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my great grandmother was born in Mexico, present day New Mexico. but she was Native American descent. isn't that what a Mexican is anyway, just they don't identify with specific tribes anymore? what am i part?
Well, there are actually a lot of Mexicans who identify with a particular tribe or pre-Columbian ethnic group. You just don't hear about it as much in the USA. Although the CIA factbook does say that 30% are at least predominantly Amerindian, the concentration is on language which is less than 7% of the population that can speak a native language. The people that do not speak Spanish are mostly women living in small villages. The men usually must know some Spanish to be able to work. For most people you are white (9%), or you can speak a native language (7%) or you are Mestizo (most people). There is some distinction among the Mestizos depending on how "brown" you are.
The overwhelming majority of people have bloodlines from both Europeans and native people. The percentage of people with native American blood in the USA is much lower. The land that became British North America did not have the great civilizations or the population levels that existed in Mexico. Also the British were not as driven (mostly by rape or simply dominance) to mate with the native people as the Spanish.
While all contact between native tribes and Europeans was a mixture of benevolence and hatred and warfare, there was a noticeable shift by the 1920's where Indians in the USA were considered worthy of study and respect. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. While the nations were almost all defeated by then, many people began to feel some regret for the destruction of their civilization, and books began to appear about the native wisdom of the people.
In Mexico, starting much earlier in the 19th century, people began to seriously study the old civilizations. The feelings of the Mexican people were also driven by the knowledge that they were often carrying the blood of the indigenous people, as well as that of the Spanish. Today it is widely acknowledged that Aztec civilization was in many ways more sophisticated than the European civilization at first contact. I don't think that anyone in Europe had the engineering skill to build the **** that split the lake under present day Mexico city divided into clean water zone and a brackish water zone. Widespread malaria kept villages near the sea very small as people stayed at higher altitudes. Without that mitigating circumstance, it is possible that the Mexicans would have discovered Europe first.
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Originally Posted by CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
Ethnic groups: mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%,
Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%,
white 9%, other 1%
Languages: Spanish only 92.7%, Spanish and indigenous languages 5.7%, indigenous only 0.8%, unspecified 0.8%
note: indigenous languages include various Mayan, Nahuatl, and other regional languages (2005)
Given the overwhelming sophistication of the ships built by the Chinese it is only because of the Chinese distrust of their greatest Admiral, a eunuch, that the Chinese didn't discover Europe first.
As you may know, the European discovery of America was in many ways sheer luck. Christopher Columbus was convinced that all the intellectuals elite in Europe were wrong, and it was only 2200 miles to Japan from the Canary Islands off Africa. The intellectuals knew the distance was much longer and no ship of that age could carry enough provisions to sail in the open ocean for that length of time. They were, of course, correct, but Columbus was supremely lucky to find another hemisphere. The "sail off the end of the earth" story was a sheer literary invention by a 19th century writer that wanted to make Columbus look intelligent. No educated person of the time believed the earth was flat.
Most of Latin owned countries had slaves. They used the Native people and had African slaves. The white man were not the only persons to own slaves. Mexico used Apache,Navajo ,and many more for slavery and they killed most of them off. Mexico owned a large part of America. They didn't just come here and were nice to the Natives they were horrible to them just like the White man! So no Mexicans are not mostly Native American they are mostle of white,east asian,small %of african and small % of native blood. How do you think in Mexico they speak spanish? Because they mostly came from Spain. There are some tribes still in Mexico just like in America. They live in reservations and still to this day are treated poorly.
So no Mexicans are not mostly Native American they are mostle of white,east asian,small %of african and small % of native blood. How do you think in Mexico they speak spanish? Because they mostly came from Spain. There are some tribes still in Mexico just like in America. They live in reservations and still to this day are treated poorly.
Sorry but your VERY wrong. Many Mexicans are white, the majority are mixed white and Native. And there is a high number of Natives in Mexico. To say they have a small percentage of native blood is ridiculuous. There is many pure blood natives that speak their native languages in Mexico. And where the hell did you get the idea there is more east asians in Mexico than natives??????????????????????????
According to the CIA Factbook. Mexico has an unmixed indigenous population of 30%. That is the highest in North America far more than the US or Canada. Some of those nations are on both sides of the US-Mexican border and their citizens can cross freely. I think the largest nation is the Tohono O'odham Nation that straddles the Airizona-Mexican border. I think the next largest group are the Yaqui.
Amerindians in Mexico and throughout Latin America are not considered mestizo. In the United States the non-Latino mestizos like mulattoes are considered Indian and black respectively. With the caveat that non-Latino mestizos in the U.S. can claim white as their racial category if they wish.
In the United States you even have Black-Americans that own Indian casinos as members of an Amerindian nation.
So, if Mexico were one huge state inside the United States of America then the state of Mexico would be called a majority Native American nation because the United States only recognizes the label "mestizo" for Latinos.
In terms of geographical politics it helps and soothes the minds and hearts of United Statesians to view the Mexicans in Mexico as mestizos rather than Amerindians. With the former label its easier to label their undocumented people in California and Texas as "illegal aliens."
As for the OP: I would say the majority of Mexicans in Mexico are mestizo and not Amerindian. I'm not necessarily against the custom and practices of Amerindian nations inside the United States recognizing its mixed-raced descendants as Amerindian or those descendants identifying themselves as Indians if they were raised so culturally. It's just different cultural concepts of race and identity between Mexico and the United States.
