What I'm trying to accomplish: My character is a young teen recently transplanted from Mexico City to the United States. He's not used to American currency and is looking at a pocketful of quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies, trying to familiarize himself with the coins. I want to figure out what he would think of this exercise. If particular American coins look a lot like particular Mexican coins, for instance, he would notice that. Or if it would strike him as strange that a dime is smaller than a nickel, and so forth.
It seems that Mexican coinage is quite different now than it was then, so modern coins will only mislead me. (The current bi-metallic coins date from the New Peso re-valuation in 1993, I think.)
Can you help me?
I was living in the US at the time, and I don't recall there being all that many Kennedy half dollars in circulation, but obviously it's not impossible he could run across one or two of those. I remember wheat-back pennies being common, but silver Mercury dimes were really scarce, and I never saw silver dollars except as Christmas presents. The Eisenhower dollar didn't come out until 1971.
So I am trying to find (ideally) a picture of all the Mexican coin denominations in circulation in the late 1960s, showing their sizes, colors and designs. In my dreams, this picture would include a set of American coins for comparison. Lacking that, a detailed description would also help a lot.
Searches already performed: Mexican coin denominations 1960s, Mexican to American coins comparison, Mexican coins history, in various permutations. I get a lot of coin-selling sites, usually with closeup pictures of single coins, or else dollars-to-pesos conversion calculators. Modern coins turn up a lot as well, as do commemorative coins for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
I've also checked the community archives.
