The Censo General de Población y Vivienda is the main national census for Mexico. It is produced by the national statistics agency INEGI, a decentralized agency of the Mexican Federal government, with the purpose of collating and reporting detailed demographic, socioeconomic and geographical data from across the nation. Since 1900 the censo general has been conducted on a decennial basis, taking place the year ending in zero of each decade. The only variation to this schedule thus far occurred with the fourth census, where difficulties arising from the Mexican Revolution resulted in its deferral from 1920 to 1921. As of 2014 there have been a total of 13 censos generales taken at the national level, the most recent completed in 2010. From the 1990s INEGI began to produce an intermediate series of national population and housing censuses, surveying only a smaller and selected subset of key demographic indicators. This intermediate series—the Conteo de Población y Vivienda —is also conducted decennially, in the years ending in "5" midway between two successive censos generales. These conteos allow the planning for public policy and services to be based on data that is more current than would otherwise be the case, as the alternating conteos and censos provide a refresh of key population indices that is no more than five years old.
History
The practice of census-taking in Mexico may have precedents dating back to the late pre-Columbian period. According to traditions recorded in several of the post-conquesthistorical sources, Xolotl—a 12th-century ruler of a "Chichimec" polity in the Valley of Mexico—ordered that a review be undertaken to enumerate the populace under his control. This survey, carried out at a place adjoining his capital Tenayuca, is supposed to have been conducted by the addition of stones to a pile representing each person counted. During the later Aztec Empire, it is known that written census-like records were used to keep track of land ownership and the tribute obligations of individual city-states across central Mexico. In the decades after the conquest and Spanish colonial expansion, the administrators and missionaries for the Real Audiencia of Mexico began the systematic collection of population data for the new territories. One such was the document known as the Suma de visitas de pueblos por orden alfabético from 1548, which contained a survey and description of 907 villages and settlements in central Mexico. A census taken twenty years later in 1568, taking in some 90% of the towns and villages of Central Mexico, is probably the most comprehensive of the 16th-century records still extant. During the later Colonial period in the 17th century a number of other demographic counts and compilations were made. In general the data from these—likely incomplete and rudimentary—are no longer preserved. It was not until the late 18th century that an accounting of the population was conducted, known as the Revillagigedo census, that could be said to resemble a "censo general" with something approaching a national extent. Conducted under viceroyJuan de Güemes Padilla, Count of Revillagigedo between 1790 and 1791, some forty volumes of data from this census are conserved in the Mexican national archives. When Mexican independence from Spain was achieved in 1824, the new Republic sought a process to enumerate the citizens in each of its constituent federated states and entities. Article 12 of the 1824 Constitution of Mexico expressed the intention:
A census of the whole confederation shall be taken within five years, and shall be renewed afterwards every ten years, which shall serve to designate the number of deputies to which each state is entitled. In the meantime the elections are to be regulated on the basis established in the preceding article, and the census which served to regulate the election of deputies in the congress now in session.
Official census dates
The following table lists the official dates of all the national population censuses conducted, since the first formally recognised one in 1895.
