US Hispanic Racial Dynamics

This is an update to an earlier post, The Racial Makeup of Hispanics. For background on the issue, please refer to the previous post.

This post will mostly deal with Hispanics in California, because that is where I live.

In the previous post, we noted that Hispanics seemed to be getting darker (more Indian and Black and less White) with time in California and the Southwest. The first study, done in the early 80's in San Diego, showed CA Chicanos to be 68% White, 30% Indian and 2% Black.

The second study, done in 1998, that show Arizona Chicanos were 57% White, 39% Indian and 4% Black. That figure is about the same as for California 14 years prior. This is because the Mexicans who go to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have traditionally been lighter than the ones who come to California.

We now have a new study showing that by the year 2000, California Hispanics (overwhelmingly Mexicans and Chicanos) have become much darker over 16 years. The new study includes two surveys - one shows CA Hispanics at 46% White, 43% Indian and 11% Black, while the other shows them at 48% White, 38% Indian and 13% Black. Taken together, the studies show CA Hispanics at 47% White, 40.5% Indian and 12% Black.

CA Hispanics

   White  Indian  Black
              
1984    68     30      2
2000    47     40.5    12

Two new studies were reported in the Southwest US as a whole from 2000. The first found admixture of 64% White and 36% Indian and the second found 66% White and 34% Indian. Another study of the border county of Starr County, Texas (97% Mexican) showed the typical Southwestern mix of 65% White, 35% Indian. No Black DNA was found in any of these studies.

The combined total for the three studies was 65% White and 35% Indian. This is about along the lines with what previous studies had found.

Studies of Hispanic admixture in California, Nevada and the US Southwest represented as pie charts. All charts are from a recent study done in 2000.

What this indicates in that the Chicanos and Mexicans in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado are much Whiter, less Indian and dramatically less Black than those in California. This may be because of California's huge agricultural crops that attract many largely-Indian Mexicans from Guerrero and Oaxaca.

There is evidence that in general, the flow of Mexican immigrants to the US is the same as it has always been - they are coming from the same states as they have always come from:

In general, therefore, we do not find a "changing profile" of Mexican migrants during the 1980s. Rather, despite a few changes, we perceive a remarkable continuity in trends and patterns.

Maintaining a pattern that dates back at least to the 1940s and perhaps even to 1900, recent outflows continue to be dominated by migrants from a handful of western states: principally Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, and to a lesser extent Durango, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas.

Together these six states have consistently accounted for about half of all Mexico-U.S. migrants, with the border states comprising another 30 percent and the central states making up the remaining 20 percent. Over time, emigration has also become less selective with respect to education, suggesting that the outflow has increasingly been one of the rural and urban poor, predominantly from the western states.

Most Mexican immigrants continue to come from the Northern, North-Central and the West-Central part of the country, traditionally Mestizo areas. Look at these pics of Tejano singers whose ancestors came from those places.

Chihuahua in Northern Mexico has traditionally sent many immigrants to the US. Check out these photos of Chihuahua hotties and see how they are a lot more White than Indian. This phenotype is so common in my town that it is almost ubiquitous.

A typical Mexican-American in the US. They have, in general, a light brown skin color that is well within the range of Mediterranean White populations. Mexicans in Mexico tend to be much darker due to less White admixture (but it varies by region - see below). Mexican-Americans who have been in the US for longer tend to be Whiter, while recent immigrants tend to be more Indian.

Once again, to reiterate, 50% of Mexico's historic immigration has come from the more Euro-Mestizo (Zacatecas is actually the most Mestizo state in Mexico - it has almost no Whites or Indians) rural areas of Jalisco, Zacatecas, Sinaloa, Guanajuato, Michoacan, San Luis Potosi and Durango. These states are Western Mexico or North-Central Mexico.

The border states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Leon and Coahuila have traditionally made up 30% of Mexico's immigration. Mexicans in these states are some of the Whitest (Mestizos) in all Mexico.

The reason that those states are Whiter is because they had fewer Amerindians from the very start.

Admixture studies from Mexico as a whole. The only areas with majority-White genes in this chart are in Nuevo Leon, Jalisco and Mexico City. All of these areas also have negligible to zero Black genes. The other areas are generally mostly-Indian or plurality-Indian, except in Veracruz, where Indian and White constitute the largest groups, followed closely by Blacks. In Veracruz, Mexico State, Campeche and Tabasco, there is a substantial Black element totalling around 15-25%.

Combined totals of the three heavily Cuban (and Venezuelan and Nicaraguan upper class in Florida) areas of Florida, New Jersey and the SE US show a population that is 83% White, 10% Indian and 7% Black. This indicates that Hispanics in this area are de facto mostly-White people, though they are mixed race.

Hispanics in Pennsylvania are 83% White and 13% Black, with no Indian. There is a good guess that these are mostly Puerto Ricans and possibly Dominicans.

The Hispanic population of Virginia is hard to characterize - it is 64% White, 21% Indian and 15% Black. There are many Salvadorans in this state, but that does not sound like a Salvadoran racial mix - Salvadorans have little to no Black in them. This group is probably mixed Salvadoran, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Mexican.

All told, the total on the East Coast is 79% White, 10% Indian and 11% Black. The Hispanics on the East Coast are clearly an overwhelmingly-White group of mixed race persons.

Let us look at these figures as a chart:

US Hispanics

         White  Indian  Black

East Coast    79     10      11
Southwest     65     35      0
California    47     40.5    12

Hispanics on the East Coast and in the US Southwest are to this day a mostly-White ethnic group, despite the fevered blatherings of White nationalists.

This can no longer be said about California's Hispanics. California's Hispanic population is now the least White, the most Indian and the most Black of any major region in the US, and it has become much less White, more Indian and dramatically more Black in the past few decades.

References

Peterson, B.L., Su, B. and Chakraborty, R. et al. 2000. World population data for the HLA-DQA1, PM® and D1S80 loci with least and most common profile frequencies for combinations of loci estimated following NRC II guidelines. J. Forensic Sci. 45:118–146.

Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.