Mexico Cartogram

What the cartogram reveals

The massive central bulge is where Mexico's gravity lives: Ciudad de Mexico, Estado de Mexico, Puebla, and Guadalajara. On a standard map, these states look like they share the country equally with Chihuahua and Durango. On the cartogram, they ARE Mexico. The central highlands contain more people than the entire north combined.

Monterrey stands out clearly in the northeast, the industrial capital of northern Mexico. Tijuana and Mexicali swell out of Baja California, revealing the border economy that a standard map hides behind the peninsula's long, thin shape. The Yucatan holds its form because Merida and Cancun carry real population weight. And the vast deserts of Chihuahua, Durango, and Sonora? Compressed to thin strips, because almost nobody lives there.

Why this matters

A standard map of Mexico allocates visual weight by land area. Chihuahua dominates the north. But Chihuahua has 3.7 million people. Estado de Mexico has 17 million. On a normal map, they look roughly equal. A cartogram corrects this by making area proportional to population: what the eye sees matches where the people actually are.

Every policy debate, every resource allocation, every electoral analysis that uses a standard map is starting from a distortion. Land doesn't vote. Land doesn't need hospitals. Land doesn't experience poverty. People do. A cartogram replaces geographic bias with demographic truth.

At the municipio level, the distortion is even more revealing. Within each state, population concentrates in a few urban centers while vast rural territories hold very few people. Switch between "Normal" and "Cartogram" to watch the country reshape itself when you measure by people instead of land.

How it was built

The boundaries are INEGI's Marco Geoestadistico made for the 2020 census, so every one of the 2,469 municipios matches its census count exactly: 126,014,024 people in total. Shared borders are simplified once and moved together, so neighbouring municipios can never overlap. The map uses an equal-area projection, and the cartogram is computed with the Gastner-Seguy-More flow-based algorithm (via the authors' cartogram-cpp), across 285,155 border points.

Measured on the final map, comparing each municipio's area with its share of the population:

• Median area error: 0.92%, population-weighted: 1.889%
• Worst municipio: 438.95%
• Overlap between municipios: 0.195% of the map
• Borders that cross themselves: 836 municipios, covering 0.0511% of the map, almost all smaller than a pixel

The colors come from the same census. Each rate uses INEGI's own denominator (people aged 3+ for languages, occupied homes for housing), and state and national figures are INEGI's official totals, never averages of municipios.

The whole pipeline, from INEGI's files to these numbers, is reproducible from the repository. The map renders on a canvas in your browser; the site runs on AWS S3 and CloudFront for $0.51/month, with no backend.

Pipeline source on GitHub. Data: INEGI Marco Geoestadistico (Censo de Poblacion y Vivienda 2020) and Census 2020 ITER. Algorithm: Gastner, Seguy and More (2018), "Fast flow-based algorithm for creating density-equalizing map projections," PNAS.