Mexican Culture and People

Today, indigenous peoples make up approximately 30 percent of the Mexican population, and people of European ancestry, primarily Spanish, make up about nine percent of the population. About two percent of all Mexicans are immigrants from abroad.

Africans contributed to the original racial mixture when approximately 120,000 slaves were brought to the region between 1519 and 1650. By the end of the colonial period, as many as 200,000 Africans may have entered New Spain. Black Mexicans intermarried with Native Americans and mestizos and live on both the west and east coasts.

The vast majority of Mexicans - about 90 percent - are Catholic. During the colonial era, many Native Americans and mestizos adopted the Spanish language, and were converted to Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Spanish colonizers. Mexican culture is a fascinating blend of Native American traditions and Spanish colonial influences.

As many as 100 Native American languages are still spoken in Mexico, but no single alternative language prevails. Eighty percent of those Mexicans who speak an indigenous language also speak Spanish. Mexico has produced numerous writers, essayists, and poets of international renown, including Octavio Paz, who in 1990 became the first Mexican to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Carlos Fuentes is another Mexican writer whose fiction is widely read in Europe and the United States. The Mexican Revolution was instrumental in fostering a new sense of nationalism and experimentation Mexican popular music, in the form of ballads and sidewalk performances, has contributed significantly to popular music in the United States.