Why I Built This Site

I didn't set out to build a study site. I was trying to become Mexican.

By then Mexico wasn't a country I was living in. It was home. What made me act on that was my first daughter being born here. Until then residency had been fine — it renewed, it worked, I didn't think about it much. Afterwards I kept noticing how much of my life still ran on someone else's permission. If my online work dried up I couldn't take a local job without going through INM first. Half of any ordinary errand routed through my immigration file. I had no vote in the country I had chosen and expected to grow old in. Article 33 bars foreigners from involving themselves in Mexican politics and has never defined precisely what that covers. And my daughters were going to be Mexican in a way that I wasn't.

What I wanted was security, and the kind that only comes from belonging. Not being able to lose the country my girls were born in over a paperwork problem, an opinion, or a bad year of work. Being able to work, vote and walk into an office without my status being the first question. Being Mexican like they are — the same as them on paper — so we could raise them in a fully bicultural home without one parent standing slightly outside of it. That's what the carta de naturalización meant to me, and it's why I was willing to sit an exam I turned out to be badly prepared for.

In 2019 I started the process at the SRE office in Cancún, and I was not worried about the exam. I grew up in Canada, but by then I had been living in Mexico for years and my Spanish was well past getting by. My major was in International Studies. I had taken university courses on Latin American history, the Mexican Revolution, NAFTA and Mexican politics. I had spent years visiting the museums and the archaeological sites. I assumed the exam would be the easy part.

It wasn't.

The exam doesn't test whether you live in Mexico. It tests whether you know that Cri-Crí was Francisco Gabilondo Soler, that the 1953 reform to Article 34 gave women the vote, that Article 3 guarantees free secular education, which Mexicans have won Olympic gold, and the capital of every one of the 32 states. If you grew up here, a lot of that is primary school — absorbed once and never studied again. If you didn't grow up here, none of it is.

There is also no official list of questions. SRE publishes a bibliography — a handful of recommended books, with Nueva historia mínima de México as the main one — and the exam draws on that reading and on Mexican culture more broadly besides. Cri-Crí's real name is not in the book. Nobody can hand you the hundred questions and promise you're finished, because no such list exists to hand over. That, more than the difficulty of any single question, is what catches people out.

With all of that background I still needed months of study. I mention it because if you're looking at this material and it feels like a lot, that isn't a sign you're behind. It's the exam.

The problem I ran into

When I started studying, the best thing I could find was a Word document somebody had typed up and posted to a Facebook group. Then a second one, which was mostly the first with a few questions bolted on. Then a Quizlet set that someone had built while studying and abandoned the day they passed. None of it had been checked against the books the exam draws on. None of it cited a source. None of it was being maintained by anyone. Wrong answers got carried forward from one version into the next, and because everybody was sharing files from the same lineage, the mistakes started to look like consensus.

The people who made those files were trying to help, and for a lot of applicants they were the only thing available. But "everybody has this document" is not the same as "this document is correct," and I didn't want to walk into the exam trusting a file nobody had ever checked and nobody was looking after.

I build software for a living, so my reaction was predictable. I took the questions that were circulating and went through them one at a time, checking each against the books in SRE's bibliography and other primary sources, correcting what was wrong and dropping what I couldn't confirm at all. By the time I walked into the exam I had a study guide I actually trusted.

I sat it in December 2019, and passed on the first attempt.

A few weeks later I put the study guide online, so that the next person wouldn't have to start from a photocopy of a photocopy.

And then I waited, which turned out to be the long part. The pandemic arrived, SRE suspended naturalization processing for months, and my carta didn't reach my hands until March 2021, fifteen months after the exam. Under the temporary rules only Mexico City was issuing them by then, so I flew up from Cancún to collect it. I have never been so happy to buy a plane ticket. The first thing I did when I got home was book my passport appointment.

The site has been up, and free, ever since.

How I handle the material

• Answers are checked against official and primary sources, not against other study guides.
• Everything exists in both Spanish and English. I studied in my first language because it was faster, and you should be able to do the same.
• I would rather you understand the material than memorize a list. Knowing the Constitution was promulgated in Querétaro in 1917 is worth more than knowing that the answer to question 47 is "1917."
• Facts hold when they hang on something. This exam is a few hundred names, dates and articles that are far easier to keep hold of once you know the story they belong to, so the material tries to give you the story and not only the answer.
• Reviewing on a schedule beats rereading. Going back over the same pages feels productive and mostly isn't. Being asked about the things you are on the verge of forgetting, at roughly the moment you would forget them, works considerably better.
• When I'm not certain about something, I say so instead of guessing confidently.

How long it takes

Longer than most people plan for. In a typical year only about 172 Americans and 36 Canadians naturalize in Mexico, out of the hundreds of thousands living here. Some of that is the paperwork, and the tax and pension questions I go through on the pros and cons page. A good part of it is this exam.

If names like Nueva España, the Porfiriato or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are new to you, then you aren't only learning answers — you're building the context they sit inside, in a second language. That is slower work than a list of questions makes it look. Start earlier than you were planning to, and study for understanding rather than recall. The material sticks better that way, and the exam is easier to pass when the answers connect to something.

Who this site is for

Permanent residents. Spouses of Mexicans. Parents of Mexican children. Anyone who has built a life in Mexico and wants it recognized on paper. Whatever brought you here, it's the same exam, and it asks all of us the same questions. That's why the site is free.

What this site isn't

This is an independent study resource. It is not affiliated with the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores or any part of the Mexican government, it is not legal or immigration advice, and I'm not a consultant — I can't review your file or tell you whether you qualify. For that, go to the SRE or to a licensed professional. What I can do is help you walk in prepared. If you're at the start of the process, the how to apply and exam information pages are the place to begin.

Still being built

The site is still maintained and still changing. The material gets corrected when the sources move or when someone writes in to tell me something is wrong — and people do, which is the best thing about running this. The study set I made for myself also grew into Knowledgize, which isn't built from circulating question lists at all. It works through the material itself, deck by deck and topic by topic, with review scheduled around what you're about to forget and an AI tutor that will explain the harder history at whatever length you need, in whichever language you prefer.

Whatever security looks like in your situation, this exam is one of the things standing between you and it. Getting more people past it is the entire point of the site. Nothing beats an email from someone telling me they passed.

More Mexican Naturalization Information