Mexico: Creating Mixed Ethnicity Citizens for the Mestizo Nation

Abstract

The population of current Mexico reflects a long history of ethnic group mixing. Different indigenous groups of Asian origin mixed among themselves, and later with Spanish and other European populations, and to a lesser extent with African slaves and their descendants. Over the last 120 years, through a carefully planned state-building project, successive Mexican governments have tried to create a new type of citizen based on the merged qualities of this mixing, through an official set of policies eliminating racial divisions known as mestizaje, a sort of Mexican melting pot that created the ‘bronze race’. The chapter reflects on this recent history and how official ethnicity statistics tried to measure, but at the same time erase, ethno-racial boundaries and shape the ways in which Mexicans see themselves as a mixed population. Over the last two decades, new ontologies of ethnicity, racial, and cultural identities have been introduced in official statistics challenging these deeply rooted conceptions of the national self by questioning the Mestizo Nation discourse and revealing entrenched racial divisions in social life. The chapter points at new ideas for measuring mixedness and difference through creative combinations of identity dimensions, which will hopefully open up new paths on how we try to understand ourselves.