A codex comes home, for now
The Codex Azcatitlan, one of the most important pictographic accounts of Mexica history, is back in Mexico for the first time since it left the country in 1840. On loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) to mark the bicentenary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, it is on display at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA) until 31 December, in the free exhibition El Códice Azcatitlan. México-Francia, 200 años de amistad. In return, the Codex Boturini, also known as the Tira de la Peregrinación, has travelled to Paris, where the BnF was due to put it on show this week. The reciprocal loan was agreed by presidents Claudia Sheinbaum and Emmanuel Macron in November 2025 and completed in under a year, a record for the institutions involved. “We are undoubtedly seeing a revival of the old friendship that existed between France and Mexico, but there is also a renaissance of cultural ties between Spain and Mexico, and between several other countries,” noted presidential advisor and representative to the European Council, Alfonso Suárez de Real. “Thanks to the support of President Claudia Sheinbaum, cultural diplomacy has been extremely active.”
Culture Minister Claudia Curiel de Icaza described the two works as the same journey told in different mediums: the Boturini a long, uncoloured strip of amate paper, the Azcatitlan a colour-illustrated book that carries the story into the Conquest.
Drawn on paper and bound, the codex was produced between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It traces the Mexica migration from Aztlán to the founding of Tenochtitlan, the reigns of successive tlatoanis (rulers), the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1519, and the conquest and evangelisation. Baltazar Brito Guadarrama, director of the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia and curator of the exhibition, notes that its annotations in Spanish have helped confirm the locations of several sites in the foundation narrative. He argues that features such as the prominence of women and an African figure among Cortés’s forces merit further study. Kept at no more than 40 lux, the original is displayed open at pages four and five, in which eight peoples, among them the Tepanecs, Chalcas and Xochimilcas, set out in search of the site designated by Huitzilopochtli. The choice is intended to show the multi-ethnic roots of the Mexica foundation myth. The remaining folios are reproduced in large format, alongside 25 pieces arranged in six thematic sections.
Its first owner is believed to have been the Texcocan historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a descendant of Nezahualcóyotl. It passed to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, who bequeathed his library to the Jesuits, and in 1737 was acquired by the Italian collector Lorenzo Boturini, whose papers were confiscated by the viceregal authorities and later deposited at the Royal and Pontifical University. The French scholar Joseph Aubin acquired it in the 1830s and took it to France, later selling it to the collector Eugène Goupil, whose widow donated it to the BnF in 1896.
The loan has revived the question of repatriation. Curiel said the initiative began with a petition from the Hñähñu community of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo. Brito confirmed that talks with France are under way, though he stressed that nothing has been agreed. French specialists have inspected conservation conditions in Mexico, and Brito sees the loan as a possible first step. The legal path is uncertain. A French law enacted in May 2026 allows items in public collections to be restituted, but only where there is serious evidence that they were illicitly appropriated between 1815 and 1972; the codex’s departure, as historically documented, was not illicit. Bills specifically seeking the transfer of the Azcatitlan and the Codex Borbonicus to Mexico were tabled in the National Assembly in April 2025 and in the Senate in June 2026. Mexico’s ambassador to France, Blanca Jiménez Cisneros, said Mexican officials had lobbied French legislators, while cautioning that any result would take time.
The loan also anchored an international symposium on Mesoamerican codices, held at the MNA from 22 to 25 September. It was organised by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the BnF and the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, with specialists from Mexico, France, Italy and Poland. The BnF’s director of collections, Jean-Charles Bédague, noted that nearly 1,000 BnF documents on Mexican history are now available on Memórica, the Mexican government’s digital platform. The INAH, meanwhile, is gathering high-resolution images of Mexican codices held in France, Spain, Italy, the United States, England and Scotland, with a view to making them freely available online.
From Juchitán to the National Palace
For her second Grito de Independencia on 15 September, President Claudia Sheinbaum wore an outfit embroidered by artisans from Juchitán de Zaragoza, in Oaxaca’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It consisted of a black jacket covered in hand-stitched flowers in red, purple, pink, blue and green, worn with a straight black skirt and the presidential sash. The embroidery was the work of Elvis Guerra, Dayari Ramírez, Reyna Montero and Lorena Martínez of the Biulú workshop; the garment was designed by Thelma Islas Lagunas and Crystel Martínez Torres and made up by Saúl Mosqueda. The floral pattern drew on a design from Guerra’s family history.
