Flag of Mexico

How to read it

The flag is set by Mexico’s law on the national arms, flag and anthem (Ley sobre el Escudo, la Bandera y el Himno Nacionales), published on 8 February 1984 and in force from 24 February 1984. Article 3 describes a rectangle of three vertical stripes of identical size, green, white and red counting from the pole, with the coat of arms in the centre of the white stripe at a diameter of three quarters of that stripe’s width. Height and length are in the ratio 4 to 7. Article 2 describes the arms, every reproduction of the arms must match the official model, and models authenticated by the three branches of government are kept in the Archivo General de la Nación and the Museo Nacional de Historia. The law names no shades. The present design dates from 16 September 1968, according to the Museo Patria y Libertad in Boca del Río, Veracruz, which credits Pedro Moctezuma Díaz Infante and Francisco Eppens Helguera; the 1984 law replaced the law of 1968. Article 10 makes 24 February Flag Day (Día de la Bandera). The arms have their own history on oldsymbols.com, as the eagle on the cactus.

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What bird is on the Mexican flag?

A golden eagle (águila real, Aquila chrysaetos), according to Mexico’s Secretaría de Educación Pública and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The flag law itself says only “a Mexican eagle” (águila mexicana) and names no species. UNAM adds that the golden eagle is listed as threatened in Mexico under the standard NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010.

What the eagle on the cactus means

The arms show the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. In the Mexica story, as UNAM retells it, the war god Huitzilopochtli promised his people their land where they saw a golden eagle on a nopal cactus devouring a serpent; they found it on an island in Lake Texcoco, where they built Tenochtitlan, now the Zócalo of Mexico City. The archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma writes that for the Mexica the eagle had a solar meaning and stood for Huitzilopochtli, and calls the rock, the cactus, the eagle and the serpent the four elements from which the flag and the arms were made.

The serpent is the part historians argue about. The only pre-Hispanic carving of the founding, the Teocalli of the Sacred War, shows the eagle holding in its beak the atl-tlachinolli, the glyph of water and fire that stood for war, which Matos says can be mistaken for a serpent. Xavier Noguez, writing in Arqueología Mexicana, notes the view repeated in many texts that the serpent is a Christian addition, the eagle as good against the serpent as evil, and also the possibility that part of a serpent’s body was carved beside the glyph, now half destroyed. Colonial pictures differ: fray Diego Durán’s compilation shows the eagle holding a serpent in one picture and a bird in another.

The coat of arms as the law describes it

Article 2 describes the eagle in left profile, the tops of its wings higher than its crest and slightly spread in an attitude of combat, its tail feathers in a natural fan. Its left talon stands on a flowering nopal cactus growing from a rock that rises out of a lake, and with its right talon and its beak it holds a curved serpent as if to devour it. Several cactus pads branch to the sides. A branch of oak in front of the eagle and one of laurel on the other side form a half circle below, tied with a ribbon in the flag’s three colours. On the reverse of the flag the eagle faces the other way and stands on its right talon. The glyphs for water (atl) and for the rock were put clearly into the arms only in 1968, Noguez writes.

Where the meanings of the colours come from

The flag law describes the colours and gives them no meaning. The meanings in use come from schools and civic tradition: the Secretaría de Educación Pública teaches green as hope, white as the unity of Mexicans and red as the blood shed by those who gave the country its freedom. The colours began with the Army of the Three Guarantees (Ejército Trigarante) in 1821. Its flag, the Museo Patria y Libertad says, used them for the three guarantees: green for independence and the honour of the nation, white for religion and the unity of Mexicans and Spaniards, and red for the union to end Spanish power in Mexico.

Mexico’s and Italy’s flags side by side

Italy’s flag has the same three colours in the same order, green at the pole. Italy’s Constitution (article 12) describes it as three vertical bands of equal size, green, white and red, and names no emblem, so the coat of arms in the white stripe is the surest way to tell Mexico’s flag apart. Mexico’s is also a long flag: seven units long for every four high, by article 3 of its law.