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OpenCage 👉🌍

Mondays can be a drag, so let's liven things up with a thread.

Last week we looked at geographic oddities of Australia 🇦🇺, this week let's head to the New World 🌎 and turn our attention to Mexico 🇲🇽.

1/n

2/ The United States 🇺🇸 and Mexico 🇲🇽 share the world’s most frequently crossed international boundary, with approximately 350M legal crossings/year.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E

3/ The MX/US border has changed many times over the years.

“New Spain” extended much farther north as many Spanish place names in southwestern US attest. Here's a picture of the Arkansas River in Pueblo, Colorado - once the northern border of the historical province of Nuevo México

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Spai

4/ When the 🇲🇽 Mexican-American 🇺🇸 war ended in 1848 about 45% of Mexico was ceded to the United States, what is today parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%

5/ Then in 1854 to make building a transcontinental railroad 🚂 easier, the US purchased a large area of modern Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico, a deal known as the Gadsden Purchase

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_

6/ The 🇲🇽🇺🇸 border is still in flux as the Rio Grande / Río Bravo del Norte river continues to move, and most recently the border was readjusted by mutual agreement in 2009.

These changes are covered by a treaty signed in 1970
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary

7/ Little known is that at one point Mexico 🇲🇽 also had a dispute with ... 🇫🇷 France about the ownership of Clipperton Island in the Pacific. Arbitration determined the island to belong to France.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippert

8/ Though the external border is no longer in dispute, several Mexican states disagree on their borders. Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán all claim slightly overlapping territories.

9/ The Yucatán peninsula was actually briefly an independent country, the Republic of Yucatán, before finally joining Mexico 🇲🇽 in 1848.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic

10/ The capital of 🇲🇽 Mexico is Mexico City (often abbreviated as “CDMX”).

It is the largest city in North America, a megalopolis with an estimated 30M people. The urban area continues to expand.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_C

en.wikipedia.orgMexico City megalopolis - Wikipedia

12/ Wrapping up, if 🇲🇽 Mexican geography is your thing, you may enjoy our interview from back in 2018 with Miriam Gonzalez about OpenStreetMap in Mexico.

blog.opencagedata.com/post/ope

We hope you enjoyed our look at 🇲🇽 Mexican . Thanks for reading (and sharing).

We have many more threads about other countries, border disputes, exclaves, geocoding, etc listed on our blog. Most still on twitter, but over time we are moving them here to masto.

blog.opencagedata.com/geothrea

We'll feature more countries in coming weeks and months