Muslim life in Mexico has two distinct roots. The older one runs through the Porfiriato-era migration of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Levantine families from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine settled in Mexico City and built the community organizations that still run its mosques today. The newer one took shape in the 1990s in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, where several hundred Tzotzil Maya embraced Islam in the years following the Zapatista uprising and eventually built the Al-Kausar Mosque, now one of the more distinctive Sunni communities in Latin America.
Mexico's geography adds its own complication: the country stretches across roughly 30 degrees of longitude, from the Baja California peninsula to the Yucatán, and sits at very different elevations along the way — Mexico City itself is over 2,200 meters above sea level. Prayer times calculated for the capital do not translate cleanly to Tijuana in the northwest or Cancún in the southeast, which is why this page fixes its calculation to Mexico City's own coordinates rather than a single national estimate.
Mexico's mosques and community organizations, including the Centro Cultural Islámico de México, generally follow the Islamic Society of North America's angles, reflecting the country's close ties to Muslim institutions across the United States and Canada; at Mexico City's latitude of roughly 19.4°N, ISNA's 15° twilight angle for both Fajr and Isha produces a clear, well-defined pair of twilight windows year-round.
Estimates vary by source: the 2010 census counted about 2,500, while more recent figures from community leaders and international observers put the number closer to 7,500–10,000, still under 1% of the population.
In the 1990s, a group centered in San Cristóbal de las Casas — initially linked to a Spanish Sufi movement and later realigned with mainstream Sunni organizations — saw several hundred Indigenous Tzotzil Maya convert to Islam, eventually building the Al-Kausar Mosque that still serves the community.
Elevation has only a small effect on sunrise and sunset compared to sea level, mainly by letting you see the horizon a little earlier or later; it doesn't change the underlying solar geometry that Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha are calculated from.
Yes — a city like Tijuana sits several degrees further north than Mexico City, so during a summer Ramadan its daylight hours run longer, while a winter Ramadan is shorter there than in the capital.