 which involved visits to more than 7 million households across the country. As of March 2015, Mexico’s total population was 119,530,753 (48.6% male, 51.4% female), up from 111,954,660 million in 2010, a growth rate averaging 1.4% a […]
Is mass tourism a form of colonialism or imperialism? This, essentially, is the question thoughtfully considered by Denise Fay Brown of the University of Calgary in her article, “Tourists as colonizers in Quintana Roo, Mexico”, published in the Summer 2014 issue of The Canadian Geographer. Brown draws on decades of personal ethnographic fieldwork related to […]
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, continues to showcase Mexican textiles in a major exhibition entitled Viva México! Clothing and Culture. The exhibition opened in May this year and closes 23 May 3, 2016. It occupies the museum’s Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume. Even though the museum’s collection of Mexican textiles is […]
The award-winning video team at PostandFly.com.mx continue to produce some powerfully-evocative short videos focusing on Mexico’s extraordinary scenery. Many of the individual clips in this video were filmed in Baja California Sur, with occasional forays into Chihuahua and central and southern Mexico: For those that like to match names with places (that’s what makes you […]
The 2015 hurricane season in Mexico for Pacific coast storms started on 15 May and ended on 30 November. For Atlantic storms, the hurricane season extended from 1 June to 30 November. Hurricanes are also known as typhoons or tropical cyclones. This year, predictions for hurricane activity in the Atlantic were fairly close to reality, […]
This page lists some of the many maps on Geo-Mexico.com. Want to use a map? All these maps [except those marked (*)] are original Geo-Mexico.com maps. The use of any of Geo-Mexico’s maps for educational purposes is fine, provided credit is given to Geo-Mexico.com. For commercial use (including business presentations, newsletters, magazines, books, TV), please contact […]
Line 12 of Mexico City’s Metro (subway) system was originally opened in October 2012. The new line, also known as the Golden Line, extended the city’s metro system into several lower income areas in the south-eastern part of the city, including Tlahuac, Milpa Alta, Xochimilco and Iztapalapa. However, in March 2014, the elevated (above ground) […]
As we discussed in this earlier post, historical analysis combined with greater climatological understanding shows that many of the worst droughts and floods in Mexico have been associated with either El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events or with the related Pacific-North American Oscillation. Perhaps 65% of the variability of Mexican climate results from changes in […]
Proficiency in English is widely seen as an ever-more-essential skill in our increasingly-internationalized and business-oriented world. Many Mexicans have acquired excellent English, whether from education, family connections or residence abroad. It therefore comes as something of a shock to study the latest English Proficiency Index, put out by the Toronto-based organization, Education First (EF). Education […]
It is now just over a year since the first locally locally transmitted cases of chikungunya were reported in Mexico. (Local transmission means that mosquitoes in Mexico have been infected with chikungunya and are spreading it to people). The virus, first isolated in Tanzania in 1952, began to spread rapidly after an outbreak that originated […]
While writing Geo-Mexico, the geography and dynamics of modern Mexico, we were surprised to find there were no books in English about the geography of Mexico aimed at readers in the upper grades of high school or beginning years of college. On the other hand, we knew of several books about Brazil aimed at that […]
Earlier this year, UNESCO added a 16th century aqueduct in Mexico to its list of world heritage sites, bringing the total number of such sites in Mexico to 33. The Aqueduct of Padre Tembleque was constructed between 1554 and 1571. It is named for the Franciscan friar, Francisco de Tembleque, who began the 48-kilometer-long aqueduct, […]
A BBVA-Bancomer report, based on Mexico’s 2010 census data includes an interesting graph showing where “Americans older than 50” live in Mexico. The data is based on place of birth, so some of the “Americans” in the data are of Mexican heritage – they were born in the USA, to parents who were born in […]
The flow of bilateral Mexico-USA trade has increased six-fold in value in the past 20 years to nearly 1.5 billion dollars a day; 80% of it moves by truck or rail. A new rail bridge, the West Rail Bypass International Bridge (WBR), opened in late August, capable of carrying up to 24 million metric tons […]
The 2015 survey of connectivity by Mexican consultancy Gabinete de Comunicación Estratégica (GCE) provides further support, if any were needed, of the north-south digital divide that we have commented on several times previously. GCE carried out a telephone survey of 49,600 people, across the entire country, including respondents in the 76 largest cities. Respondents ranged […]
Follow-up, 28 October 2015: In the event, Hurricane Patricia did not cause anywhere near the catastrophic damage that it might have. This was partly because it was narrower than most hurricanes of its size and happened to continue on a path that missed the major resorts of Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo, and partly because it […]
It is easy to forget how rapidly transportation systems have changed since the horse and buggy days. The completion of the Mexican stretch of the Pan-American Highway (i.e. the part from the U.S. border to Guatemala) in the late 1940s was a significant turning-point in the development of Mexico’s road network. The highway made previously […]