On June 13, 1998, in Lyon, Mexico beat South Korea 3-1 at the World Cup. Cornered by two Korean defenders, Cuauhtémoc Blanco trapped the ball between his feet and jumped forward over them with the ball. The move became known as the cuauhtemiña.
The sports newspaper Récord describes it as a technical resource “nacido en el barrio” (born in the neighborhood).
In Roberto Gómez Bolaños’s television comedy El Chapulín Colorado, one of the hero’s catchphrases is “¡No contaban con mi astucia!” (They did not count on my cunning!). His weapon is the chipote chillón, a squeaky toy mallet.
The show ran from 1973 to 1979. The character kept appearing in sketches until 1992.
The name chilaquiles comes from the Nahuatl word chīlāquilitl. According to TV Azteca, the dish “surgió para dar una segunda vida a las tortillas que habían quedado duras del día anterior” (arose to give a second life to tortillas that had gone hard from the day before).
In INEGI’s National Housing Survey of 2020, 57.3 percent of owner-occupied homes had been acquired through autoconstrucción or autoproducción, self-construction or self-production.
INEGI’s satellite account of housing for 2024 found that the self-production of housing contributed 55.6 percent of the housing sector’s GDP.
In the 1960s, collective taxis began to run along Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, on a fixed route from La Diana to La Villa. According to Expansión, the name came from “el cobro de un peso por pasajero” (the charge of one peso per passenger), so people called them peseros. The microbuses later inherited the name.
Los Topos, “the moles,” is a volunteer rescue group that arose after the earthquake of September 19, 1985. A member described to Telemundo how they search the rubble for survivors: “Primero levantamos el puño al cielo como señal de silencio” (First we raise our fist to the sky as a sign for silence).
After the earthquake of 2017, Uno TV recalled the closed fists raised above the ruins “para pedir silencio” (to ask for silence).
Guillermo González Camarena developed a system for color television in “un modesto taller-laboratorio en el sótano de la casa de sus padres” (a modest workshop and laboratory in the basement of his parents’ house), according to the ILCE, the Latin American Institute for Educational Communication.
According to the Gaceta UNAM, he patented it in Mexico in 1940 and in the United States two years later. Another source gives 1940 for both patents.
In January 1968, Mexico broadcast the first educational program for telesecundaria, secondary school by television. It was intended for “zonas rurales, aisladas y de alta marginación” (rural, isolated and highly marginalized areas).
In 2023, according to SEP figures reported by DPL News, Mexico had 18,800 telesecundarias, 53.2 percent of its public secondary schools.
In Mexico City, residents reserve a parking space on the street with buckets, crates or other objects, or they pay a franelero, an informal attendant who watches cars. Chilango describes “apartar lugares con botes, cubetas o recurrir a los llamados franeleros” (reserving spaces with cans and buckets, or turning to the so-called franeleros) as an everyday scene.
On August 15, 2025, the Congress of Mexico City approved 24 to 36 hours of arrest for people who charge for parking or for watching cars on public streets.
In the huapango of the Sierra Gorda, a topada is a “duelo poético-musical entre dos huapangueros” (a poetic and musical duel between two huapango musicians), each with his own group. México Desconocido describes one in Xichú between Guillermo Velázquez and Tobías Hernández. It began at midnight on December 31 and lasted until ten the next morning.
A study published in 2012 in UNAM’s Revista de Literaturas Populares describes the topada as “a complex system of improvisation and memory.”