Mexico has produced numerous writers, essayists, and poets of international renown, including Octavio Paz, who in 1990 became the first Mexican to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Carlos Fuentes is another Mexican writer whose fiction is widely read in Europe and the United States. He often writes about social issues in contemporary Mexico, but his best-known work deals with the decades that followed the Mexican Revolution.

Mexican arts, with the exception of folk arts, generally followed European patterns during the colonial period and the 19th century. The Mexican Revolution was instrumental in fostering a new sense of nationalism and experimentation

Mexican popular music, in the form of ballads and sidewalk performances, has contributed significantly to popular music in the United States. Examples include "La Bamba," a Mexican folk song that was recorded in a rock-and-roll style by American singer Ritchie Valens in 1959, and the work of the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s and 1970s.