Social Stratification in Mexico

In a recent ASR article (2010), Andres Villarreal (hereafter AV) presents evidence of dramatic skin color stratification and indigenous disadvantage in contemporary Mexico based on the 2006 MIT Mexico Panel Study. AV uses regression models to predict educational attainment, occupational status and household income for Mexicans by ethnicity and according to three skin color categories. He finds that the darkest skin tone individuals have the lowest socioeconomic status followed by those with intermediate skin colors on all these outcomes, even after controlling for individual characteristics. AV does us an important service by drawing our attention to the role of skin color in Mexican social stratification, which has generally been denied or overlooked. However, we argue that AV overstates the effects of skin color on class in Mexican society because he ignores class origins, he uses a highly subjective skin color indicator that is itself affected by class, and he misidentifies indigenous ethnicity. In this comment, we find general support for AV’s conclusions about the effect of skin color in the Mexican stratification system, especially in educational attainment, but class origins are a more dominant factor in Mexican social stratification and they explain some of the apparent skin color differences that AV found. By controlling for class origins and by using more accurate measures of color and indigenous ethnicity, we discover that the magnitude of indigenous and skin color disadvantage is smaller than AV finds in the case of educational attainment. Class origins and educationi largely explain color differences in occupational status while color and indigenous identity have virtually no effect. We have sought to replicate AV’s analysis on most variables since we believe it is excellent methodologically, except that we use innovative and new data that better capture color, indigenous ethnicity, and class origins. We show that the rest of our coefficients are very similar to those in a model that replicates the same variables used in one of AV’s models, suggesting that our data, variables and statistical methods closely match his. We realize that the shortcomings we find for AV are mostly due to his use of a data set that was not designed for this end.