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Mexican History & Culture

Mexico: Biography of Power

Enrique Krauze

Krauze tells the whole arc of modern Mexico – from the independence priests of 1810, through the Revolution, to the modern presidency – as one long story of strongmen and one-man rule. It runs close to 900 pages, but it reads like a narrative.

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Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

Camilla Townsend

The Aztec story built entirely from records the Mexica wrote themselves, in their own Nahuatl – not the Spanish version most of us got in school. Townsend trades the exotic, blood-soaked stereotype for real people, and shows how the Aztecs adapted and endured long after the conquest. It won the Cundill History Prize and reads like a page-turner.

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The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World

Carlos Fuentes

Fuentes traces five centuries of Spanish and Latin American culture — the collision and mixing of peoples and faiths that shaped Mexico and the rest of Spanish America. Written as the companion to his documentary series, it's part history, part meditation on what it means to be Mexican, and one of his most readable books.

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Mexican Fiction & Literature

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo

A man promises his dying mother he'll find the father he never met. He reaches the town of Comala and discovers it full of ghosts and murmurs, with Pedro Páramo's story surfacing out of them. Short, strange, and one of the most influential novels ever written in Spanish. Famous novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, said he could recite it front to back.

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In the Shadow of the Angel

Kathryn Blair

Often called Mexico's Gone with the Wind. It follows Antonieta Rivas Mercado – daughter of the man who designed the Ángel de la Independencia – through three turbulent decades, from the last years of the Díaz dictatorship through the Revolution and the power struggles that followed. She bankrolled a generation of Mexican artists and threw herself into the fight for women's vote, before a dramatic end in Paris. Blair, who married Antonieta's son, spent twenty years researching it.

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The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene

Greene's 1930s Tabasco, where the state has outlawed the Church and hunts its priests down. The last one left — a drinker, a father, no one's idea of a saint — keeps moving from village to village with a police lieutenant on his heels. Greene called it his best book; it grew out of a trip he took through Mexico in 1938, and it captures a violent chapter most visitors never hear about.

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Like Water for Chocolate

Laura Esquivel

On a turn-of-the-century ranch, Tita is the youngest daughter — which by family tradition means she can never marry, and must stay home to care for her mother while the man she loves marries her sister. So everything she feels goes into her cooking. Twelve chapters, one per month, each built around a recipe. Short, magical, and one of the best-loved Mexican novels of the last century.

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The Hummingbird's Daughter

Luis Alberto Urrea

Urrea spent twenty years researching the life of his own great-aunt Teresita — raised in poverty, the illegitimate daughter of a powerful rancher, who in 1889 wakes from what everyone believed was death with the power to heal. As pilgrims flock to her and she becomes the Saint of Cabora, her following grows dangerous under the Díaz dictatorship — Díaz himself is said to have called her the most dangerous girl in Mexico. Sweeping, mystical, and grounded in real history.

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Mexican Biographies

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo

Hayden Herrera

The definitive life of Mexico's most famous painter, and the book the 2002 film was based on. Herrera moves from Kahlo's childhood during the Revolution, through the accident at eighteen that shaped her body and her art, to her stormy marriage with Diego Rivera and a life tangled up with Trotsky, the Communist Party, and Mexican folk culture. Illustrated, intimate, and still the best single account of her.

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The Last Emperor of Mexico

Edward Shawcross

The strange, tragic episode when Mexico had a European crown. In 1864, Napoleon III lured the Austrian archduke Maximilian across the Atlantic to rule as emperor, on the false promise of a hero's welcome and French support. What he walked into was a country in the middle of civil war – an adventure that ended with his execution by Benito Juárez's forces and his wife Carlota's slide into madness.

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Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

Camilla Townsend

The woman history remembers as La Malinche — the indigenous translator who made Cortés's conquest possible, and who has been branded a traitor ever since. Townsend, author of Fifth Sun, looks past the myth of the scheming seductress to the real person: sold into slavery as a child, handed to the Spanish, and navigating an impossible position with real courage and skill. One of the most contested figures in how Mexico sees itself — and a little more scholarly than the rest of the list, though still very readable.

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