Guerra, a Zapotec poet, translator, artisan and muxe activist, founded Biulú after the 2017 earthquakes to preserve local textile techniques. Around 20 women and muxe embroiderers now work there, selling huipiles and traditional dress as far afield as South America, Spain and Thailand. Guerra called dressing the president a collective achievement belonging to all of Juchitán.
The choice echoed Sheinbaum’s first Grito, in 2025, when she wore a purple dress with a contrasting bodice embroidered by the Nahua artisan Virginia Verónica Arce Arce, of San Isidro Buen Suceso, Tlaxcala. Both outfits mark a departure from the balcony fashion of recent first ladies. Margarita Zavala, wife of former president Felipe Calderón, favoured the Mexican designer Macario Jiménez, who for the 2010 bicentenary created a dress trimmed with the silver buttons of a charro suit. Angélica Rivera, wife of Enrique Peña Nieto, made her debut in 2013 in a green lace gown by Benito Santos, reportedly worth 120,000 pesos; the following year she was criticised for wearing an 80,000-peso Oscar de la Renta design. Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller wore a green and black lace dress donated by the Mexican label Mussi for her husband Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s first presidential Grito in 2019.
Asked about her wardrobe, Sheinbaum told reporters that she recycles her clothes, often incorporating textiles given to her on tour, and favours Mexican craftwork over international fashion houses as an expression of national identity.
Days after the celebrations, the story took a darker turn. On the night of 18 September, two people on a motorbike fired on the façade of Guerra’s home in Juchitán; no one was injured. In a video, Guerra appealed to Sheinbaum and Oaxaca’s governor, Salomón Jara, for help, describing constant threats and extortion attempts following the opening of a new events venue, and saying that hundreds of residents had fled Juchitán in fear. Guerra later said the extortionists had been demanding 200,000 pesos since early August; the state prosecutor’s office says the attack stemmed from an extortion attempt and that those responsible have been identified. Jara offered Guerra protection and a security escort, and on 23 September Sheinbaum received Guerra at the National Palace alongside the Security Secretary, Omar García Harfuch. The same day, federal and state forces arrested Juchitán’s mayor, Miguel Sánchez Altamirano of the governing Morena party, on charges of aggravated extortion and crimes against state security. Investigators accuse him of protecting Los Cromos, a local faction of the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). Sheinbaum has since said that the arrest is not directly related to the attack on Guerra.
Nearly five centuries of academic tradition
The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) celebrated its 475th anniversary on 21 September, marking the founding of the University of Mexico with an event at the Palacio de la Antigua Escuela de Medicina, in Mexico City’s historic centre. The date recalls the royal decree issued on 21 September 1551 by Prince Philip, on behalf of his father, Charles V, establishing the Real Universidad de México; teaching began in 1553, and the title of Pontifical was added later by a bull of Pope Clement VIII. After closures and upheavals, the institution was re-founded as the National University in 1910 and became autonomous in 1929. While the UNAM of today differs tremendously from its colonial forerunner, the university regards it as the starting point of a continuous academic tradition.
Its alumni span the centuries. The playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and the polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora studied at the colonial university, while the writer Rosario Castellanos, Mexico’s three Nobel laureates (Octavio Paz, Alfonso García Robles and Mario Molina) and a long line of presidents, among them Claudia Sheinbaum, passed through the modern one. Its relationship with the state has swung between closeness and confrontation, most dramatically when troops occupied Ciudad Universitaria in 1968.
The commemorative programme, coordinated across more than 70 academic bodies in Mexico and abroad, comprises some 400 activities. The Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM, itself turning 90, will reopen the renovated Sala Nezahualcóyotl on 26 September with works by Gabriela Ortiz, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Mahler (more on this below). The centrepiece exhibition, Universidad de México: 475+ años de concebir futuros, opens at the Colegio de San Ildefonso on 7 October and runs until 31 March 2027, displaying more than 700 pieces, from manuscripts to fossils and scientific instruments, alongside immersive technology. A photographic exhibition of 62 large-format panels opens on 12 October along the Galería de la Juventud Heroica in Chapultepec. A commemorative book, due in the first quarter of 2027, will pair the San Ildefonso catalogue with 25 personal essays by figures including Elena Poniatowska, Margo Glantz, Gonzalo Celorio and the former footballer Hugo Sánchez.
