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Latin American & Latinx/e/a/o Studies

Mexican Americans

Mexican Americans (also known as Chicanos and Chicanas) are one of the oldest population groups in the United States, and simultaneously one of the newest as a result of ongoing immigration from Mexico. Indeed, the immigration of Mexicans into the United States is considered the longest sustained migration of labor anywhere in the world. The 2005 mid-decade census counted 42 million Hispanics in the United States, representing 14.5 percent of the national population. Mexican Americans represent 64 percent of the total Hispanic American population, or 27 million people.

The historical background of Mexican Americans is complex due to the mixed heritage that was forged through mestizaje, or the process that fused Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Asians biologically and culturally during three hundred years of colonialism in the Americas. The indigenous background of Mexican Americans includes numerous groups from the Mexica (Aztecs), Maya, and Tarahumara, as well as many of the indigenous populations of the American Southwest. Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, indigenous groups created magnificent societies that ranged from the Pueblos of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest to the Mayan culture of southern Mexico. This diversity created for Mexican Americans a multilayered identity based primarily on Spanish and indigenous culture.

Source: "Mexican Americans." In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 119-126. Vol. 5. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. Gale eBooks (accessed February 23, 2023). 

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