Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
thousand victims at a time—little was said about the long history of life in the Americas before the first
Europeans arrived. Mexico had been the center of a succession of Indian civilizations for over twenty-five
hundred years. The Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec—or Mexica, as they called themselves—cultures de-
veloped pottery making, mathematics, metallurgy, sophisticated calendars, astronomical observations, ar-
chitecture, hydraulic engineering, urban planning, medical treatments, and complex social structures just
as their European and Asian counterparts did.
The capital of the Aztec Empire was a marvel of engineering. In 1325, as protection against powerful
neighbors, the Aztecs chose the island of Tlatelolco in muddy Lake Texcoco as the site of their city. Build-
ing three raised causeways and two aqueducts that brought fresh water into the city, they drained swamp-
land and built a dike ten miles long to keep out salty waters from another part of the lake. Within two hun-
dred years, it was an imperial city covering almost five square miles with a network of canals and bridges
that made Tenochtitlán—which means “Place of the Prickly Pear Cactus”—an American Venice.
But the defining moment in modern Mexican history came in 1519, with the arrival of a few ships
carrying about six hundred men under the command of Hernán Cortés. With guns, horses, and most
devastatingly, the smallpox virus, the Spanish quickly dominated Mexico, Central America, and South
America, wiping out as much as 90 percent of the native population—estimated between 1.5 and 3 mil-
lion—stripping the land of its gold and displacing centuries-old societies. Aztec pyramids were reduced
to rubble, their stones used to build Roman Catholic cathedrals. Mexico was ruled as the Viceroyalty of
New Spain for the next three hundred years, until 1810 when the Mexicans first revolted, winning inde-
pendence, temporarily, in 1821. During the next twenty years, a considerable portion of Mexico's territory
was stripped away by the United States, first by the rebellion of Texas and its annexation into the Union in
1836, and later with the annexation of California and much of the American Southwest after the Mexican
War in 1845-48.
Under a reformer president, Benito Juárez, an Indian, Mexico disestablished the Catholic Church as
a state religion and refused payment of its foreign debts in 1855. The response was an invasion by Brit-
ish, Spanish, and French forces, with the French ultimately seizing Mexico City and taking control of the
country, declaring Archduke Maximilian of Austria to be emperor of Mexico in 1863. A succession of re-
bellions and dictatorships finally led to the revolution of 1910-17. Since 1917, Mexico has been ruled as
a constitutional republic with a president elected for a single six-year term. Although a democracy, Mex-
ico's politics have been dominated by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for decades. But
opposition parties on both the right and the left have recently begun to make gains.
With an area about one fifth the size of the United States, Mexico has a population of more than 108
million (2010) and a growth rate of about 2.3 percent, far higher than Canada's rate of 0.7 percent or the
U.S. rate of 0.8 percent. One of the most indebted nations in the world, Mexico remains poor even though
it is an oil-producing nation, and recent advances in agriculture have improved its food production. Low
labor costs have made high-tech assembly of everything from cars to personal computers a growing source
of jobs.
But its capital, Mexico City, is poor, polluted, and congested. One of the worst places to build a city,
it is vulnerable to nature's deadliest threats—earthquakes and still-active volcanoes. Yet for five hundred
years it has been one of the world's largest cities, continuing to grow in spite of the regular predictions of
its doom, with a population of nearly 23 million in 2011.
IMAGINARY PLACES: Where Was El Dorado?
The English navigator and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) was writing in 1595 of a king-
dom supposedly located somewhere between the Amazon and Peru. The name El Dorado was first applied
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search