Aida’s Reviews > Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America > Status Update

"...over time language displaced other criteria (e.g., food, footwear, clothes), and in the latter half of the twentieth century it was the sole criterion used in the census to identify indigenous people. However, it was far from an "objective" measure of indigeneity as speaking an indigenous language was a sign of illiteracy, isolation, backwardness, and poverty."

"Describing the climate under which these rebellions occurred, Friedrich Katz writes: "When Mexico won independence at the beginning of the 19th century, some 40 percent of agricultural land in the central and southern regions of the country was communal land that belonged to the Indigenous people. When Porfirio Díaz was beaten in 1911, only 5 percent remained in their hands..."

"The castas system reflected the concerns of Spanish and creole elites for maintaining a socioracial hierarchy in the presence of increased racial mixing (Katzew 2004). In this hierarchy, Spaniards were on top and indigenous people and Africans at the bottom, with mixed-race individuals falling somewhere in between, depending on the composition of their mixture."

"Although most Mexicans identify as mestizo
(mixed), our findings show that a significant number of Mexicans embrace a white identity and that many of them are not in positions of privilege or status. We also find that few Mexicans identify as being of African descent, despite the significant demographic flows of Africans to Mexico during the colonial era."