There's a rainbow of different kinds of Mexican mercados. However, a few characteristics unite them. For instance, most Mexican mercados announce themselves by degree.

At the mercado's edge in Mixquic, México state, in 2024; copyright free image courtesy of "DeBolsillo" made available through Wikimedia Commons.

You're walking down a regular street peopled with regular folks, seeing regular stores with typical window displays and typical merchandise. But then you notice that more and more people around you are carrying bags filled with fruits and vegetables, or maybe flowers and plants as seen above. Stores along the street may also change in character. Instead of being fronted with standard doors and large display windows, now their entire fronts may be open, with all kinds of merchandise avalanching onto the sidewalk. This causes the street to feel less formal, and to look more colorful. The mercado's congenial unpretentiousness, then, is contagious, and diffuses into the general neighborhood around it.

Right around the mercado it starts getting crowded. People slow down and gawk at this and that, and maybe even buy a taco to nibble on. Street traffic clogs up and jaywalkers outnumber sidewalk walkers. Now you smell the most wide-ranging and penetrating of mercado odors -- the green aroma of celery, and the unctuous odor of the meat stalls' unrefrigerated, dismembered flesh. You enter and if it's a big market, you'll see something similar to what's below:

Tianguis of Jesús María in Aguascalientes, in 2025; copyright free image courtesy of "Salazar Lira Hanna Elizabeth" made available through Wikimedia Commons.

Especially in smaller towns there may be no large mercado building, but rather a place where lots of sellers have agreed to congregate, such as seen below. Often such outside marketing zones are known as tianguises. In areas with large indigenous populations it's possible that the tianguis has been taking place in that same spot for many years, possibly centuries. In smaller villages it's likely that the tianguis occurs only once a week, or even less often.

Tianguis in Pahuatlán, Puebla state, in 2018; copyright free image courtesy of "Ximenantsin" made available through Wikimedia Commons.

Right around big mercados it starts getting crowded before you reach the mercado building itself. People slow down and gawk at this and that, and maybe even buy a taco to nibble on. Street traffic clogs up and jaywalkers outnumber sidewalk walkers. Soon you smell the most wide-ranging and penetrating of mercado odors -- the green aroma of celery, and the unctuous odor of the meat stalls' unrefrigerated, dismembered flesh. You enter and if it's a big market, you'll see something similar to what's below:

Inside the vast Mercado lucas de Galvez in Mérida, Yucatán, in 2024; copyright free image courtesy of Eden, Janine and Jim made available through Wikimedia Commons.

Sometime, especially in big cities and during special events or festivals, in an informal manner here and there across town sidewalks become crowded with small displays of merchandise. One spot may be occupied by someone selling tamales from a covered pot, the next by a little girl presiding over dozens of cheap plastic sandals, the next by a young man with transistor radios and batteries, and on it goes. Maybe the goods are displayed on wooden trays about the size of a door, and set atop wooden horses, or possibly the trays are suitcase-size, with their own fold-down legs. The most humble and usually the most numerous displays, especially in indigenous communities, are those arranged atop straw mats, tablecloths, towels, shawls, or maybe nothing, on the sidewalk.

Vendors informally gathered on the Día de la Candelaria, or Candlemas Day, occurring yearly on February 2nd, melding Catholic practices and pre-Hispanic Aztec traditions, in Actopan, Hidalgo, in 2019; copyright free image courtesy of "RubeHM" made available through Wikimedia Commons.