Friday, September 08, 2006

Mexican Americans are not mostly Amerindian   posted by Razib @ 9/08/2006 10:15:00 PM
Share/Bookmark

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he mentioned Mexican Latinos being Amerindian. I have looked up data on this before and I recalled Mexican Americans being about 50/50 in most of the surveys (averaged out). The genetical data and historical literature seems to imply male Iberian ancestors and female Amerindian ancestors. I pointed out to my friend that there is a problematic bias in who he classifies as "Latino" as he walks down the street: white Latinos are not Latino until you know their name, while more Amerindian looking Latinos are Latinos simply via visual inspection. In other words, there is a bias among Latinos you don't know to simply pick out the more Amerindian ones within a given family, so Latinos are naturally more Amerindian looking to most people. I myself noticed this when I observed that some family members within a group of related Latinos I would have assumed were white if I had not seen them in the context of their near kin (some of whom looked Amerindian, and most who looked mixed). An idiotic brown reader (a Kashmiri pandit who fancied himself white despite his no doubt sand niggerish Persian appearance) offered that of course Mexican Americans were mostly Amerindian, look at Cheech Marin. Now, this goes to show that not only white people are guilty of not being able to tell different peoples apart, Cheech Marin has a prominent mustache in many photos. No matter what you assess in regard to his overall phenotype, when was the last time you saw a mustache in a fully unadmixed Amerindian??? The reader was clearly an unreflective moron, but then, so are many GNXP readers as over the years (I'm talking over all 4 years of this blog) individuals have claimed over & over that American Latinos are mostly Amerindian. At which point I double-check PUBMED, make a cite, and that's that (taking all of 30 seconds). But I'm tired of this.

Before one can have a discussion one must have some familiarity with the facts. Steve points me to these two neat charts (cite):




Here are the individual data points....


My hunch is that the Colorado sample of Mexican Americans is a little whiter than average, but, that still doesn't mean that I believe American Latinos (Mexican Americans) are predominantly Amerindian. The reality is that a disproportionate number are from the northern, more European, states of Mexico. So on a priori grounds we would expect that Mexican Americans would be whiter than the average Mexican, and the large indigenous minority has begun to emigrate only within the last few decades to this country.

Why is this important? Because people keep saying on the comment boards that Mexican Americans are predominantly Amerindian, and that doesn't seem to be true. They are a hybrid population. Houses collapse on a foundation of lies.