Mexico P139—2025 Commemorative of P134—100 Pesos 2024.06.27 UNC B724 W139 JEHC/IMP Butterflies

One of the most visually striking commemorative banknotes of the 2020s — Mexico's 100 Pesos 100th Anniversary note celebrates a century of the Banco de México with a vertical polymer design pairing the country's greatest literary mind with one of the world's most spectacular natural phenomena.

Front

• Color: Red and blue on multicolor underprint; vertical layout
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poet and writer — lower right
• Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City — lower left
• Bank of Mexico gate, two butterflies, and ribbon showing “100” four times — split across both edges as a perfect match device
• Security strip: “100 PESOS” and butterflies, visible from both sides
• Variable color ink on lower-left denomination numeral (tilt effect)
• Signatures: Jonathan Ernest Heath Constable (Deputy Governor) & Isabel Morales Pasantes (Main Cashier)
• Date: Ciudad de México, 27 Jun. 2024

Back

• Color: Red and black on multicolor underprint; vertical layout
• Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve — two butterflies on a flower, many others in flight against a temperate forest background
• UNESCO World Heritage natural site (States of México and Michoacán de Ocampo)

Other Characteristics

• Catalog numbers: TBB B724; Numista N#482764; W139 2024(5)
• Watermark: Transparent window on Bank of Mexico gate, with butterfly and raised “100”
• Composition: Polymer (Safeguard® / Guardian™)
• Size: 132 × 65 mm
• Issuing entity: Banco de México
• Printer: Banco de México, Mexico City
• Signatures: Jonathan Ernest Heath Constable (Deputy Gov.) & Isabel Morales Pasantes (Main Cashier)
• Currency: New Peso (1992–date)

The Nun Who Outthought Everyone

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) was born Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez in colonial New Spain — illegitimate, self-taught, and reading Latin by age three. By her teens she had mastered theology, philosophy, mathematics, and music well enough to stump the viceregal court's finest scholars in a public examination. Unable to attend university (women were barred), she entered a convent at 19 — not out of piety, she later admitted, but because it was the only institution that would give her a library and time to think. From her cell at the Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City, she produced poetry, plays, and philosophical essays that are now considered the first great works of Latin American literature. When the Church pressured her to stop writing and “return to her devotions,” she wrote a devastating defense of women's right to education and intellectual life. She died nursing plague victims at 46. The Colegio de San Ildefonso on this note — one of colonial Mexico's great centers of learning — represents the world of scholarship she was denied and conquered anyway.

A Hundred Million Monarchs

Every autumn, up to a billion monarch butterflies leave their summer breeding grounds across the United States and Canada and fly up to 4,500 km south to a cluster of oyamel fir forests in the mountains of Michoacán and the State of México — the same forests depicted on the reverse of this note. No individual butterfly makes the round trip; it takes three to four generations to complete the cycle, yet each generation navigates back to the same trees their great-grandparents left. Scientists still do not fully understand how. The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. When the butterflies arrive in November, the forests turn orange. The sound of their wings, locals say, is like rain.

A Century of the Banco de México

The Banco de México was founded on 1 September 1925, replacing a chaotic patchwork of private and state banks that had issued their own competing currencies during and after the Mexican Revolution. This commemorative note — issued 27 June 2024 and dated for the centennial year — is an overprint on the standard P-134 series, with the Bank's anniversary logo added to the obverse. It was issued in multiple signature varieties as different members of the Junta de Gobierno rotated through; this listing is the W139 2024(5) variety, signed by Deputy Governor Jonathan Heath Constable and Main Cashier Isabel Morales Pasantes.

About Mexico

• Origin of name: From the Nahuatl Mēxihco — believed to derive from Mēxtli, an alternate name for the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, combined with -co (place of). The exact etymology remains debated.
• Capital: Mexico City (city pop. ~9.2 million; metro pop. ~22 million)
  • Origin of name: Named after the Mexica people (the Aztecs), who founded Tenochtitlan on the same site in 1325.
• Population: ~129 million (UN 2023) — comparable to Japan or the Philippines
• Area: 1,964,375 km² (758,449 mi²) — roughly three times the size of Texas
• GDP per capita (PPP): ~$23,000 (IMF 2023)
• Main exports: Vehicles and auto parts, electronics, crude oil, medical devices, beer
• Borders: United States (north); Guatemala and Belize (south)
• Ethnicities: Mestizo (~62%), Indigenous (~21%), European-descent (~10%), Afro-Mexican and other (~7%)
• Memberships: UN (1945); USMCA; G20; OECD (1994)
• Sovereignty: Independence from Spain declared September 16, 1810; recognized 1821

Mexico Unfiltered

• Mexico is the world's largest producer of avocados, limes, and chili peppers — and the birthplace of chocolate, tomatoes, and corn as cultivated crops.
• Mexico City is sinking — built on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, parts of the city are subsiding at up to 50 cm per year as groundwater is extracted from the clay beneath it.
• Mexico has the world's largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Americas — 35 in total, spanning pre-Columbian ruins, colonial cities, and natural reserves including this note's Monarch Butterfly Reserve.
• The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) killed an estimated 1–2 million people and produced one of the world's first post-revolutionary constitutions (1917), which still governs the country today.
• Nearshoring is transforming northern Mexico — as companies relocate supply chains from Asia, cities like Monterrey and Juárez are experiencing the fastest industrial growth in the country's modern history.

Own this centennial note and hold a hundred years of Mexican monetary history in your hands — a self-taught nun who rewrote the rules of colonial literature on one side, and a billion butterflies navigating by starlight on the other.