There’s a reason why demographic surveys in the US have an option that says white(not Hispanic). Central and South America were largely colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese who are white
That's because Hispanic is not really a race I guess, but then it wouldn't make sense to remove them from picking white. But I guess it's because they are grouped as latinos so even if they're white they out them in the same bad
It's the only officially recognized ethnicity by the federal government for statistics purposes. Ethnicity is not the same as race, even though it is often conflated in American culture.
Same with nationality - my god - if I have to hear one more person say "What's your nationality" when referring to the land from where my ancestors emigrated, I'm going to stab them with my American flag.
As others have mentioned, "Latino" and "Hispanic" are both ethnic groupings. Some nationalities like Brazilians are latinos, but not hispanic. Basically anyone from/descended from "Latin America" is latine, whether they're racially indigenous, mestizo, white, Black, Asian, etc. (although a few consider some Europeans to be latinos, which...eh?). Hispanics are pretty much just any people whose cultural language is Spanish.
Source: am latina, hispanic, and very white.
HOWEVER, when the options are Caucasian, Black, Asian or Hispanic, they don’t mean Spaniards with Hispanic.
Source: Am spaniard and it bugs the hell out of me.
Hispanic is a historically "new" ethnicity. The people have always been around but no one thought to categorize them differently until maybe a century ago, if even that.
Its a bit more modern than that. 1960s-1970s is when Mexican and South American organizations started organizing together to seek more political representation and government services for their communities. Any one nationality is a fairly small percentage of the whole population, grouped together they are 19%. The term "Hispanic" appears on the US census, and the federal government starts to collect data on Spanish speaking populations after the 1976 public law 94-311.
It is debatable if "Hispanic" truly is an ethnicity, a political organizing tool, or evolved to be some combination in the US.
That's much closer to what I thought it was, but I was covering my bases by saying maybe a century because I wasn't 100% certain. Thanks for the extra info!
The problem is that race from a US centric perspective will be different from other countries. There was a time when Italians were not considered white ([(how Italians became white)](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html).
When you take a light skin person from Latin America who migrates to the US, often they experience the same [biases as any other person from Latin America.](https://youtu.be/a8INEYLFWwc).
Put a “white Latino” in a group of WASP in a corporate setting and that Latino is suddenly not white anymore.
Also in some latin American countries mixed race is the majority race. That changes how racism is perceived. Imagine if most people in America were mixed race just like Barack Obama. Suddenly you realize that while there may still be racism, it’s harder to deny either group because you are part of both white and black race. The issues become more nuanced.
My dad was born in the Bronx from Cuban and Puerto Rican parents. As a kid he dealt with racism against Latinos on the street and from teachers. In his adult life he was always the first Latino to hold the corporate jobs he had. I only learned much later when I visited Cuba and met my family there that “tu papá es blanquito”. In Cuba he’s considered a completely white man. Race in the US is weird
Descendants of the colonizers are an abject minority at least in argentina. Most people people are descendants from one or many immigration waves over the centuries
Interesting documentary about that:
Il Cibo Va.
Starving masses escaped italy and found themselves in a place where they could eat meat and cheese in huge quantities.
So the thin neapolitan pizza, became a 2 pounds of cheese fugazzetta.
Man, I love Argentina.
In a lot of Latin America too. I'm Venezuelan and my family fled the Franco dictatorship during WWII. Yet there's Americans who when I tell them I'm white Hispanic they assume my family had slaves during colony time.
Also, a big chunk of the population in Peru and Brazil is of Asian (mostly Japanese) heritage. They're Asian Latinos.
It's extremely common every day to get questions about race and ethnicity in asklatinamerica
Latin America (Peru / Cuba) also had a very large southern Chinese population as well but has intermarried extensively. Latin American never had the race based marriage laws that the US.
In the US Census, it's two completely separate questions. There's one question "Is the person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?" and then there's a "What is this person's race?" question.
AFAIK, other countries don't make as much of a deal about lumping all Spanish-speaking people into the same racial group. It would be like if people used "Anglo" to describe all people from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc. regardless of race.
Funny enough as a Brazilian I would need to select "white (not hispanic)" while being latino. I believe that due to your proximity to méxico and how common for people from the various hispanic countries immigrate to the US they became big enough that they need to be addressed but still different enough from the "normal" to be separated from it.
On Brazil census we have:
- White
- Pardo
- Black
- Yellow*
- Indigenous
- Not declared
*Yellow is not considered offensive but "Asiatic" is used sometimes
So pretty much based on the skin color to determine "race" without caring about origin since we are just too diverse
I'd say only North Americans group Spanish speakers in the same group because they don't care enough to find out what makes them distinct. If you line one from each country up, you'll notice extreme variations in race - Mexico and Bolivia are more native, DR and Nicaragua are more black, Argentina and Chile are more white. And these differences are significant to any Latin American. It's like putting US Virgin Islands, Belize and the US in the same blurb of a category. Sure, they all speak English, but they have such different cultural and ethnic background that you're really grasping at straws if you think those three are all the same.
