The Mexican peso goes back to the Spanish colonial period.

In 1535, Spain set up the Mexico City mint, the first mint in the Americas, which still operates today.

It produced silver coins called reales, and the most famous was the eight-real coin known as the peso de ocho, or “piece of eight.”

The word peso means “weight” in Spanish, since it originally referred to a specific weight of silver, and one peso was worth eight reales.

Before Spanish money spread, Indigenous peoples in Mexico used cacao beans, cotton cloth, and other goods for trade, and after the conquest the real became the main currency.

The peso soon became a global coin.

Mexican silver circulated across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and many of the famous Spanish dollars were actually minted in Mexico.

That reach helped shape the United States too, since the Spanish peso was widely used in early American commerce and inspired the U.S. dollar. One leading theory even traces the dollar sign to the merchant abbreviation “Ps” for pesos. So a coin struck in colonial Mexico helped inspire the currency of the United States, and the peso’s influence went well beyond Mexico itself.

After Mexico won independence in 1821, it kept using the Spanish-style peso, and in 1823 the new government began issuing its own coins, making the peso the national currency.

The old eight-real system lingered long after independence, and the modern decimal system of 100 centavos per peso arrived in 1863.

Mexico adopted the gold standard in 1905, which tied the peso’s value to gold, and it has issued gold coins in denominations of 5, 10, and 20 pesos.

In 1910 it produced the “horse peso,” the peso de caballito, to mark the centenary of independence.

The Mexican Revolution brought some unusual money.

Different factions printed their own banknotes and coins, and even cardboard currency appeared, and some of it carried political messages.

Francisco Villa’s famous “Muera Huerta” coin, for example, called for the death of his rival Victoriano Huerta.

Over the years the peso has been redesigned many times, with coins and banknotes reflecting different political eras and national leaders.

The eagle and snake that appear on Mexican currency come from the national coat of arms and the founding legend of Tenochtitlan.

In 1993, Mexico removed three zeros from its currency, so one new peso equaled 1,000 old pesos, which simplified prices after years of inflation.

Today the peso is one of the world’s most traded currencies, largely because of Mexico’s close economic ties with the United States.