White Mexicans
White Mexicans are Mexicans of total or predominantly European ancestry. The Mexican government conducts surveys of skin color, but does not publish census results for ethnic identity.
As a racial categorization, there is no single agreed-upon definition of white people. 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 estimated the group both show around 15%. Mexico does not have a single system of skin color categorization. The term "light-skinned Mexican" is often used by the government to describe individuals in Mexico who possess European physical traits when discussing ethnicity. 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 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, how pronounced said gender asymmetry was varies considerably depending on the study. The Native American maternal contribution figures range from 90% to 59%, while research on the X chromosome shows less variation, with the reported Native American female contribution oscillating between 50% and 54%. 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 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. To keep power, the Spanish enforced a hierarchical class system in New Spain's society, with those born in Spain 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 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.
File:Dell'Acqua Ernennung Maximilians zum Kaiser Mexikos.jpg|thumb|right|Maximilian receiving a Mexican delegation at Miramare Castle in Trieste. Painting by Cesare dell'Acqua
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, 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.
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 in the 1820s and 1830s which, to 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 end the economic and social privilege based on race, as the Criollos took over from 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. However, due to the abolition of the caste system, the division became more about money and social class and less about biological differences, which increased 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 racial census published in 1793, the Euro-descendant population was between 18%-22% of the population. By 1921, when the second nationwide census that considered a person's race took place, 59% of the population self-identified as being of European descent, with 59% being Mestizo and 29% being Amerindian. Modern Mexican academics have scrutinized these numbers, saying that such a drastic alteration of demographic trends is not possible and cite, among other statistics, the relatively low frequency of marriages between people of different continental ancestries.