Latin America
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Colonialism and the co-evolution of ethnic and genetic structure in New Mexico
Colonialism and the co-evolution of ethnic and genetic structure in New Mexico
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31930496
2.2 | Materials
In semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 25 NMS, and in consultation with community leaders and social scientists who work in New Mexico, we identified seven ethnic terms that NMS commonly use to describe themselves: Chicanx (“x” denotes the gender forms that were used by study participants, for example, Chicano and Chicana), Hispanic, Latinx, Nuevomexicanx, Mexican American, Mexican, and Spanish (Healy et al., 2018; Hunley et al., 2018). We then conducted structured face-to-face interviews with 507 NMS. Interviews took place at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Thirty-two percent of New Mexicans reside in Albuquerque, and the city is representative of the state with respect to age, education, income, English and Spanish language use, race, and ethnicity (US Census Bureau, 2016). Participants were recruited through printed mailers and advertisements on the University of New Mexico campus, public libraries, community centers, and non-profit organizations. Recruitment materials asked for volunteers who self-identified as New Mexican of Spanish-speaking descent. Though we did not exclude Native American individuals from participating, only one individual identified as “Native” in an open-ended question asked prior to showing participants the list of seven terms. We added “Other” to the list of terms and asked participants to choose the terms they used to describe themselves in order of salience in their everyday lives. Participants were permitted to choose and rank multiple terms. We also asked participants to choose the term that their mothers and fathers would use to describe themselves (“Which group do you think your mother/father belongs to?”). During the interviews, we collected mouthwash samples from which we extracted DNA and genotyped 291,917 autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (Illumina HumanCytoSNP-12 DNA Analysis BeadChip Kit). The SNPs were also typed in 40 Native American, 54 European, and 40 Sub-Saharan African individuals from the HGDP-CEPH (Cann et al., 2002) (Table 2). To determine whether beliefs about connections to past ancestors, as represented by ethnic terms used by NMS today, reflect the actual history of regional migrations and isolation, as ascertained from genomic data, we conducted the following analyses.
Among groups, average European ancestry ranged from a low of 0.595 for the Mexican American group to a high of 0.744 for the Nuevomexicanx group. Average Native American ancestry ranged from 0.242 (Nuevomexicanx) to 0.368 (Mexican American), and average African ancestry ranged from 0.013 (Spanish) to 0.036 (Mexican American). The bottom row of Figure 1 shows heat maps of the pvalues for the Wilcoxon tests comparing ancestry between each pair of NMS groups, highlighting only the values that fell below 0.05. NMS who identified as Mexican American had significantly higher African and Native American ancestry and lower European ancestry than NMS who identified using all other terms except Mexican (Wilcoxon test, p < .002). The pattern of significance was similar for NMS who identified as Mexican, though only the Mexican-Nuevomexicanx and Mexican-Spanish comparisons were significant at the multiple-test adjusted threshold. Diamond-shaped points in the violin plots in Figure 1 show ancestry estimates for individuals who identified their parents as non-NMS. Eighteen NMS identified their mother as non-NMS, using terms such as Anglo, Caucasian, French, and Irish. These NMS identified themselves as Chicanx (n = 3), Hispanic (n = 4), Nuevomexicanx (n = 6), Other (n = 2), and Spanish (n = 3). The European ancestry for these NMS (mean = 0.853) was higher than it was for any of the NMS ethnic groups, and the Native American ancestry (mean = 0.142) was lower (see Table S1). Seventeen NMS identified their father as non-NMS, using terms like Anglo, Gringo, English, and Italian. These NMS identified themselves as Hispanic (n = 8), Nuevomexicanx
(n = 5), Other (n = 2), and Spanish (n = 2). They also had relatively high European ancestry (mean = 0.838) and low Native American ancestry (mean = 0.156). These results indicate that there is ongoing gene flow into NMS from non-NMS individuals who are of European descent.
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Originally Posted by Erronkari
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