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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, cost Mexico half its territory, while the United States gained land that became California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Because the new United States-Mexico border ran through territory that was still incompletely mapped, the treaty also called for government commissions from both nations to locate and mark the boundary on the ground. This book documents the accomplishments of both the U.S. and the Mexican Boundary Commissions that mapped the boundary between 1849 and 1857, as well as the fifty-four pairs of maps produced by their efforts and the ongoing importance of these historical maps in current boundary administration. Paula Rebert explores how, despite the efforts of both commissions to draw neutral, scientific maps, the actual maps that resulted from their efforts reflected the differing goals and outlooks of the two countries. She also traces how the differences between the U.S. and Mexican maps have had important consequences for the history of the boundary.

La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco’s life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films’ financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as “la crisis,” this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.

Of all the historical characters known from the time of the Spanish conquest of the New World, none has proved more pervasive or controversial than that of the Indian interpreter, guide, mistress, and confidante of Hernán Cortés, Doña Marina—La Malinche—Malintzin. The mother of Cortés's son, she becomes not only the mother of the mestizo but also the Mexican Eve, the symbol of national betrayal.

Very little documented evidence is available about Doña Marina. This is the first serious study tracing La Malinche in texts from the conquest period to the present day. It is also the first study to delineate the transformation of this historical figure into a literary sign with multiple manifestations.

Cypess includes such seldom analyzed texts as Ireneo Paz's Amor y suplicio and Doña Marina, as well as new readings of well-known texts like Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad. Using a feminist perspective, she convincingly demonstrates how the literary depiction and presentation of La Malinche is tied to the political agenda of the moment. She also shows how the symbol of La Malinche has changed over time through the impact of sociopolitical events on the literary expression.

The 1910 Revolution is still tangibly present in Mexico in the festivals that celebrate its victories, on the monuments to its heroes, and, most important, in the stories and memories of the Mexican people. Yet there has never been general agreement on what the revolution meant, what its objectives were, and whether they have been accomplished.

This pathfinding book shows how Mexicans from 1910 through the 1950s interpreted the revolution, tried to make sense of it, and, through collective memory, myth-making, and history writing, invented an idea called "la Revolución." In part one, Thomas Benjamin follows the historical development of different and often opposing revolutionary traditions and the state's efforts to forge them into one unified and unifying narrative. In part two, he examines ways of remembering the past and making it relevant to the present through fiestas, monuments, and official history. This research clarifies how the revolution has served to authorize and legitimize political factions and particular regimes to the present day. Beyond the Mexican case, it demonstrates how history is used to serve the needs of the present.

In the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico’s Southern Highland region, three facets of sociocultural life have been interconnected and interactive from colonial times to the present: first, community land as a space to live and work; second, a civil-religious system managed by reciprocity and market activity wherein obligations of citizenship, office, and festive sponsorships are met by expenditures of labor-time and money; and third, livelihood. In this book, noted Oaxacan scholar Scott Cook draws on thirty-five years of fieldwork (1965–1990) in the region to present a masterful ethnographic historical account of how nine communities in the Oaxaca Valley have striven to maintain land, livelihood, and civility in the face of transformational and cumulative change across five centuries.

Drawing on an extensive database that he accumulated through participant observation, household surveys, interviews, case studies, and archival work in more than twenty Oaxacan communities, Cook documents and explains how peasant-artisan villagers in the Oaxaca Valley have endeavored over centuries to secure and/or defend land, worked and negotiated to subsist and earn a living, and striven to meet expectations and obligations of local citizenship. His findings identify elements and processes that operate across communities or distinguish some from others. They also underscore the fact that landholding is crucial for the sociocultural life of the valley. Without land for agriculture and resource extraction, occupational options are restricted, livelihood is precarious and contingent, and civility is jeopardized.

2026 Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History
2026 María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History, Conference on Latin American History
2026 Honorable Mention, Environment Section of the Latin American Studies Association

A history of the Purépecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes.

Landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of Juátarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the Purépecha—a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, Juátarhu’s enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges.

Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, Pérez Montesinos shows how Purépechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using Juátarhu’s diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Purépechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, Pérez Montesinos argues that Michoacán, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era’s most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of Juátarhu.

El Tajín, an ancient Mesoamerican capital in Veracruz, Mexico, has long been admired for its stunning pyramids and ballcourts decorated with extensive sculptural programs. Yet the city's singularity as the only center in the region with such a wealth of sculpture and fine architecture has hindered attempts to place it more firmly in the context of Mesoamerican history. In Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents, Rex Koontz undertakes the first extensive treatment of El Tajín's iconography in over thirty years, allowing us to view its imagery in the broader Mesoamerican context of rising capitals and new elites during a period of fundamental historical transformations.

