Mexico has really not pulled its weight in the Nobel Prizes over the years. One in Chemisty (Mario Molino, 1995); one in literature (Octavio Paz, 1990; two Peace Prizes (Alfonso Garcia Robles, 1992). But there are those prizes “with a *” we might at least partially credit to Mexico.

None, alas, in the sciences… although Claudia Sheinbam was somehow part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when the UN intergovernmental body received a Peace Prize in 2007 along with former US vice-president Al Gore) but in Literature, you can add a few. Chilean poet Gabreilla Mistral (1945) spent most of her career working for Mexico’s Secretariat of Education; Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias (1967) wrote his seminal novel, “El Presidente” while serving as his country’s ambassador to Mexico, and living in Mexico City: Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982) was already living in Mexico at the time he received the award, and spent most of the rest of his life here. And 2010’s laurealate, Pervian Mario Vargas Llosa, was here along enough to get involved in a messy domestic scandal with Garcia Maquez, that ended up with a fist-fight at the Palacio de Bellas Artes between two future laureates, an a trenchant observer of Mexico and Mexican politics (“The perfect dictatorship” he dubbed the government of the time). JM LeClezio (France, 2008) wrote extensively on Mexican colonial history (his research for his doctoral disseration on the Puripecha is said to have influenced his later “lyrical” writing style).