South And Gulf Coast of Mexico historical timeline

Mesoamerican civilisation begins in this region, and its later history is one of persistent indigenous resistance.

The Olmec

On the Gulf coast of Veracruz and Tabasco, from around 1500 BC, the Olmec built the first cities in Mesoamerica at San Lorenzo and La Venta. They carved colossal heads up to three metres high from basalt hauled a hundred kilometres, and established much of what followed — the ball game, the calendar, the maize god, the jaguar imagery. They are called the mother culture for good reason.

Zapotec and Maya

Monte Alban was founded around 500 BC on an artificially levelled mountaintop and ruled the Oaxaca valleys for a thousand years, with one of the earliest writing systems in the Americas. Palenque flourished in the seventh century under Pakal, whose tomb was found beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions in 1952 — the first royal burial discovered inside a Mesoamerican pyramid.

Conquest and resistance

The Spanish took the region in the 1520s and 1530s, but never completely: the Chiapas highlands rose repeatedly, the Tzeltal revolt of 1712 established an independent indigenous polity for months, and the Caste War of Chiapas followed in 1869.

Juarez

Benito Juarez, a Zapotec orphan from an Oaxacan village who became president and led the resistance to French occupation, is the region’s greatest figure and Mexico’s most revered.

The Isthmus and the railway that never was

Before the Panama Canal opened in 1914, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was the shortest crossing between the oceans in the Americas, and a railway was built across it in 1907 to carry cargo between two purpose-built ports. For a few years it was one of the busiest freight routes in the world; the canal made it obsolete almost overnight, and the isthmus towns have been trying to recover that position ever since — most recently with a new interoceanic corridor.

1994

The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas put indigenous rights on the national agenda and has shaped the region since.