Demographics of Mexico - Ethnic groups - Encyclopedia II

The largest ethnic group is the mestizos, constituting approximately 60% of Mexico's population. Mestizos are people of mixed Native American and European heritage. The most of the Mexican mestizos may be originally half Aztec & half Spanish.

Unmixed Native American peoples make up the second-largest group; official statistics put them at 10% of the population, but many believe the figure to be closer to 30%. The reason for the discrepancy is the federal government's policy of using spoken language rather than race as the basis of classification. But in Mexico, as in the United States and other countries in the Americas, most Native Americans no longer speak their native tongues. In Mexico this is partly a result of the government's own policy of cultural and linguistic assimilation, which has resulted in the "Hispanization" of many of the Native American populations.

Thus, many mestizos are in fact assimilated Native Americans, inflating the mestizo population estimate from 60% to as high as 80%. Meanwhile, the number of Native Americans continues to decline as more are assimilated and as the linguistic basis of classification remains the same.

In the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, and in the interior of the Yucatán Peninsula, the majority of the population is indigenous. Large indigenous minorities, including the Nahua, Tarasca, and Mixtec are also present in the central regions of Mexico. In northern Mexico the indigenous are a small minority and include the Tarahumara of Chihuahua and the Yaqui and Seri of Sonora.

About 9% of the population, mostly in Mexico City, Jalisco, Sonora, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Chihuahua and other large metropolitan areas, is of unmixed white European descent. In addition to the Spanish colonists, French settlers arrived during the Mexican Empire (19th century) and Italians during the government of Porfirio Díaz, Americans, Yugoslavs and Germans arrived in Mexico after World War I. During the 1930s many Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War arrived, mostly in Mexico City. Polish and Russian (Guadalupe, Baja California) refugees, Ashkenazic Jews among them, also settled during the war. The Jewish immigrants joined the Sephardic community that had lived in Mexico since the Spanish Inquisition.

Also of note are colonies of Mormons, Mennonites and Molokans, mainly in the northern states of Chihuahua and Durango. British immigrants also settled, mainly in mining areas, as well as French settlers in Santa Rosalía, Baja California Sur. Some believe that the British first brought Protestantism into Mexico. Greek immigration has been important as well, especially in the state of Sinaloa and its capital Culiacán.

Mexicans of Lebanese and Turkish descent are present in huge numbers, some Chinese and Filipinos arrived from the Philippines in colonial times. During the period of Asian Exclusion from the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants settled in northern and western Mexico, especially Baja California. Mexicali is known for its relatively prominent concentration of people of Chinese descent. There are also Jewish Mexicans of Lebanese, Turkish or other Mediterranean descent, with common ancestral roots in Spain, and speak Ladino, which is closely related to Spanish.

Since colonial times, when thousands of Africans were brought as slaves, Mexico has had a significant number of people of black-African descent. Today Afro-Mexicans of relatively unmixed black-African ancestry, as well as Zambos and mulattos, represent only about 0.5% of the population, due to higher birth-rates amongst the other groups as well as continued immigration from Europe.

Most of Mexico's blacks live in the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Yucatán. Major populations also exist in Mexico's larger cities, such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Tijuana. In addition to those present since the colonial era, many African-Americans seeking to escape racial discrimination in the United States during the early 20th century emigrated to Mexico.

Mexico is also the destination for many other Latin American groups: mostly Argentines, but also Brazilians, Cubans, Colombians, and Venezuelans. The PRI governments in power for most of the 20th century had a policy of granting asylum to fellow Latin Americans fleeing political persecution in their home countries.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ethnic groups", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page