Talk:Municipalities of Mexico

This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Cities This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cities, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of cities, towns and various other settlements on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.CitiesWikipedia:WikiProject CitiesTemplate:WikiProject CitiesWikiProject Cities articles Urban studies and planning Mid‑importance Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. Mexico High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mexico, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Mexico on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MexicoWikipedia:WikiProject MexicoTemplate:WikiProject MexicoMexico articles High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Municipio is a common Spanish word that is not necessarily connected with the Mexican municipios. At least Spain, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and most Spanish speaking countries also have municipios. Should this page be renamed to Mexican municipio? should this talk in generically about municipios and have a section about the Mexican ones? -Mariano 10:47, 27 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Tobias,

You moved

• municipio (Mexico) is an article about one of the types of municipalities of Mexico.
• municipio (Mexico) is one of the articles from municipio
• In Wikipedia:WikiProject Mexico we have agreed on conventions to use municipio (Mexico) in every article about a municipio, but not a delegación (which is another type of municipality).

Thanks, --Vizcarra 21:05, 30 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I harmonized with:

• other articles in Category:Municipalities
• the category it is the main article of Category:Municipalities of Mexico
  • this cat itself was harmonized from "M in MX" to "M of MX" like for other countries
• all the "Municipalities of xy-state-of-mexico" articles
• States of Mexico

• Commune (subnational entity)
• Comune in Italy
• Commune in France
  (Tobias says: France along with China is deviating in article style)
• municipalities of Romania, counties of Romania
  )

• Municipio
• Municipio (Argentina)
• Município (Brazil)
• Municipio (Mexico)

--Vizcarra 05:38, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Vizcarra, I think you needn't worry too much about "municipio" and "municipality" being false cognates, because I honestly don't think they are: per my Concise Oxford. "municipality: town or district, having local self-government; governing body of this". Sounds like a municipio to me. While a Mexican "municipio" might not be the direct equivalent of a "municipality" in the US, the distinctions are country-specific between those two national contexts, and not at any deeper lexical level. The powers and authorities of a Mexican estado aren't exactly parallel to those of a US state, but that doesn't stop us from calling our estados states. Doesn't stop the Germans doing the same with their Länder, either. I really don't think we have to start using municipio in English just because the correlations aren't exact. Fwiw, I think Tobias (with whom, it certainly is no secret. I have had long and bitter arguments in the past about subnational divisions) made a correct call in this case.

As for the delegaciones -- well, the DF is a special case, but I'd be hesitant to equate those with "municipalities" in any way: they don't have the necessary degree of self-government to qualify, I don't think. And, out in the provinces, aren't delegaciones a second-level subdivision of the municipalities? Or only in some states? –Hajor 05:58, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

States and estados are equivalent indeed, they're both subdivisions of a country. Municipales is different, a town is indeed a municipality, in Mexico a town is not a municipio. A delegación is a municipality and is not a municipio. Municipio is a very specific entity and municipality isn't. Comuni and Communes are both municipalities and they are listed under their own name and I think we should do the same. --Vizcarra 06:11, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• For Mexico I would say a town is not a municipality but part of it? I think outside of US it is very often equivalent to commune.
• For Romania municipality and commune exist thus, the terms cannot be equated there.
• there is also the term
  municipalidad
  in CL and PE.

By the way, I took the liberty of modifying your template, I added a few that are used in Mexico (such as comisaría and ejido and divided them in categories. Let me know what you think. --Vizcarra 03:25, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

replied at

(Talk) 19:33, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply

]

How about changing the url from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Municipio_%28Mexico%29 to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Municipio_Mexico

Delegaciones are not muncipalities, they are, indeed, political subdivisions but not municipalities: they do not elect a city council and are not fully autonomous, as a municipio would be. --

I believe that the given area of Carlos A. Carrillo, listed as the 5th largest municipality by area, is completely off, as supported by the documentation at [1] The municipality's article at [2] gives its area as 239.59 km², which is a far cry from the number 19,881.00 given on the first document. Looking at a map of Veracruz's Papalopan region (#8), it is obviously not a large municipality, so I don't know how they got that original figure in the first place. Somebody will have to tell these guys that they got their number wrong. I gave the original page as support for changing the list, but I absolutely don't trust the number. Backspace 06:21, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I reverted the recent edits [and important in terms of meaning and information that was being portrayed. Let me explain:

