IIRC from some Mexican history books Mexico had a greater amount of mestizajeintermarrying over several generations between indigenous and immigrant groups than most or all ? other Latin American nations , leading to a large percentage I think a clear majority of Mexicans having both indigenous and European immigrant ancestry . If my memory is working , Octavio Paz said something like Mexicans have two souls . When I lived in the south central region a while back , it struck me both how much racism there was it was quite pervasive , and was mixed with classism , and how very different its flavor was , in most cases , to the racism in the US . I concluded rightly or wrongly that it couldn ' t be the same kind of falsecategorization thing we all seem to believe in here in the US , because most Mexicans are partly the race they discriminate against . It would be as if , I don ' t know , 80 % of US citizens has at least one black grandparent or greatgrandparent .