A demographic surprise
Mexico’s population is growing more slowly, and ageing faster, than demographers expected. The 2025 Intercensal Survey, conducted between 6 October and 14 November 2025 and published by the national statistics institute (INEGI) on 22 September, puts the population at 130.9 million, well short of the roughly 133 million projected by the National Population Council (Conapo) and the United Nations. Average annual growth slowed to 0.7 per cent between 2020 and 2025, reflecting both deaths during the pandemic and falling fertility. Over the same period, the median age rose from 29 to 32, and the average number of children born to women aged 12 and over fell from 2.1 to 1.9. The survey’s estimate of the total fertility rate, the number of children a woman would be expected to have over her lifetime, is starker still: it fell from 1.9 in 2019 to 1.2 in 2024, ranging from 0.8 in Mexico City to 1.8 in Chiapas. Average household size shrank from 3.6 to 3.3 people, even as the number of occupied homes rose from 35.2 million to 39.7 million. Three of the country’s 32 federal entities lost population: Veracruz, Guerrero and Mexico City.
The survey also records the first fall in the foreign-born population since at least 2010, from 1.21 million to 1.17 million (0.9 per cent of the total), a decline El País links to tougher US migration policy. More than half of foreign-born residents were born in the United States, followed by Venezuela and Cuba. In the other direction, the survey estimates that 1.26 million people living in Mexico moved abroad, of whom only around 151,000 have returned. Some 24.2 million people (18.6 per cent of the population) identify as Indigenous, and 2.1 million (1.6 per cent) as Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant. Yet only around three in ten Indigenous people speak an Indigenous language: 7.4 million speakers in all, and their share of the population aged three and over slipped from 6.1 to 5.9 per cent. Education and connectivity have improved, with illiteracy falling to 3.7 per cent, average schooling rising to 10.3 years and household internet access jumping from 53.9 to 75.7 per cent. Violence, however, continues to uproot families: some 1.6 million people, in around 510,000 households, live with at least one member who was forced to move by violence or crime, with Zacatecas and Morelos the worst affected. A further 152,000 households include someone displaced by natural or man-made disasters.
Behind the slowdown lies a sharp fall in births. According to Milenio, births in hospitals run by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) fell from 425,516 in 2017 to 271,955 in 2025, a decline of more than 36 per cent; in those of the ISSSTE, the social security institute for state employees, they fell from 36,052 to 18,691 over the same period, a drop of 48.2 per cent. Víctor Manuel García Guerrero, a demographer at the Colegio de México, said his first reaction to the figures was that they must be wrong. He had assumed that births missed while civil registry offices were closed during the pandemic would be registered late, but the numbers kept falling, and INEGI confirmed there had been no processing error.
In the 1970s, when the population was growing by 3.5 per cent a year, the government created Conapo and launched the famous slogan “La familia pequeña vive mejor” (The small family lives better). Families that once averaged almost seven children now average 1.2, far below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Mexico is certainly not alone. According to the World Bank, fertility in Latin America has fallen by 68.4 per cent since 1950, and José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), has warned that the region is ageing as much in a couple of decades as Europe did in more than a century. Globally, the UN’s latest World Population Prospects puts the average at 2.25 births per woman, one child fewer than a generation ago, and projects that it will fall to the replacement level of 2.1 by the late 2040s. At 1.2, Mexico’s rate is barely half the global average: the country is arriving early at a point much of the world is expected to reach within a generation.
Sala Nezahualcóyotl reopens with a premiere
The Sala Nezahualcóyotl, the UNAM’s celebrated concert hall at the Centro Cultural Universitario, reopens this weekend after closing in April for the second phase of a comprehensive remodel. Over 180 days, work covered 1,250 square metres, some 35 per cent of the complex, focusing on infrastructure, services and comfort while leaving the main auditorium’s renowned acoustics untouched. Stage lighting was completely replaced, with more than 20 kilometres of new cabling and around 190 fixtures that cut energy use by roughly half. The basement rehearsal room, the costliest single intervention at about 18 million pesos, now replicates the main hall’s acoustic conditions. The stage floor, 50 cedar doors with an acoustic function, the original chandeliers and 800 stalls seats have been restored or renewed, and 34 spaces for people with disabilities added. The university’s board of trustees approved a budget of 153 million pesos. A third phase, due for completion in September 2027, will add a story to the orchestras’ building.
