page_title: Mexico
section_title: Ethnicity and race
hierarchical_section_title: Mexico / Demographics / Ethnicity and race
context_page_description: Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico covers 1,972,550 square kilometers and has approximately 128,649,565 inhabitants, making it the world's 13th-largest country by area, 10th-most populous country, and most populous Spanish-speaking nation. It is a federation comprising 31 states and Mexico City, its capital city and largest metropolis. Other major urban areas include Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, Toluca, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and León.
  Pre-Columbian Mexico traces its origins to 8,000 BC and is identified as one of six cradles of civilization; it was home to many advanced Mesoamerican civilizations, most well-known among them the Maya and the Aztecs. In 1521, the Spanish Empire conquered and colonized the territory from its base in Mexico City, which then became known as New Spain. The Catholic Church played an important role as millions of indigenous inhabitants converted.
context_section_description: Despite living in a diverse country, the majority of Mexicans are united under the same national identity. This is the product of an ideology, strongly promoted by Mexican academics and politicians such as Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos, known as mestizaje, whose goal was that of Mexico becoming a racially and culturally homogeneous country. In practice, this ideology was reflected in Mexico's national censuses of 1921 and 1930: in the former, approximately 60% of Mexico's population identified as Mestizos, and in the latter, Mexico's government declared that all Mexicans were now Mestizos, for which racial classifications would be dropped in favor of language-based ones in future censuses. Today, historians and academics consider that a good number of people were classified under the "mestizo identity" by the government regardless of whether they were of mixed ancestry or not, as the population trends reported in those censuses are incongruent with those exhibited in earlier censuses and modern research has observed that when asked directly about their ethno-racial identification, many Mexicans do not identify as Mestizos. Ethnoracial labels such as "White" or "Indian" are far more prominent in contemporary Mexican society than the "Mestizo" one is, whose use is mostly limited to intellectual circles.
  The total percentage of Mexico's indigenous peoples tends to vary depending of the criteria used by the government on its censuses: it is 5.4% if the ability to speak an indigenous language is used as the criteria to define a person as indigenous, if racial self-identification is used it is 14.9% and if people who consider themselves part indigenous are also included it amounts to 23%. Nonetheless, all the censuses conclude that the majority of Mexico's indigenous population is concentrated in rural areas of the southern and south-eastern Mexican states such as Yucatán at 59%, Quintana Roo 39% and Campeche 27%, who are chiefly Maya; Oaxaca with 48% of the population, the most numerous groups being the Mixtec and Zapotec peoples; Chiapas at 28%, the majority being Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya; Hidalgo 24%, the majority being Otomi; Puebla 19%, and Guerrero 17%, mostly Nahua peoples and the states of San Luis Potosí and Veracruz are both home to a population that is 15% indigenous, mostly from the Totonac, Nahua and Teenek (Huastec) groups. All of the indices of social development for the indigenous population are considerably lower than the national average which is motive of concern for Mexico's government.
  Similarly to Mestizo and indigenous peoples, estimates of the percentage of European-descended Mexicans vary considerably: according to the Encyclopædia Britannica which uses as reference the 1921 census, their numbers range from around 10%–20% (the results of the 1921 census, however, have been contested by various historians and deemed inaccurate). Recent nationwide field surveys that account for different phenotypical traits (hair color, skin color etc.) on the other hand, report rather higher percentages, with it being between 18%-23% if the criteria is the presence of blond hair, and of 47% if the criteria is skin color, with the later surveys having been conducted by Mexico's government.
   While during the colonial era, most of the European migration into Mexico was Spanish, in the 19th and 20th centuries a substantial number of non-Spanish Europeans immigrated to the country, with Europeans often being the most numerous ethnic group in colonial Mexican cities. Nowadays Mexico's northern and western regions have the highest percentages of European populations, with the majority of the people not having native admixture or being of predominantly European ancestry.
  The Afro-Mexican population (1,381,853 individuals as of 2015) is an ethnic group made up of descendants of Colonial-era slaves and recent immigrants of sub-Saharan African descent. Mexico had an active slave trade during the colonial period, and some 200,000 Africans were taken there, primarily in the 17th century. The creation of a national Mexican identi
caption: Depiction of the casta system in Mexico. Painting of 1777.
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