page_title: White Mexicans
section_title: Establishment of Europeans in Mexico
hierarchical_section_title: White Mexicans / Establishment of Europeans in Mexico
caption_attribution_description: English: Retrato de familia Fagoaga Arozqueta (Portrait of family Fagoaga Arozqueta). The Fagoaga Arozqueta family was an upper-class criollo family from Mexico city, New Spain.
context_page_description: White Mexicans are Mexican citizens who are considered white, typically due to European or Middle Eastern descent. While the Mexican government does conduct ethnic censuses in which a Mexican has the option of identifying as "White" the results obtained from these censuses are not published. What Mexico's government publishes instead is the percentage of "light-skinned Mexicans" there are in the country, with it being 47% in 2010 and 49% in 2017. Due to its less directly racial undertones, the term "Light-skinned Mexican" has been favored by the government and media outlets over "White Mexican" as the go-to choice to refer to the segment of Mexico's population who possess European physical traits when discussing different ethno-racial dynamics in Mexico's society. Nonetheless, sometimes "White Mexican" is used.
  Estimates of Mexico's white population differ greatly in both methodology and percentages given; unofficial sources such as the World Factbook and Encyclopædia Britannica, which use the 1921 census results as the base of their estimations, calculate the White Mexican population as only 9% or between one tenth to one fifth of the population.
context_section_description: The presence of Europeans in what is nowadays known as Mexico dates back to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the early 16th century by Hernán Cortés, his troops and a number of indigenous city states who were tributaries and rivals of the Aztecs, such as the Totonacs, the Tlaxcaltecas and Texcocans among others. There are stories about Moctezuma taking Cortés to be the return of the God Quetzalcoatl due to his light skin and light-colored hair and eyes, which had never been seen before by the people of Mesoamerica. However, this has been disputed. After years of war the coalition led by Cortés finally managed to conquer the Aztec Empire which would result on the foundation of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and while this new state granted a series of privileges to the members of the allied indigenous tribes such as nobiliary titles and swathes of land, the Spanish held the most political and economic power. The small number of Spaniards who inhabited the new kingdom would soon be complemented by a steady migration flow of Spanish people, as it was the interest of the Spanish crown to Hispanicize and Christianize the region given that Indigenous peoples and their customs were considered uncivilized, thus the Spanish language and culture were imposed and indigenous ones suppressed.
  The Mexican experience mirrors much of that of the rest of Latin America, as attitudes towards race, including identification, were set by the conquistadors and Spanish who came soon after. Through the colonial period, the Spanish and their descendants, called "criollos" remained outnumbered by the indigenous and "mestizos" or those of mixed Spanish and indigenous parents (albeit a person of 7/8 Spanish ancestry and 1/8 or less indigenous ancestry could be considered to be "criollo"). To keep power, the Spanish enforced a hierarchical class system in New Spain's society, with those born in Spain (known as Peninsulares) being the most privileged, followed by criollos, then Mestizos, then the indigenous and finally the Africans. Nonetheless the system was not completely rigid and elements such as social class, social relations and who a person descended from did figure into it. However, the notion of "Spanishness" would remain at the top and "Indianness" would be at the bottom, with those mixed being somewhere in the middle. This idea remained officially in force through the rest of the colonial period.
  Criollo resentment of the privileges afforded to the Peninsulares was the main reason behind the Mexican War of Independence. When the war ended in 1821, the new Mexican government expelled the peninsulares (approximately 10,000 – 20,000 people) in the 1820s and 1830s which at a degree, kept the European ethnicity from growing as a percentage; this expulsion however, did not lead to any permanent ban on European immigrants, even from Spain. Independence did not do away with economic and social privilege based on race as the Criollos took over those of Spanish birth. A division between "Spanish" and "indigenous" remained with Criollos distinguishing themselves from the rest of society as the guardians of Spanish culture as well as the Catholic religion. Due the abolition of the caste system the division, however, became more about money and social class and less about biological differences which widened the possibilities of social mobility for Mestizo and Indigenous Mexicans. For this reason many of the political and cultural struggles of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries would be between the Criollos and the Mestizos.
  According to Mexico's first ever racial census published in 1793, the Eurodescendant population was between 18%-22% of the population (with Mestizos being 21%-25% and Amerindians being 51%-61%) but by 1921, when the second nationwide census that considered a person's race took place, only 9% of the population self identified as being of European descent, with 59% being Mestizo and 29% being Amerindian. While for a long time the 1921 census' results were taken as fact, with international publications such as The World 
caption: Portrait of the family Fagoga Arozqueta. An upper class colonial Mexican family of Spanish ancestry (referred to as Criollos) in Mexico City, New Spain, ca. 1730.
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