Mexico Racial and ethnic ideologies Very generally speaking ethno-racial relations can be arranged on an axis between the two extremes of European and Indigenous American cultural and biological heritage, this is a remnant of the colonial Spanish caste system which categorized individuals according to their perceived level of biological mixture between the two groups. Additionally the presence of considerable portions of the population with partly African and Asian heritage further complicates the situation. Even though it still arranges persons along the line between indigenous and European, in practice the classificatory system is no longer biologically based, but rather mixes socio-cultural traits with phenotypical traits, and classification is largely fluid, allowing individuals to move between categories and define their ethnic and racial identities situationally. Generally, it can be said that in scholarship, as well as popular discourse, there has been a tendency of talking about indigenous peoples in terms of ethnicity, about Afro-minorities and white socio-economic privilege in terms of race, and about mestizos in terms of national identity. It is now however becoming recognized that processes of identity formation and social stratification in regards to all population groups in Mexico can be analyzed both in terms of race and of ethnicity.
Racial and ethnical terms Mestizaje In Mexico's post-revolutionary period, Mestizaje was a racial ideology that combined elements of the Euro-American ideologies of the racial superiority of the "white race" with the social reality of a postcolonial, multiracial setting. It promoted the use of planned
miscegenation as a
eugenic strategy designed (in their conception) to improve the overall quality of the population by multiplying white genetic material to the entire population. This ideology was very different from the way the eugenics debate was carried out in Europe and North America, where racial "purity" and anti-miscegenation legislation was the eugenic strategy of choice. The ideology of Mestizaje came from the long tradition of tolerance of racial mixing that existed in the Spanish colonies. The ideology was influently worded by
José Vasconcelos who in his
La Raza Cósmica formulated a vision of how a "
race of the future" would be created by mixing the mongoloid, negroid, and caucasian races. As the place where this mixing was already well underway, Mexico, and Latin America in general, was the center of the creation of this new and improved species of human beings, the
mestizo.
Mestizos The large majority of Mexicans classify themselves as "
Mestizos", meaning that they neither identify fully with any indigenous culture or with a particular non-Mexican heritage, but rather identify as having cultural traits and heritage that is mixed by elements from indigenous and European traditions. By the deliberate efforts of post-revolutionary governments the "Mestizo identity" was constructed as the base of the modern Mexican national identity, through a process of cultural synthesis referred to as
mestizaje. Mexican politicians and reformers such as
José Vasconcelos and
Manuel Gamio were instrumental in building a Mexican national identity on the concept of mestizaje (see the section below). The term "Mestizo" is not in wide use in Mexican society today and has been dropped as a category in population censuses, it is however still used in social and cultural studies when referring to the non-indigenous part of the Mexican population. The word has somewhat pejorative connotations and most of the Mexican citizens who would be defined as mestizos in the sociological literature would probably self-identify primarily as Mexicans. In the Yucatán peninsula, the word Mestizo is even used about
Maya speaking populations living in traditional communities, because during the
Caste War of the late 19th century those Maya who did not join the rebellion were classified as mestizos. In Chiapas the word "Ladino" is used instead of mestizo. Sometimes, particularly outside of Mexico, the word "mestizo" is used with the meaning of a person with mixed indigenous and European blood. This usage does not conform to the Mexican social reality where, like in Brazil, a person of mostly indigenous genetic heritage would be considered Mestizo either by rejecting his indigenous culture or by not speaking an indigenous language, Additionally the categories carry additional meanings having to do with social class so that the term indigena or the more pejorative "indio" (Indian) is connected with ideas of low social class, poverty, rural background, superstition, being dominated by traditional values as opposed to reason. Commonly, instead of the term Mestizo, which also has a somewhat pejorative usage, the term "gente de razón" ("people of reason") is used and contrasted with "gente de costumbre" ("people of tradition"), cementing the status of indigeneity being connected to superstition and backwardness. For example, it has been observed that upwards social mobility is generally correlated with "whitening", if persons with indigenous biological and cultural roots rise to positions of power and prestige they tend to be viewed as more "white" than if they belonged to a lower social class. Indigenous identity was constructed by the dominant Euro-Mestizo majority and imposed upon the indigenous people as a negatively defined identity, characterized by the lack of assimilation into modern Mexico. Indian identity therefore became socially stigmatizing. Cultural policies in early post-revolutionary Mexico were paternalistic towards the indigenous people, with efforts designed to "help" indigenous peoples achieve the same level of progress as the rest of society, eventually assimilating indigenous peoples completely to Mestizo Mexican culture, working toward the goal of eventually solving the "indian problem" by transforming indigenous communities into mestizo communities . The category of "indígena" (indigenous) is a modern term in Spanish America for those termed
Indios ("Indians") in the colonial era. They can be defined narrowly according to linguistic criteria including only persons that speak one of
Mexico's 62 indigenous languages, this is the categorization used by the National Mexican Institute of Statistics. It can also be defined broadly to include all persons who self-identify as having an indigenous cultural background, whether or not they speak the language of the indigenous group they identify with. This means that the percentage of the Mexican population defined as "indigenous" varies according to the definition applied, cultural activists have referred to the usage of the narrow definition of the term for census purposes as "statistical genocide". == Caribbean ==