Koontz focuses on three major architectural features—the Pyramid of the Niches/Central Plaza ensemble, the South Ballcourt, and the Mound of the Building Columns complex—and investigates the meanings of their sculpture and how these meanings would have been experienced by specific audiences. Koontz finds that the iconography of El Tajín reveals much about how motifs and elite rites growing out of the Classic period were transmitted to later Mesoamerican peoples as the cultures centered on Teotihuacan and the Maya became the myriad city-states of the Early Postclassic period.

By reexamining the iconography of sculptures long in the record, as well as introducing important new monuments and contexts, Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents clearly demonstrates El Tajín's numerous iconographic connections with other areas of Mesoamerica, while also exploring its roots in an indigenous Gulf lowlands culture whose outlines are only now emerging. At the same time, it begins to uncover a largely ignored regional artistic culture of which Tajín is the crowning achievement.

For decades, Mexico has been one of the world’s top non-OPEC oil exporters, but since the 2004 peak and subsequent decline of the massive offshore oilfield—Cantarell—the prospects for the country have worsened. Living with Oil takes a unique look at the cultural and economic dilemmas in this locale, focusing on residents in the fishing community of Isla Aguada, Campeche, who experienced the long-term repercussions of a 1979 oil spill that at its height poured out 30,000 barrels a day, a blowout eerily similar to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Tracing the interplay of the global energy market and the struggle it creates between citizens, the state, and multinational corporations, this study also provides lessons in the tug-of-war between environmentalism and the lure of profits. In Mexico, oil has held status as a symbol of nationalist pride as well as a key economic asset that supports the state’s everyday operations. Capturing these dilemmas in a country now facing a national security crisis at the hands of violent drug traffickers, cultural anthropologist Lisa Breglia covers issues of sovereignty, security, and stability in Mexico’s post-peak future.

The first in-depth account of the local effects of peak oil in Mexico, emphasizing the everyday lives and livelihoods of coastal Campeche residents, Living with Oil demonstrates important aspects of the political economy of energy while showing vivid links between the global energy marketplace and the individual lives it affects.

In the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world, histories and collections of ritual knowledge were often presented in the form of painted and folded books now known as codices, and the knowledge itself was encoded into pictographs. Eight codices have survived from the Mixtec peoples of ancient Oaxaca, Mexico; a part of one of them, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, is the subject of this book. As a group, the Mixtec codices contain the longest detailed histories and royal genealogies known for any indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall offers a unique window into how the Mixtecs themselves viewed their social and political cosmos without the bias of western European interpretation. At the same time, however, the complex calendrical information recorded in the Zouche-Nuttall has made it resistant to historical, chronological analysis, thereby rendering its narrative obscure.

In this pathfinding work, Robert Lloyd Williams presents a methodology for reading the Codex Zouche-Nuttall that unlocks its essentially linear historical chronology. Recognizing that the codex is a combination of history in the European sense and the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, he brings to vivid life the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (AD 935–1027), a ruler with the attributes of both man and deity, as well as other heroic Oaxacan figures. Williams also provides context for the history of Lord Eight Wind through essays dealing with Mixtec ceremonial rites and social structure, drawn from information in five surviving Mixtec codices.

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy.

Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi” and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

Cristina, the young protagonist of Tree of Desire, and her little brother Joaquín run away from a home that is outwardly normal, but inwardly disfunctional. Lost on the streets of Mexico City, they confront some of the most terrifying aspects of city life. Or is it all a dream? The story suggests, without confirming, that sexual abuse has driven Cristina to her desperate escape. But is it an escape? Are they awakening from a dream, or reentering a nightmare?

Serafín, too, is lost in the city. Searching for his father who has deserted the family, he is virtually helpless amid the city dangers. Serafín finds compassion in surprising places, but will he survive to return to his mother and their rural village?

These two novels by one of Mexico's premier writers illuminate many aspects of contemporary Mexican life. Solares describes Mexico's different social classes with Dickensian realism. His focus on young protagonists, unusual in Mexican literature, opens a window onto problems of children's vulnerability that know no national borders. At the same time, his use of elements of the fantastic and the paranormal, and his evocative writing style, make reading his novels a most pleasurable experience.

Professor Luis Leal is one of the most outstanding scholars of Mexican, Latin American, and Chicano literatures and the dean of Mexican American intellectuals in the United States. He was one of the first senior scholars to recognize the viability and importance of Chicano literature, and, through his perceptive literary criticism, helped to legitimize it as a worthy field of study. His contributions to humanistic learning have brought him many honors, including Mexico's Aquila Azteca and the United States' National Humanities Medal.

In this testimonio or oral history, Luis Leal reflects upon his early life in Mexico, his intellectual formation at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, and his work and publications as a scholar at the Universities of Illinois and California, Santa Barbara. Through insightful questions, Mario García draws out the connections between literature and history that have been a primary focus of Leal's work. He also elicits Leal's assessment of many of the prominent writers he has known and studied, including Mariano Azuela, William Faulkner, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, Rudolfo Anaya, Elena Poniatowska, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodríguez, and Ana Castillo.