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Mexican American in the United States

What does it mean to be Mexican-American?

More than 30 million Americans trace their roots back to Mexico – but what does it mean to be Mexican-American?

Mexican Americans are Americans of Mexican descent.  As of July 2009, Mexican Americans make up 10.3% of the United States’ population with over 31,689,000 Americans listed as of Mexican ancestry. Mexican Americans comprise 66% of allHispanics and Latinos in the United States.  The United States is home to the second largest Mexican community in the world second only to Mexico itself comprising nearly 22% of the entire Mexican origin population of the world. Canada is a distant third with a Mexican origin population of 37,000 as of 2001 although increasing to 61,505 as of 2006.

In addition, as of 2008 there were approximately 7,000,000 undocumented Mexicans living in the United States which if included in the count would increase the US share to over 28% of the world’s Mexican origin population (Note that some of the undocumented would be captured in the US Census count depending on their willingness to provide information).   Most Mexican Americans are the descendants of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and/orEuropeans,especially, Spaniards.

Mexican American history is wide-ranging, spanning more than 400 years and varying from region to region within the United States. In 1900, there were slightly more than 500,000 Hispanics living in New Mexico, California and Texas.  Most were Mexican Americans of indigenous Mexican, Spanish, and other hispanicized European settlers who arrived in the Southwest during Spanish colonial times. Approximately ten percent of the current Mexican American population can trace their lineage back to these early colonial settlers.

As early as 1813 some of the Tejanos who colonized Texas in the Spanish Colonial Period established a government in Texas that looked forward to independence from Mexico. In those days, there was no concept of what a Mexican was. Many Mexicans were more loyal to their states/provinces than to their country as a whole. This was particularly true in frontier regions such as ZacatecasTexasYucatanOaxaca,New Mexico, etc.   As revealed by the writings of colonial Tejano Texians such as Antonio Menchaca, the Texas Revolution was initially a colonial Tejano cause.

Adaptation of Mexican food tailored for the mainstream American market usually is very different than Mexican food typically served in Mexico itself.

By 1831, Anglo settlers outnumbered Tejanos ten to one in Texas.  The Mexican government became concerned by their increasing numbers and restricted the number of new Anglo-American settlers allowed to enter Texas. The Mexican government also banned slavery within the state, which angered slave owners.  The American settlers along with many of the Tejanos rebelled against the centralized authority of Mexico City and the Santa Anna regime, while others remained loyal to Mexico, and still others were neutral.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_American

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