Flag of Mexico

What the flag of Mexico looks like

The flag of Mexico has three vertical bands of equal width: green at the hoist (the side nearest the pole), white in the middle and red at the fly. The flag is wider than most, with a width-to-height ratio of 4:7.

The national coat of arms sits in the center of the white band, taking up about three-quarters of its width. It shows a Mexican golden eagle in profile, facing left, standing on a prickly pear cactus (nopal) that grows from a rock rising out of a lake. The eagle holds a rattlesnake in its beak and in one talon. Below it, an oak branch and a laurel branch curve around the cactus and are tied together with a ribbon in the green, white and red of the flag.

Because the emblem is part of the design, the flag is easy to tell apart from the plain Italian tricolor, which has no coat of arms and a different shade of green and red. The Mexican flag is also often shown in emoji form: the Mexico flag emoji reduces it to the three bands and a small emblem.

Mexico flag meaning and symbolism

The colors were given a religious and political meaning when they first appeared in 1821. Green stood for independence, white for the Catholic faith and purity of religion, and red for the union of Americans and Europeans in the new nation. Later governments, especially after the secular reforms of the 19th century, reinterpreted them. The version taught in Mexican schools today usually reads green as hope, white as unity and red as the blood shed by the national heroes. Mexican law describes the design of the flag in detail but does not fix an official meaning for the colors, so all of these readings are traditional.

The eagle and snake come from the story of how the Mexica (Aztec) people found their capital. According to legend, their god Huitzilopochtli told them to settle where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus. They saw it on an island in Lake Texcoco and founded Tenochtitlan, which lies under present-day Mexico City. The eagle is often read as the sun and the struggle for survival, and the snake as the enemy or the forces of the earth. Many Mexicans simply see the scene as a symbol of the nation's origin.

The oak and laurel branches are usually said to stand for strength and victory.

History of the Mexican flag

The oldest banner linked to Mexican independence is the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that Miguel Hidalgo carried when he started the independence war in 1810. The green, white and red colors appeared in 1821 with the Ejército Trigarante (Army of the Three Guarantees), led by Agustín de Iturbide. The three guarantees were religion, independence and union.

Under Iturbide's short-lived empire (1821-1823), the flag took its vertical form and placed a crowned eagle on the white band. After the empire fell in 1823, the republic kept the colors but removed the crown and added the snake in the eagle's beak and the oak and laurel branches. During the second empire of Maximilian (1864-67) a more elaborate imperial eagle was used, with griffins on either side and eagles in the corners. The republican flag later returned, and its coat of arms was redrawn several times over the next century, so the eagle appeared in many different styles.

The version used now was adopted on 16 September 1968 as an adaptation of a design approved by presidential decree in 1916, in which the eagle was turned from front-facing to side-facing. It was confirmed by the 1984 Law on the National Arms, Flag and Anthem. Mexico celebrates Flag Day (Día de la Bandera) on 24 February.

Mexican flag vs Italian flag

Mexico and Italy use the same three colors in the same order, which causes frequent confusion. The differences are the emblem, the proportions (Italy's flag is 2:3) and the shades: Mexico uses darker shades, especially of green. The Mexican tricolor is older than the Italian one: when Mexico adopted its colors, no sovereign state in Europe used the Italian-style tricolor, although Napoleon's Cisalpine Republic had adopted a horizontal version in 1797. The similarity once caused trouble at sea, because Mexico's merchant flag had no coat of arms, so both countries later adopted naval flags with different emblems.

Flying a Mexican flag in the United States is legal. The US Flag Code asks that flags of different nations fly from separate staffs of the same height, with the American flag in the position of honor on its own right, but it is a guideline, not a law with penalties for private citizens.