Seriously, I’ve been called an ILLEGAL for being from a Spanish-speaking country and coming to the U.S. with paperwork. Also, my friend’s weird dad saw my name on a social media account when my friend was texting me and he said I was a “typical Mexican”. I am a white European Spanish woman, why do people assume I’m automatically Mexican?
I’m going to go against the grain and point out that these types of people generally live in areas where there are very few foreigners. The closest country with Spanish as their native language is Mexico. Given the lack of diverse exposure to people of different backgrounds, you can see whymany might default to Spanish speakers = Mexicans. That said, they are also likely to be undereducated as well…
It’s a mental shortcut, and people in general just love using those.
BTW, is it usually correct though? If at least 50% of the Spanish speakers actually are Mexican, it could justify the existence of this shortcut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Americans (which is citing https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2022.B03001?q=B03001)
In the US, yeah, you are more likely to speak to a Mexican than any other hispanic Spanish speaker.
Mental shortcut to me is the easiest thing to look at.
It’s super easy to just default to something. It requires no thought, introspection, etc. Just a simple, quick answer that may or may not be right but you wouldn’t care.
So much of modern life is people defaulting to a lazy, easy option.
Not just modern life, but ancient too. The human mind is just full of these shortcuts, and on average, they have served the species well.