Crossing into Mestizaje? Interethnic Households and Intergenerational Ethnic Identification in Ecuador

Official statistics treat ethnic self-identification as a fixed trait. This study examines which youths do not reproduce the ethnic category of their household of origin and instead identify as mestizo, the unmarked category of Ecuador’s national ideology of mestizaje. Using the 2025 Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, Desempleo y Subempleo (ENEMDU; National Survey of Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment), we link youths aged 18–29 who reside with a non-mestizo household head and with the head’s spouse, so that the categories of both coresident parental figures are observed (n = 3960), and estimate survey-weighted logit models with complex-design inference. Living in an interethnic household is the strongest correlate of mestizo identification, with an average marginal effect of 31.93 percentage points. Most of this association is attributable to transmission: 88.1% of interethnic households include a mestizo spouse, and 86.8% of their youths identify as mestizo. In interethnic households where neither parental figure is mestizo, 39.3% of youths identify as mestizo, a figure that falls to 8.0% in homogeneous households; this reclassification, however, is not evident among the minority of youths who answered the survey question themselves, most of whom also reported their parents’ categories. Youths follow a mestizo mother more often than a mestizo father (89.2% versus 69.2%). Socioeconomic status does not jointly predict reclassification. Declared ethnic identification is therefore a porous measure: the population that declares a category does not coincide with the population that shares it by family origin.