Mexicans of European descent officially in force through the rest of the colonial period. Criollo resentment of the privileges afforded to the "Peninsulares" was the main reason behind the Mexican War of Independence. When the war ended in 1821, the new Mexican government expelled the peninsulares (approximately 10,000 – 20,000 people) in the 1820s and 1830s which at a degree, kept the European ethnicity from growing as a percentage; this expulsion however, did not lead to any permanent ban on European immigrants, even from Spain. Independence did not do away with economic and social privilege based on race as the Criollos took over those
Eric Van Young Eric Van Young Eric Van Young, Distinguished Professor of History at University of California, San Diego, is an American historian of Mexico who has published extensively on socioeconomic and political history of the colonial era and the nineteenth century. He is particularly well known for his 2001 book, "The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1821", which won a major prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History. His article "The Islands in the Storm: Quiet Cities and Violent Countrysides in the Mexican Independence Era," published in "Past and Present" won the Conference on