Ethnic-Racial Demography in Mexico

Mexico is a multiethnic country composed of Indigenous people—Afro-descendants (ADs), and European-descendants. Its diverse population composition reflects historical processes shaped over time: thirty thousand years of ancestral civilizations, the colonial invasion (1519–1521), the colonial period (1521–1821), witnessing the trafficking and slavery of one hundred and fifty thousand African people (1521–1829), the independence wars (1810–1821) and independent period (1821–1909), a Revolution (1910–1920), and the consolidation of the constitutional state. At the end of the nineteenth century, a long dictatorship adopted eugenics, a supremacist pseudoscience promoted by Europe and the United States, promoting miscegenation and assimilation of original peoples and African descendants through education policies. This study analyzes this historical formation from the Critical Race Theory (CRT) perspective and its concepts of structural racism and racialization to compare three population groups according to their specific demographic variations in civil status, age at marriage, number of children, family structure, and level of education. The objective is to understand how these racialized groups differ in family behavior and the intersections between demographic and household characteristics. The quantitative methodology includes demographic methods to describe the patterns and differences between ethnically racialized groups, conforming to structural and family inequalities. The results show that the demographic transition is less accelerated among Indigenous and ADs, related to their lower level of education and other socioeconomic vulnerabilities and also to fertility and family structure and composition, leading to the need for support for the racialized women and elderly in the next decades and multigenerational families. Conclusions show the need for specific affirmative policies oriented to support families of Indigenous and ADs.