• As it was discussed above, delegaciones are not municipalities. In the past some users tried to
  redefine
  municipality as to make it a false cognate of "municipio", so that the English concept would encompass both the "municipio" and the "delegación". Besides undertaking a philological challenge, delegaciones cannot be equated to municipalities in that they do not have regulatory powers, they are not autonomous, and most of their competencies are either supervised or administered by the Federal District. Most of all, they do not have any equivalent of a municipal council (nor a board of trustees or chairmen).
• To put it into a different perspective. Both municipios and delegaciones are second-level administration units. By broadening the meaning of "municipality" in English to encompass both (or as to equate it to the concept of second-level administration), the term in English would have to encompass that of the different second-level administrative units, be it a county, a borough or a municipality itself, which would involve a contradiction, in that a municipality is a category of a municipality.
• Municipalities across countries do not have the same structure, not even amongst English speaking countries. But they are still called municipalities. We cannot
  try to redefine
  the concept so as to say that what is an obvious philological cognate (as potrayed in all major dictionaries) is not (that is trying to say that municipio is not a municipality). Municipios in Mexico are different from municipios in Spain in structure, but they use the same word.
• Cities are organized politically into municipalities. In fact, a municipal council is usually the equivalent of a city hall. In that sense, Mexico City is a special case, it is not a municipality, but elevated to a first-level unit, a federal district.

Please discuss before reverting. --the Dúnadan 01:04, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that. I was unaware of such an existing issue. I don't have strong feelings towards any of the two positions. Now, in the sense that "A municipality is an administrative entity composed of a clearly defined territory and its population and commonly referring to a city, town, or village, or a small grouping of them." then yes, both municipios and delegaciones are municipalities. If not then the definition of municipality ought to be modified.

If a delegación is not a municipality then:

1. why is it thoroughly discussed in the article?
2. why is it included in the Municipalities of Mexico template. If you do not agree to the edits that's fine, as long as the position is one or the other not a mixture of both. I am not an edit warrior, so I will check back in a couple of weeks to check if it still sounds as confusing as it does right now with a renewed spirit.

And finally, I disagree with my edits being considered vandalism ("rvv"="ReVerted Vandalism") but I quickly forget. --FateClub 01:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, I have to say that I am sorry, I should have written rv and not rvv. Your edits were not vandalism. I apologize.

I believe that the article "municipality" should indeed be reviewed. WordNet, by Princeton University defines municipality as "people living in a town or city having local self-government", or as a " an urban district having corporate status and powers of self-government".[3] The second definition is almost a verbatim rendering of the definition in Webster's Dictionary.[4]. In that sense, municipalities are more than just mere administrative divisions, they are (or must be) autonomous (i.e. self-governing). I hadn't read the article about municipalities, but it seems they try to say that communes, counties and even comarques are all municipalities. They may share characteristics, but I would group them all as "second-level administrative divisions" regardless of whether they are called municipalities, communes, boroughs, parishes or comarques. But that is another story.

The status of "delegaciones" is rather blurry, given that the process of devolution of government to the Federal District is still in progress. Even though since 2000 a "head of government" is elected by popular vote, its functions are merely administrative. Delegaciones are not self-governing in that, in absence of a municipal council, they cannot propose or enact laws within their territories, except through the representatives in the Legislative Assembly of the whole Federal District. In other words, the regulatory powers belong to the Federal District and not to the delegaciones.

The second issue would be whether "municipio" and "municipality" are indeed cognates, regardless of the differences in their competencies across countries. They are indeed cognates. Diccionario Espasa translates "municipality" as "municipio"[5], and given the definition of municipio in Spanish [6], they refer to the same concept. The implied differences between a "municipality" and a "municipio" (in Mexico) are not that different from, say a "municipio" in Spain and a "municipio" in Mexico (or any other country). Moreover, in my opinion, saying that "municipio" is not a cognate of a "municipality" (whether it is in Standard Spanish or Mexican Spanish) constitutes

original reserach

.

I was unaware of the template. I believe it should be edited to reconcile it with the definition given in the article.

Finally, I thought it was necessary to include a section about "delegaciones" in this article for two reasons (but they are both open to debate):

• Since cities (or groups of cities) in Mexico are politically represented through municipalities, we must explain why Mexico City is not a municipality.
• Given that "delegaciones" and "municipios" are both second-level administrative divisions, they are often (but not always) grouped in cross-municipal comparisons in statistical data (HDI, GDP, etc.). This makes the "delegaciones" of Mexico City, different from say, boroughs in New York or London, or even from "delegaciones" of other Mexican cities (like Querétaro), which are third-level political divisions. Since a user may encounter a comparison between "Garza García, NL", and the borough of "Benito Juárez" in DF, I thought it would be useful to give the definition of a delegación in this article too.

