Skin Color and Social Mobility

Moving up the ladder? How skin color influences social mobility in Mexico

by Andrés Nigenda

In Mexico, there is pervasive social stratification by skin color. Lightest-skinned Mexicans have, on average, 1.5 additional years of schooling and earn 53% more per hour than their darkest-skinned peers.^/1 This stratification is also persistent over time: social mobility for darker skinned Mexicans is reduced when compared to their lighter skinned peers. These inequities are accentuated for some and attenuated for others given other sociodemographic characteristics.

This project explores different dimensions of social mobility for Mexicans aged 25 to 64 in 2016 using data from Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). INEGI's 2016 Module on Intergenerational Social Mobility (MMSI)^/2 lets us compare an individual's perception of their current socioeconomic status with that at age 14. Although in this context, socioeconomic status is a subjective measure of an individual's economic and social position in regard to others, it provides the unique opportunity to investigate whether Mexicans face significant barriers to social mobility given their skin color.

The MMSI also provides information on self-perceived skin color using Princeton's Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA) scale, which assigns skin color according to an eleven color palette.^/3All of the visualizations in this project follow this scale, where a value of 1 corresponds to the darkest skin color, and a value of 11 to the lightest skin color as follows:

This scrollytelling explores social mobility by skin color through social mobility matrices. On each matrix, a square represents a bucket of mobility in which people perceive themselves to have a certain socioeconomic level given their level at age 14. Each bucket is colored with the average skin color of the people that land on it.^/4 The upper diagonal of a matrix represents buckets with upward social mobility whereas the lower diagonal (under the purple steps) represents buckets with static or downward social mobility. Hover over each bucket to reveal a tooltip with bucket-specific information on the average skin tone, the total population and the population as a proportion of all buckets.

For example, in 2016, 0.11% of all Mexicans perceived themselves to be at the highest socioeconomic level possible given that they were at the lowest one at age 14. The average skin color of this subset of the population was 7.79, which corresponds to color number 8 on the palette.

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All Mexicans

The lighter your skin color, the more likely you are to be better off, or at least not worse off than when you were 14 years old

If we look at all Mexicans aged 25 to 64, we can notice two things. First, the bucket with the highest socioeconomic mobility has a lighter average skin color than the bucket with the highest downward mobility. Second, buckets in the upper part of the matrix (buckets with higher upward mobility and lower downward mobility) have a skin color that is, on average, lighter than the ones on the bottom half.

Mexican Women

Social mobility for darker-skinned women is lower than for their lighter-skinned peers

The overwhelming majority of higher upward mobility and lower downward mobility buckets are lighter skinned on average. That is, if you are a Mexican woman that was born with a darker skin color, not only are you more likely to not go up the ladder of social mobility when compared to your lighter-skinned peers, but you are also more likely to have a lower socioeconomic level, and stay there.

Afromexicans

Afromexicans have a very reduced spectrum of upward mobility

According to the latest inter-census survey, 1.2% of Mexico's population identifies as afro-descendants.^/5

Given the previous patterns that we have observed, it is not surprising to see that even among Afromexicans, lighter-skinned Afromexicans have better mobility outcomes than darker-skinned ones. Even worse, there are noticeable gaps in the higher upward mobility buckets.

Rich Mexicans

Mexicans with the highest socioeconomic status are lighter-skinned

In addition to perceived socioeconomic status, the MMSI survey classifies dwellings into four strata according to specific census characteristics.

Mexicans at the highest socioeconomic stratum are whiter than the average Mexican. Notice how the bin with the highest mobility in this stratum, where individuals went from having the lowest perceived socioeconomic level at age 14 to the highest current level, had an average skin color of 9.39 out of 11, where 11 is the lightest possible skin color.

Notes

/1 Campos-Vazquez, R.M., Medina-Cortina, E.M. Skin Color and Social Mobility: Evidence From Mexico. Demography 56, 321–343 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0734-z

/4 The average is rounded up or down at two decimals

/6 According to the census stratification