page_title: New Spain
section_title: Population in early 1800s
hierarchical_section_title: New Spain / Demographics / Population in early 1800s
caption_attribution_description: English: Casta Painting, No. 15. From Mestizo and from Indian; Coyote.
context_page_description: The Viceroyalty of New Spain was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. It covered a huge area that included territories in North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania.
  It originated in 1521 after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the main event of the Spanish conquest, which did not properly end until much later, as its territory continued to grow to the north. It was officially created on 18 August 1521 as a Kingdom, the first of four viceroyalties Spain created in the Americas. Its first viceroy was Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco, and the capital of the kingdom was Mexico City, established on the ancient Tenochtitlan.
  It included what is now Mexico plus the current U.S. states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Florida and parts of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; the southwestern part of British Columbia of present-day Canada; the Captaincy General of Guatemala; the Captaincy General of Cuba; and the Captaincy General of the Philippines.
context_section_description: While different intendencies would perform censuses to get a detailed insight in regards to its inhabitants (namely occupation, number of persons per household, ethnicity etc.), it was until 1793 that the results of the first ever national census would be published. The census is also known as the "Revillagigedo census" because its creation was ordered by the Count of the same name. Most of the census' original datasets have reportedly been lost; thus most of what is known about it nowadays comes from essays and field investigations made by academics who had access to the census data and used it as reference for their works, such as Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt. Each author gives different estimations for the total population, ranging from 3,799,561 to 6,122,354 (more recent data suggests that the actual population of New Spain in 1810 was closer to 5 or 5.5 million individuals) as well as the ethnic composition in the country although there isn't much variation, with Europeans ranging from 18% to 22% of New Spain's population, Mestizos ranging from 21% to 25%, Indians ranging from 51% to 61% and Africans being between 6,000 and 10,000. It is concluded then, that across nearly three centuries of colonization, the population growth trends of whites and mestizos were even, while the total percentage of the indigenous population decreased at a rate of 13%–17% per century. The authors assert that rather than whites and mestizos having higher birthrates, the reason for the indigenous population's numbers decreasing lies on them suffering of higher mortality rates, due to living in remote locations rather than in cities and towns founded by the Spanish colonists or being at war with them. It is also for these reasons that the number of Indigenous Mexicans presents the greater variation range between publications, as in cases their numbers in a given location were estimated rather than counted, leading to possible overestimations in some provinces and possible underestimations in others.
  ~Europeans are included within the Mestizo category.
  Regardless of the possible imprecision related to the counting of Indigenous peoples living outside of the colonized areas, the effort that New Spain's authorities put on considering them as subjects is worth mentioning, as censuses made by other colonial or post-colonial countries did not consider American Indians to be citizens/subjects, as example the censuses made by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata would only count the inhabitants of the colonized settlements. Other example would be the censuses made by the United States, that did not include Indigenous peoples living among the general population until 1860, and indigenous peoples as a whole until 1900.
  Once New Spain achieved its independence, the legal basis of the Colonial caste system was abolished and mentions of a person's caste in official documents were also abandoned, which led to the exclusion of racial classification in the censuses to come and difficulted to keep track of the demographic development of each ethnicity that lived in the country. More than a century would pass for Mexico to conduct a new census on which a person's race was taken into account, in 1921, but even then, due to it showing huge inconsistencies regarding other official registers as well as its historic context, modern investigators have deemed it inaccurate. Almost a century after the aforementioned census was made, Mexico's government has begun to conduct ethno-racial surveys again, with its results suggesting that the population growth trends for each major ethnic group haven't changed significantly since the 1793 census was taken.
caption: Mestizo and India with their Coyote children.
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