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nydus/Anahuac: Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and ModernPublic
Page 353 of 425
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CHAPTER XI. PUEBLA. NOPALUCÁN. ORIZABA. POTRERO.

husbands, liking their liveliness and good humour better than the quieter ways of their own countrymen. Even Europeans settled in Mexico sometimes take wives of negro blood.

I have never noticed in any country so large a number of mixed races, whose parentage is indicated by their features and complexion. In Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent. In America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race, distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer gives in his work on Mexico, such as mulatto, mestizo, zambo, chino, and so forth. Here all the brown Mexican Indians are taken as one race, and the Red Indians of the frontier-states are not included at all. If we come to dividing out the various tribes which have been or still are existing in the country, we can count over a hundred and fifty, with from fifty to a hundred distinct languages among them.

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