Native American ǀ American Indian
Photo: Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico since 2018, with Native American ancestry through his paternal grandparents.
In Mexico, the term Mestizo (lit. mixed) is used to refer to an ethnic group that can be defined by different criteria, namely a cultural criterion (the language spoken) or a stricter biological criterion. Because of this, estimates of the number of Mestizos in Mexico do vary. Mexicans from the Northeastern part of the country across the border from Texas are generally considered Mestizo. They come from backgrounds combining European Spanish, Amerindian or Indio and African admixture. Autosomal DNA studies agree that there is a significant genetic variation depending on the region analyzed, with southern Mexico having prevalent Amerindian and small but higher than average African genetic contributions, the central region of Mexico showing a balance between Amerindian and European components, and the latter gradually increasing as one travels northwards and westwards, where European ancestry becomes the majority of the genetic contribution up until cities located at the Mexico-United States border, where studies suggest there is a significant resurgence of Amerindian and African admixture.
Mexican – Northeastern – Mestizo represents 143 unrelated individuals from Northeastern Mexico made up of mainly Mestizo populations who were sampled in 2002 by Universities in Mexico and the United States.
Source publication: Maximum Likelihood Estimates of Admixture in Northeastern Mexico Using 13 Short Tandem Repeat Loci, American Journal of Human Biology, 2002, 14, p429-439.
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