Creating the first map, Mexico: population by state, taught me how to create a new shapefile from a selected part of another shapefile, a technique I look forward to using in the future.
I thought I was doing well with the map until I looked at it on the blog and realized how cluttered the labeling was and how poorly the word Mexico shows up on the country. However doing the second map in this lab, the one of central Mexico, taught me a bit more about that. I did have a lot of frustration trying to get the labeling right as initially I couldn't get the map to display only urban areas with populations over 1 million - despite checking all the right boxes, I think - and only when I switched to data from layout view was I able to get it correctly labeled. The great thing about this map was that I learned to do an inset map properly.
For the third map, the stretched symbology elevation map, we looked at a raster file of elevation for Mexico. I had to check an atlas before concluding that the figures must be in meters - I didn't see it anywhere in the metadata. I would think that stretched symbology, which is shown here, would be a better way to depict elevation than classified symbology because elevation changes continuously rather than jumping from elevation category to elevation category, but I actually found the classified symbology map - not shown here - easier to comprehend. I did wonder why the raster file had some small omissions, or empty spots, where Mexico had no elevation information; this is probably only barely visible on this map.