The reopening concerts this weekend, on 26 September at 8pm and 27 September at noon, feature the world premiere of Fanfarria volcánica by Gabriela Ortiz, winner of three Grammy awards in 2025 and a UNAM alumna and professor. The five-minute piece gives brass and percussion the leading role, with some musicians playing from the boxes, and draws on the volcanic Pedregal landscape on which the hall stands. It was commissioned to mark the 90th anniversary of the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM (OFUNAM), the hall’s 50th and the university’s 475th. Cellist Mischa Maisky, 78, will play Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1 and his own transcription of Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin. The programme closes with Mahler’s First Symphony under principal conductor Sylvain Gasançon, whose tenure ends on 7 and 8 November with the composer’s Resurrection Symphony.
A new chapter for public book buying
The Culture Ministry and the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) have opened a 50-million-peso call to buy books from independent, small and mid-sized Mexican publishers for public libraries nationwide. It is the first such purchase in a decade; the last, in 2016, was worth 300 million pesos but was criticised for favouring large publishers. Registration runs from 28 September to 7 October, and publishers must hold at least 200 copies of each title submitted. Priority areas include Mexican history, children’s and young adult books, Mexican literature, popular science and bilingual editions in Indigenous languages. Results are due on 30 October, with the FCE handling procurement.
The purchase sits alongside a proposed zero VAT rate for bookshops and distributors, included in the 2027 economic package and still awaiting congressional approval. Culture Minister Claudia Curiel de Icaza said that extending publishers’ existing exemption to distribution would correct a significant imbalance; the government puts the benefit at 200 to 250 million pesos a year. Independent booksellers have questioned one of the conditions for the zero rate, which requires sales of books and periodicals to make up at least 90 per cent of income, as many rely on cafés and other services.
Meanwhile, Educal’s 2026–2030 programme, published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación (the federal government’s official gazette) on 9 September, establishes that the state bookshop chain will work with the FCE rather than merge with it, although FCE director Paco Ignacio Taibo II had presented a merger as settled. The programme assigns distribution, sales and reading promotion to Educal and publishing to the FCE. It notes that more than 70 per cent of Mexico’s bookshops are concentrated in metropolitan areas, leaving states such as Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero poorly served. Educal, which had 62 operating bookshops and six Librobús mobile units at the end of 2025, plans to open new branches, upgrade premises and join more book fairs.
Chatter Box
A Milan debut for an emerging Mexican designer. Mexican label Neithan Herbert will make its runway debut on Milan Fashion Week’s official schedule on Saturday 26 September with its spring/summer 2027 collection. Designer Neithan Ruiz, 28, is Mexican Ecuadorian and grew up in San Miguel de Allende; he was named among five new designers to watch by The New York Times‘s T Magazine. He studied at Milan’s Istituto Europeo di Design, graduating in 2020, and founded the brand the following year with his sister, Anga. His clothes are made with local artisans using hand-smocking, embroidery and pleating traditional to Guanajuato, and last year the actress Adriana Paz wore one of his designs to the Oscars.
For Milan, Ruiz has produced half the collection in Italy so that base garments can be reproduced for buyers, while showpieces and embroidery are still made in Mexico. A fundraiser organised by his San Miguel community paid for the five women artisans who make his garments to travel to Milan, where they will open the show.
Morelia Film Festival unveils 2026 programme. The Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia (FICM) will hold its 24th edition from 16 to 25 October across Morelia and Pátzcuaro, with free online screenings on Imcine’s platform, nuestrocine.mx. A total of 96 films will compete: 12 features, 12 documentaries, 64 Mexican shorts and eight titles in the Sección Michoacana. Features in contention include new work by Nicolás Pereda, Rodrigo Plá and Diego Luna.
Jonás Cuarón’s Campeón gabacho, about a Mexican migrant chasing a boxing career in the United States, opens the festival, with his father, Alfonso Cuarón, attending as producer. Guillermo del Toro will host a gala screening of a restored El laberinto del fauno marking its 20th anniversary. Other guests include James Gray with Paper Tiger, Carlos Reygadas with Heil Jupiter!, Gael García Bernal with Hombre al agua and Demián Bichir with the documentary Mujer santuario. International titles include new films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Danny Boyle and Taika Waititi, while tributes honour the Golden Age screenwriter and actor Janet Alcoriza and the Hungarian director Béla Tarr, who died in January. Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona will preside over the Mexican feature jury. Winners in the short film and documentary feature categories may be considered for Oscar nominations.
