this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Mexico didn’t exist back then. Europeans hadn’t conquered and genocided and created states in the Americas.
This was native (indigenous) americans.
But those native people are still alive and the majority identify as Mexicans (additional to their community's identity). They're often bicultural, bilingual, etc.
Are you really going to walk to Xochimilco, where there are still chinampas, and tell the people they should not take credit for them as a society, for example? As crazy as to walk to an ethnic German in Köln and telling him/her that the Köln cathedral and the... Cologne, sorry, whatever, and the food and the stuff is not really their heritage because "you weren't Germany until...". WTH? Then all Germans did during the Weimar Republic wasn't them. All they did as Empires wasn't them. I hope it's not an awful analogy.
Like, you're technically correct, but pragmatically it doesn't make much sense to me in this case.
Mexicans are native
indigeneity and nationality are two different concepts that have nothing to do with each other.
this can range from indigenous Oaxacans who are US citizens to Mexican citizens who are settlers who murder indigenous people in Mexico to steal their land.
Mexico is a settler colonial state created by Spanish genociders.
The Mexican ruling class is still largely of european descent. It’s well established that lighter skin correlates with status in Mexico.
What did the natives call the region in their language?
Well before Mexico, it was the Aztecs and they called their land Aztlán, Mexico is probably some bastardized name from Nahuatl
Aztlán was the place they said they came from (probably in today's U.S. territory). The "Aztecs" called themselves "Mexica". That's also their name in Spanish, and I have a faded memory that it is not the name in English only because an anthropologist had trouble pronouncing it or something. Whatever.
Mexicas (meh - SHE - kahs) founded Tenochtitlan. After its fall, you are right, Mexico was named 'Mexico' from Nahuatl but people pronounced and pronounce it 'MEH - hee - koh' because of the Spanish language influence (think, as in Quixote, 'kee - HO - teh').
There were Mexican intellectuals pushing for a 'meh - SHEE - koh' pronunciation in the 20th century, but they failed miserably.
there was never a Aztec people that was the name someone made up. The Mexica people are the ones you are talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztecs
Someone has made up every name for every thing
You put "Mexica" in English... someone made that up, too. chaos everywhere what will we do
No, the people literally called themselves Mexica, they chose to call them Aztecs because they thought it would confuse the people.
No, they didn't call themselves "Mexica".
They didn't use the letters "M", "e", "x", "i", "c", or even "a".
Regardless, the term "Mexica" and all of those English letters were made up by someone. Not a single one of those words or letters existed independent of whomever made them up.
if you would have read the artical that I liked you could indeed see they called themselves Mexica (even if I must use these letters to represent the sounds). They never used the work Aztecs, its just a dumbing down for people, which seems it was needed, but still whitewashing.
Theres no such thing as Aztecs. Its Mexicas at best, but there existed several heterogenous cultures in the region, like the Olmecs.
I don't know where exactly maize was cultivated, but Mexico comes from city Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
They found millenia old traces of maize in the valley of the Rio Balsa in Xihuatoxtla and also in the valley of Tehuacán.
Something about Coxcatlán phase. Couldn't find a name of a people who would have been responsible for the domestication.
It's easiest to say it happened in Mesoamerica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Mexico