page_title: White Mexicans
section_title: 1793 census
hierarchical_section_title: White Mexicans / Official censuses / 1793 census
context_page_description: White Mexicans are Mexican citizens who are considered white, typically due to European or Middle Eastern descent. While the Mexican government does conduct ethnic censuses in which a Mexican has the option of identifying as "White" the results obtained from these censuses are not published. What Mexico's government publishes instead is the percentage of "light-skinned Mexicans" there are in the country, with it being 47% in 2010 and 49% in 2017. Due to its less directly racial undertones, the term "Light-skinned Mexican" has been favored by the government and media outlets over "White Mexican" as the go-to choice to refer to the segment of Mexico's population who possess European physical traits when discussing different ethno-racial dynamics in Mexico's society. Nonetheless, sometimes "White Mexican" is used.
  Estimates of Mexico's white population differ greatly in both methodology and percentages given; unofficial sources such as the World Factbook and Encyclopædia Britannica, which use the 1921 census results as the base of their estimations, calculate the White Mexican population as only 9% or between one tenth to one fifth of the population.
context_section_description: Also known as the "Revillagigedo census" due to its creation being ordered by the Count of the same name, this census was Mexico's (then known as the Viceroyalty of New Spain) first ever nationwide population census. Most of its original datasets have reportedly been lost; thus most of what is known about it nowadays comes from essays and field investigations made by academics who had access to the census data and used it as reference for their works such as Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt. Each author gives different estimations for each racial group in the country, although they don't vary much, with Europeans ranging from 18% to 22% of New Spain's population, Mestizos ranging from 21% to 25%, Indians ranging from 51% to 61% and Africans being between 6,000 and 10,000, The estimations given for the total population range from 3,799,561 to 6,122,354. It is concluded then, that across nearly three centuries of colonization, the population growth trends of whites and mestizos were even, while the total percentage of the indigenous population decreased at a rate of 13%-17% per century. The authors assert that rather than whites and mestizos having higher birthrates, the reason for the indigenous population's numbers decreasing lies on them suffering of higher mortality rates, due living in remote locations rather than on cities and towns founded by the Spanish colonists or being at war with them. It is also for these reasons that the number of Indigenous Mexicans presents the greater variation range between publications, as in cases their numbers in a given location were estimated rather than counted, leading to possible overestimations in some provinces and possible underestimations in others.
  ~Europeans are included within the Mestizo category.
  Regardless of the possible imprecisions related to the counting of Indigenous peoples living outside of the colonized areas, the effort that New Spain's authorities put on considering them as subjects is worth mentioning, as censuses made by other colonial or post-colonial countries did not consider American Indians to be citizens/subjects, as example the censuses made by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata would only count the inhabitants of the colonized settlements. Other example would be the censuses made by the United States, that did not include Indigenous peoples living among the general population until 1860, and indigenous peoples as a whole until 1900.
caption: New Spain in 1819 with the boundaries established at the Adams-Onís Treaty