I also believe that the nomenclature used in the articles about Mexico City's boroughs are misleading. I have brought the issue at Wikiproject:Mexico, but nobody else has said anything about it. I would appreciate your opinion on this matter.

--the Dúnadan 04:35, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think we agree so far that municipalities = municipios and boroughs = delegaciones. If delegaciones (boroughs) are not municipios (municipalities) then let's separate the "boroughs in Mexico" into a separate article with the boroughs of Mexico City, Tijuana, etc. And how each of them is administered. --FateClub 16:23, 23 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Besides Mexico City, I don't know how many other cities (or rather, municipalities) are divided into boroughs; as far as I know this is the case of only the municipalities of

Querétaro, Centro (Villahermosa

). In other words municipalities could be further subdivided into boroughs (third-level admin divisions). Here's the thing: Mexico City is not a municipality, so its boroughs are second-level administrative and semi-autonomous divisions, whereas the boroughs of municipalities themselves are third-level non-autonomous admin divisions.

I guess we can talk about boroughs being the internal divisions of municipalities in this article. Yet, the boroughs of the FD are an exception to this rule. While a separate article about them is appropriate their complexity (being second-level but not fully autonomous using the standard nomenclature for third-level admin divisions) and the fact that they are often used in cross-municipal statistical analysis, justifies them being treated as an exemption to the rule.

If you think talking about boroughs of the FD (exclusively) in this article is confusing, then I guess we can rename the article to "Second-level administrative divisions in Mexico", but I find it rather long (or obscure). On the other hand, having a single article about municipalities and a separate article about "delegaciones" (whether second or third level) like you suggested, is also an alternative solution, but I still think that the article about municipalities should at least have two or three lines explaining why the boroughs of Mexico City are often included in cross-municipal statistical analysis. Any consensual version is good enough. By the way, have you had the chance to review the proposal on changing the nomenclature in Wikiproject:Mexico?

--the Dúnadan 17:39, 23 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well "municipalities of Mexico" sounds good enough for me, because the definition of the term "municipality" is quite broad. In the case of Tijuana, delegaciones are subdivisions of the city, not the municipio, as far as I know and as far as I can keep observing. So, maybe it varies with city, so the topic becomes even more interesting. I didn't even kwow there was a wikiproject:Mexico. I'll take a look at it. Would you point me to it? --FateClub 23:41, 23 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The difference between municipalities and cities is rather blurry. Cities in Mexico are not autonomous and do not have regulatory powers, only municipalities do. When municipalities and cities are coextensive, that does not pose a problem, but in the case of Tijuana, that might be an issue. The boroughs of Tijuana might only pertain to urban areas (and arguably, only to the "city") but it is the municipality itself (the "ayuntamiento") who establishes their limits and competencies, being the entity with regulatory powers. In any case, I do find it interesting too, and I think I might start a draft on Boroughs of Mexico. Oh, the link to the project is Wikipedia:WikiProject Mexico, but the specific proposal for the nomenclature changes that I was talking about is here: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mexico/Terminology#C.1_Boroughs_of_the_Federal_District. --the Dúnadan 16:55, 24 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What is the reason for the extremely high occurrence of incorrect INEGI code numbers for the individual state articles of lists of municipios? I am referring to the articles linked to at the upper right hand side of this article. Does nobody ever check these numbers before they are entered? Backspace (talk) 06:19, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

per Category_talk:Municipalities_by_country#Naming Abc (municipality) might be better Abc Municipality. That's what all other use, if they have the word "municipality" in the article title. Schwyz (talk) 08:59, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Between Latin American municipalities there is some overlap in the base names. If then there is San Francsico Municipality for one country, for another San Francisco (municipality) and Municipality of San Francisco for a third, it leads to confusion for editors and readers. See Category:Municipality name disambiguation pages - which contains 67 Municipality names that are used by more than one municipality. Naming across municipalities in Latin America should be coordinated. Two countries with a cleat system that have already several articles:

Category:Municipalities of Bolivia use format "X Municipality"

Category:Municipalities of Venezuela use format "X Municipality"

Schwyz (talk) 01:13, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unless you can provide an official translation of the Spanish name in the form of "XXX Municipality" – with a capital M – the "XXX (municipality)" disambiguated for should be used. This is not only a question of the name of the article, you are also implying that the

Tijuana is "Tijuana Municipality". -- Petri Krohn (talk) 09:49, 9 August 2010 (UTC)[reply

]

First: The name of Tijuana is Tijuana. Second: What is your rationale behind Unless you can provide an official translation of the Spanish name in the form of "XXX Municipality" – with a capital M – the "XXX (municipality)" disambiguated for should be used.? Schwyz (talk) 11:30, 9 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]