Mexico wasn't called Mexico, it was split up into several different regions by tribe. I am talking about what America did, which was based on racism. The racism started in Europe, where the first Racial classifications were made up in the 1700's.
" The concept of race is one of the most problematic legacies of the Enlightenment. Most existing historiography on this concept frames its subject by two discontinuities. At the beginning of the story, we have the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by the publication of the book
Systema naturae in 1735, in which the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus proposed a classification of humankind into four distinct races. At its end stands the demise of race as a viable biological concept after World War II in favor of population-genetic conceptions of human diversity, again prominently marked by the UNESCO Statement on Race issued in 1950."
The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: The invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (1735); and the demise of racial typologies after WWII in favor of ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov