Mexico is a strikingly unusual and contradictory place. Its modern culture is built upon underlying Indian civilizations, impositions from Spain and successive infusions from Europe and North America: it is a country where the ancient and the modern now coexist, sometimes in hybridized forms and sometimes awkwardly juxtaposed with one another.

Like most other Spanish-American countries, Mexico became independent from Spain in the early nineteenth century and then began to tackle the process of establishing its own institutions and showing how it was different from other countries. Ever since then Mexico has gone out of its way to build a shared idea of nationhood and to project a unified national image; and yet one can see signs of difference and inequality all around. One might also say that the country's character, a strange marriage of dynamism and inertia, is epitomized by the oxymoronic name of the political party that ruled the country for some seventy years in the twentieth century, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

Mexico is, and has been, an important country. In our own day it is populous and linguistically significant, boasting more Spanish speakers than any other nation in the world, about twice as many as Spain. Moreover, despite the loss of more than half of its territory to the United States during the nineteenth century, Mexico is still a big country. Its role in the wider ambit of the Americas has been a crucial one, a role that began when Mexico became the main hub from which the Americas were explored and conquered during the sixteenth century. In fact at that time it was even called ‘Nueva España’, and in a sense it came to stand for the New World. Since the initial break from Spain (which proved, in any case, never to be a total one) the country has been periodically influenced by Europe, in addition to which it has had a close, if sometimes fraught, relationship with United States. If the estimates prove to be accurate, by 2025 Mexico will lose its position as the country with most speakers of Spanish to, ironically, that old rival, the United States, and largely because of the number of Mexican nationals who are crossing the northern border to live there.