White Mexicans () are Mexicans who are associated with the racial category of whiteness. In Mexico, racial classification is highly ambiguous and has often been defined by culture, language, ideology, ancestry, and phenotype (such as skin color) rather than by a single classification system.
In 1900, the Mexican Census reported 19% of the population was White and 43% was "mixed". Mexico does not have a single system of skin color categorization; modern estimates of Mexico's White population vary depending on context and due to different methodologies used. Latinobarómetro in 2023 and the Factbook in 2012 suggest that around 10% are White or have predominantly European ancestry. Britannica in 2000 and a 2005 study by a professor of the National Autonomous University of Mexico both estimated the group to be around 15%. Social stratification and racism in Mexico have remained in the modern era. Although phenotype is not as important as culture, European features and lighter skin tone are favored by middle- and upper-class groups.
The presence of Europeans in Mexico dates back to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and during the colonial period, most European immigration was Spanish. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries, significant waves of European and European-derived populations from North and South America immigrated to Mexico. This intermixing between European immigrants and Indigenous peoples resulted in the emergence of the Mestizo group, which became the majority of Mexico's population by the time of the Mexican Revolution. Some scholars challenge this narrative, citing church and census records that indicate interracial unions in Mexico were rare among all groups. These records also dispute other academic narratives, such as the idea that European immigrants were predominantly male or that "pure Spanish" individuals formed a small elite. In fact, Spaniards were often the most numerous ethnic group in colonial cities"Household Mobility and Persistence in Guadalajara, Mexico: 1811–1842, page 62" , fsu org, December 8, 2016. Retrieved on December 9, 2018. and there were menial workers and people in poverty who were of full Spanish origin.
While genetic evidence suggests that most European immigrants to Mexico were male, and that the modern population of Mexico was primarily formed through the mixing of Spanish males and Native American females, "Both studies have revealed a pattern of directional mating in this population, an asymmetric interaction between Spanish males and Native American females, much like in other Hispanic populations of Latin America (Green et al. 2000; Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000, 2003; Rodriguez-Delfin et al. 2001). During the conquest and colonization of America the immigration of women from the Iberian Peninsula was significantly lower than that of men, so European males frequently took native women as wives or partners (Morner, 1967). After the initial directional contact between European and Native American populations it seems likely that the admixed group became mostly endogamic, which would explain the high levels of Native American mtDNA (Merriwether et al. 1997)." "The Hispanos generally resemble other Hispanic and Mexican-American groups while having a somewhat higher proportion of European blood than the rest. Genetics research has also confirmed the harshly one-sided nature of the admixture. By paying special attention to the Y-chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), scientists proved that the genetic exchange in the early years of New Mexico was almost entirely between Spanish males and Indian females." [...] "The Y chromosome of Hispano men is hardly Native American at all, while their mtDNA is about 85 percent Indian. Again, the former represents fatherhood, the latter motherhood. The skew between the two means that mating happened in one direction. It means that Indian men and Spanish women were largely on the sidelines when the admixture between Spanish men and Indian women occurred." "In Mexico, approximately 90% of the maternal lineages are of Native American ancestry, implying that there has been very little European female contribution throughout colonial and post-colonial history." "Thus the observed frequency of Native American mtDNA in Mexican/Mexican Americans is higher than was expected on the basis of autosomal estimates of Native American admixture for these populations i.e. ~ 30-46% [53, 55]. The difference is indicative of directional mating involving preferentially immigrant men and Native American women. This type of genetic asymmetry has been observed in other populations, including Brazilian individuals of African ancestry, as the analysis of sex specific and autosomal markers has revealed evidence for substantial European admixture that was mediated mostly through men ." how pronounced said gender asymmetry was varies considerably depending on the study. The Native American maternal mtDNA contribution figures range from 59% to 90%,Campos-Sanchez et al. (2006): "Genetic structure analysis of three Hispanic populations from Costa Rica, Mexico, and the southwestern United States using Y-chromosome STR markers and mtDNA sequences" , Pubmed, 2006, Retrieved October 4, 2022. while research on the X chromosome shows less variation, with the reported Native American female contribution oscillating between 50% and 54%. "Results are reported in table 2 and indicate higher total Native American ancestry for LA Latinos and Mexicans (45% and 44%, respectively) than for Brazilians and Colombians (18% and 19%, respectively), which is in line with previous studies.21,22 We also observed uniformly higher Native American ancestry on the X chromosome (57% for LA Latinos, 54% for Mexicans, 33% for Brazilians, and 27% for Colombians), which is consistent with evidence of predominantly European patrilineal and Native American matrilineal ancestry in Latino populations.22" Present day Mestizos have varying degrees of European and Indigenous ancestry, with some having European genetic ancestry exceeding 90%, albeit after the Mexican Revolution the government began defining ethnicity on cultural standards (mainly the language spoken) rather than racial or phenotypic ones, which led to a large number of White persons to be classified as Mestizos.
History Establishment of Europeans in Mexico
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 Texcocanos among others. After years of war, the coalition led by Cortés finally managed to conquer the Aztec Empire which would result in 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.
Mexico's European heritage is strongly associated with Spanish settlement during the colonial period, Mexico not having witnessed the same scale of mass recent-immigration as other New World countries such as the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. However, this ruling is less blanket fact and more of a consequence due to Mexico's enormous population. Regardless, Mexico ranks 3rd behind Brazil and Argentina for European immigration in Latin America with its culture owing a great deal to the significant German, Italian, Irish, British, Polish, and French populations. White Mexicans rather, descend of a considerably ethnocentrist group of Spanish people who, beginning with the arrival and establishment of the conquistadors to then be supplemented with clerics, workers, academics etc. immigrated to what today is Mexico. The criollos (as people born in the colonies to Spanish parents were called until the beginning of the 20th century) would favor for marriage other Spanish immigrants even if they were of a less privileged economic class than them, as to preserve the Spanish lineage and customs was seen as the top priority. Once Mexico achieved its independence and immigration from European countries other than Spain became accepted, the criollos did the same, and sought to assimilate the new European immigrants into the overwhelmingly Spanish-origin white Mexican population, as the yearly immigration rate of Europeans to Mexico never exceeded 2% in relation to the country's total population, assimilation of the new immigrants was easy and Mexican hyphenated identities never appeared.
Another way on which European immigration to Mexico differed from that of other New World countries was on the profile of the needed immigrant. As New Spain's main economic activities were not related to agriculture (and the manpower for it was already supplied by the converted indigenous population), the country didn't enforce any sort of programs that would make it an attractive destination for European farmers. Much more important to the economy was mining and miners came from Europe, in particular from Cornwall, U.K. and even today parts of Mineral del Monte and Pachuca maintain strong links to both their British heritage and with the United Kingdom. There was also strong demand for people with specialized skills in fields such as geology, metallurgy, commerce, law, medicine etc. As stories of professional immigrants amassing huge wealth in a pair of years were commonly heard, New Spain became very attractive only for Europeans who filled these profiles and their families, which in the end resulted on the country getting relatively less European immigration, is also because of the aforementioned reasons that the majority of Spanish immigrants who arrived to the country were from the northern regions of Spain, mainly Cantabria, Navarra, Asturias, Galicia and the Basque Country.