A well-known phrase, which we have all heard, states that ‘history is written by the victors.’ The history of Mexico through its centenarians is a clear sample of the validity of this idea, in which five different voices reveal to us, from a well-founded historical approach, how the commemorations – traditional in some cases, invented in others – have created and modified over time the discourse regarding the main founding events of our country.

Antonio Rubial, for example, offers an overview of the extravagant celebration of the first centenary of the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and St. Hippolytus in 1621, while Cristina Torales Pacheco refers to the second commemoration, 100 years later, as an important framework for the consolidation of a Novo-Hispanic kingdom. This situation changed in 1821 with the celebration of Mexico as an independent state, a process in which Patricia Arriaga’s text focuses to show how the official discourse of this commemoration set out to reconfigure the official history and fill it with heroes. For his part, Carlos Martínez Assad makes a journey since the beginning of the 20th century to point out the great advances and changes brought by modernization, and where the commemorations began to take on a more political tinge. Finally, Sara Sefchovich’s essay leads us to reflect from the present on the consequences that globalization and the technological era produce in the security and future of all societies, while describing the last commemoration of this century: the bicentennial of the Independence of Mexico.