French life on film in Chapultepec. The railings of Chapultepec, on Paseo de la Reforma, are currently displaying El instante Ronis, 60 large-format images by Willy Ronis (1910–2009), one of the leading figures of 20th-century French humanist photography. Spanning 1930 to 2000, the selection captures everyday French life, ranging from a 14 July night in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1955 to the social struggles Ronis documented as a Communist Party member, including the 1938 strikes at Javel, the return of prisoners of war in 1945 and the funerals after the Charonne massacre in 1962. Part of Fotoseptiembre and the programme marking two centuries of Franco-Mexican relations, the show runs until late October. It then travels to the Casa de Francia in Guanajuato for the Festival Internacional Cervantino, where France is guest of honour. It is the first activity in Mexico by the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie, the French Culture Ministry archive that holds between 25 and 30 million photographs, the largest public photographic collection in Europe.
Jíkuri in Mexican cinemas. Ninety years after Antonin Artaud travelled to the Sierra Tarahumara in search of the peyote rituals he believed held the essence of art, Federico Cecchetti’s Jíkuri: viaje al país de los tarahumaras is now showing in Mexican cinemas. Loosely inspired by Artaud’s own account of the 1936 journey, the film is neither biography nor illustration but a freeform fiction. It pairs the French actor François Negret as Artaud with the Rarámuri runner José Cruz Apachoachi, who forms a spiritual bond with the poet. Milenio’s critic singled out the moment when a terrified Artaud flees the very ceremony he crossed the Atlantic to witness and also praises Iván Hernández’s photography of the Chihuahua mountains. The film screened in the Mezcal competition at the 39th Guadalajara International Film Festival and the official selection of the 20th Ficmonterrey, both in 2024. The second instalment of Cecchetti’s trilogy on Mexico’s indigenous cultures, it follows El sueño del Mara’akame (2016), which won him the Ariel and a Morelia festival prize for best first feature.
Festival CultuaUNAM includes Malkovich and more. Celebrated actor John Malkovich is coming to the Festival CulturaUNAM, which runs until 11 October with more than 60 events centred on the reopened Sala Nezahualcóyotl. On 3 October at 8pm and 4 October at noon, he performs Informe sobre ciegos, his adaptation of a chapter from Ernesto Sábato’s 1961 novel Sobre héroes y tumbas. It is set to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings, with the pianist Anastasya Terenkova, his touring partner since 2016. The OFUNAM, conducted by Sylvain Gasançon, opens the programme with scenes from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Elsewhere, the former Madredeus singer Teresa Salgueiro performs on 27 September and the saxophonist George Coleman, who played with Miles Davis, on 28 September. Meredith Monk performs on the final day, 11 October. The Comédie-Française stages Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement on 1 and 2 October, Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater receives its Latin American premiere, and Emmanuel Carrère discusses his new book on 9 October. The festival also honours the architect Teodoro González de León in his centenary year, including a concert by the Ensemble Modern on 30 September.
Culture Outing
Radical Optimism in Casa Hotbook. (Photo: Somos MXC)
ZONAMACO LAB presents Radical Optimism
The celebrated annual art fair’s experimental offshoot ZONAMACO LAB presents Radical Optimism at Casa Hotbook (Monte Líbano 280, Lomas de Chapultepec) until 11 October. Curated by Damián Romero, director of MUTEK Mexico, its interactive and immersive works, by artists including Brian Eno and Tania Candiani, use play to explore critically the tensions between connection and isolation, pleasure and exhaustion.
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 8pm; admission costs 100 pesos Tuesday to Thursday and 150 pesos on weekends.
Culture Conversation
“En México tenemos el pasado metido en el alma”: Enrique Serna en Ciberdiálogos
Enrique Serna, author of El seductor de la patria and El vendedor de silencio, explores the pre-Hispanic past in his new book El dios hambriento, a novel about the power struggles and political intrigues behind the rise of the Mexica empire. In this interview with León Krauze, he discusses truth, historical rigour and the political uses of history.