Mexican-American

Mexican Americans

Total population
35,797,080 11.14% of total U.S. population, 2015
Regions with significant populations
Southwest, West Coast, and Chicago area; there are also emerging populations in the South, Upper Midwest and Northeast.
Languages
Spanish, English, Low German (Plautdietsch) and a minority of Indigenous Mexican languages.
Religion
Predominantly Roman Catholic; also Protestant, Anabaptist, indigenous beliefs
Related ethnic groups
Other Mexican diaspora

Mexican Americans (Spanish: mexico-americanos or estadounidenses de origen mexicano) are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. As of July 2015, Mexican Americans made up 11.1% of the United States' population, as 35.8 million U.S. residents identified as being of full or partial Mexican ancestry. As of July 2015, Mexican Americans comprised 63.4% of all Hispanics 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, and comprising more than 24% of the entire Mexican-origin population of the world. Canada is a distant third, with a small Mexican Canadian population of 96,055 (0.3% of the population) as of 2011.

Over 60% of all Mexican Americans reside in the states of California and Texas. In 2015, the United States admitted 157,227 Mexican immigrants, and as of November 2016, 1.31 million Mexicans were on the waiting list to immigrate to the United States through legal means.

Communities of Spanish-speaking Tejanos, Nuevomexicanos, Californios and Mission Indians have existed in the American southwest since the area was part of New Spain's Provincias Internas. The majority of these historically Hispanophone populations eventually adopted English as their first language as part of their overall Americanization.

Mexican-American history spans more than 400 years and varies from region to region within the United States. In 1900, there were slightly more than 500,000 Hispanics of Mexican descent living in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, California and Texas. Most were Mexican Americans of Spanish descent and other Hispanicized European settlers who settled in the Southwest during Spanish colonial times, as well as local and Mexican Indians. Approximately ten percent of the current Mexican-American population are descended from the early colonial settlers; their families claim hundreds of years' residency in the country.

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Wikipedia