Some of the most serious Catholics in Mexico today are the Mayan Indians. My brother stayed with some of them in Mexico when he was contracted to shoot a film or commercial for a coffee company that gets its coffee beans from some region of Mexico the Mayans farm the beans in. They are extremely materially poor by U.S. standards my brother said, but he was very surprised with how happy and friendly the people are.
It might be worth noting in terms of race and identity that the Virgin Mary in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been designated the patron saint of all of the Americas by the Pope (a previous one) of Rome. Why that is notable is because Our Lady of Guadalupe is mestiza (not white) and she is dressed with Mexican Amerindian symbolism (aside a side note: its said as many Europeans that left for the Reformation as many mestizos and Amerindians came into the Church through Mexico).
Our Lady of Guadalupe is arguably one of the most popular cultural and religious symbols among Latinos in the U.S., her ubiquitous image adorning altars in homes, small business and churches, on murals and public shrines across East Los Angeles.
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According to anthropologists, the duality of her symbolism spoke to both Spanish and indigenous Nahauatl audiences in the sixteenth century. Her very name, Guadalupe is the Spanish pronunciation of the Nahuatl name Coatlaxopeuh, a Mesoamerican fertility goddess.
The well-known image is, according to scholars, full of a number of symbols that strongly relate it with the culture and history of the indigenous people.
The vast majority of Mexicans have Native American ancestry or the technical term Amerindian ancestry. That explains why the average Mexican phenotype is easily distinguishable from the North American WASP phenotype.
It explains why the average Mexican does not look like Matt Damon, its those Indigenous genes from the Mayans and the Aztecs.
I think the problem here is that some people want to use the presence of Native American ancestry in a typical Mexican as an excuse to deny that they are in fact a mixed people or to deny that they also have significant amounts of European genes.
From a handful of genetic studies I have seen about the Mexican population, it appears that the European contribution very rare is less than 40% or more than 60% of the DNA of a typical Mexican. At 40%, that is still an amount to large to be ignored or "swept under the rug" by claiming that the typical Mexican is Native American instead of what they really are, which is mixed.
The fact is that most of Mexico's population has distant cousins not just in Mexico itself, but also in Spain and in other parts of Latin America where Spaniards migrated.
There is scientific proof the very ancient ancestors of the peoples we call Native Americans and First Nation were living in Oregon and Virginia in what is the present day United States 10-11,000 years ago, which was long before Caesar conquered the "Low Countries for Rome". There are many tribal stories of tha honored ancestors who followed the track of the bison (Wild Ox) across the Beringa "bridge'. What the Spanish did was bring the buffalo and the horse from the south into the place that would be called the United States.
While DNA is still quite young there does not seem to be any indication at this point that the present day Mexican native peoples and the First Nation/Native American are related 10,000 years ago. This does not mean a race mix could not have occurred in the last 400 years. Part of the mystery is no existing written records. What may or may not exist today (pre-1660) is tribal lore and hieroglyphics.
The Algonkin Nation is one of the oldest First Nation tribes. At one time there were more than 200 clans, tribes, bands and subtribes descended from the Algonkin Nation that spread from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and from as far north as Nova Scotia(?) to as far south as the Gulf Coast. They spoke the same language although intonation and phonation was different from region to region. The written word did not come to the Nation until the 1600s when John Elliot created the Algonkin Bible using western phonics that mimicked the sounds of their language. The other written history comes from soldiers, French speaking explorers like Joliet and Marquette, historians, and perhaps from others such as Du Sable, the first French explorer in Louisiana.
This is the dumbest post I ever read. Yes, Mexicans can be full or part native americans because these originate in the Americas which include South, Central, and north america.
To be polite, I usually try to say "Northern Americas" when referring to USA and Canada. If you are specifically trying not to include Canada try to say "US citizens" and "USA". As you are often talking about cultural differences, you can almost always say "Northern American" as you don't have to exclude Canada.
Never ever say "Americano" as you can almost always substitute "norteamericano". It is particularly insulting when you say it in Spanish.
I realize that the official RAE term is "estadunidenses" but I find that extremely awkward.
People often get confused, because "Indianness" means something different in the U.S. and most of Latin America.*
In the U.S., "Indian" is an identity you can hold due to fractional amount of Native American ancestry. If you can register in a tribe, you are one (and in some cases, even if you can't). It doesn't matter if you look white. It doesn't matter if you don't speak one lick of the tribe's language. It doesn't matter if you know nearly nothing about tribal history and customs.
In contrast, in Latin America, Indianness is based upon language and culture. You might be 100% Indian, but if you move to a city, and your 100% Indian kid grows up speaking Spanish, he basically becomes mestizo. Most mestizo Mexicans have more Native American than European blood - sometimes far more. In a U.S. sense, they are more "Indian" than many tribes recognized here, like the Cherokee. Doesn't matter though, because the definition is different down there.
* The exception is Puerto Rico. Modern Puerto Ricans have more Native American ancestry than Cubans or Dominicans, but much less than most mainland Spanish-speaking groups (about the same amount as Argentines). Despite this, a large number of Puerto Ricans are rediscovering their "Taino" heritage. As the Tainos have essentially been dead to the world for 400 years now as a distinct people, the modern enthusiasts are more similar to European neo-pagans than anything, inventing a pastiche from different Native American traditions.
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Many Mexicans are white, the majority are mixed white and Native. And there is a high number of Natives in Mexico. To say they have a small percentage of native blood is ridiculuous. There is many pure blood natives that speak their native languages in Mexico. And where the hell did you get the idea there is more east asians in Mexico than natives??????????????????????????