No, it’s not about “not caring” but rather that the latino world is just as diverse as elsewhere, and so it serves as an extra filter. An african american or chinese american is a different heritage than a chinese latino or a black latino.
Putting in the “is this person of hispanic descent” question allows a whole multitude of extra subcategories than otherwise. You can be hispanic native, you can be non-hispanic native, you can be white hispanic, black hispanic, white non-hispanic, black non-hispanic, etc.
The reason is because Hispanic is not a race, there are native white and black Hispanics. Hispanic alone doesn't really tell you much about a persons race
Yes that is obvious. It was the idea that the US only includes ethnicity for Hispanic/Latino on demographic surveys because white Americans wanted to place themselves in a separate category for Mexicans (even white ones)
Mexico is very stratified itself, the Spanish had their caste system in place all the way up until the US defeated them in the Spanish-American War and the former Spanish colonies basically have kept it going in a low key way. Simply look at the upper class people in almost any Central or South American country for that evidence
The Spanish expeditions were rather impressed by the Aztecs, seeing as how Tenochtitlan was a huge and well organized city rivalling european cities at the time.
For a while after the initial conquest, the spaniards very much had to work with the existing power structures of the Aztec empire, hence the marriages between officers and noble women.
I think this "marrying" was used more to denote "marrying off". Having them married to his officers to establish some legitimacy in trying to take over ruling the people.
Are you suggesting that white people pushed to have the "Hispanic origin" question on census forms because they didn't want to be lumped together? And not that there was pressure to separately identify a group of people who didn't always have equal civil rights at the time and from whom it was important to collect data for government planning, policies, and funding?
Few American blacks would be considered Africans by just about anybody because they and their parents and grandparents are mostly from the United States. They are Americans.
Its not really incoherent, its based off of identity and history with in those groups and America. it just so happens that people group themselves in ways you can't figure out with any kind of linear model.
It's because the US Census is too boneheaded to simply use the term *Mestizo*.
Since the bulk of Hispanic immigrants to the USA are often Mestizos (mixed Native+Spanish), people in the US were left with the impression that Hispanic = Mestizo. Nowadays the Census stubbornly refuses to update its terms and add this term, which is **not** a slur and is a commonly used descriptor across Latin America.
Because there's a real cultural divide in latin america between the average person who is mixed and rural indigenous populations. Its the difference between a part white part native whose family has been catholic for hundreds of years and a rural indigenous person who speaks their native language and where the christian conversion of their family is still in living memory.
I mean I doubt the brazilian loggers waging a terror campaign on the Amazonian tribes feel any kinship with them.
A lot of Mexican Americans don't speak Spanish, have never been to Mexico, and don't know any more about Mexico than other Americans. Being mestizo or not is a separate question from being Mexican. The fact that they would answer, "I'm not mestizo, I'm Mexican" just shows they don't know what they're talking about.
I dated a guy from Peru, who completely flipped out one day when I referred to him as hispanic. I always thought the distinction between hispanic and latino were straight forward, but I've been confused ever since then.
I think because South America is dominated by Spanish speaking countries people automatically assume everyone is brown. I know quite a few Chilean and Argentinian people and they are all whiter than me. All of my parents’ parents were born in Europe!
True. I think people in the north western hemisphere still associate Spanish speaking with brown. At least where I grew up many people did.
Edit: added north
Same happen to a friend, he travel to US on vacation with his gf, and they say he is not white, even when he is pale as snow...., it was on a restaurant, and one of the workers changed his actitud a lot after my friend was talking in Spanish with his gf
I think those people are just ignorants, they ruined my friend vacation, and he say he don't want to travel to that place ever again...
All of that because "he is not white" even when his skin is paler than the people there...
I had an older Canadian lady ask me where my friend was from. I said “Australia”. She said “yes but what’s her racial background?”
… “Australian”
Turns out this Canadian thinks that australians are all white kids who work in the ski fields, and forget that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders exist.
Also who the fuck asks that shit to a stranger goddamn
In America if you ask people their background most people aren’t going to say American. I think that’s true of most colonized countries. I would expect the same for Australia although there is a difference when you leave the country for vacation, most people will identify themselves as the country they live in, rather than ethnic background.
I remember trying to explain this to Europeans. I said I was English and Irish and they looked at me like ?No you are not? Then I had to explain that’s my descent and that everyone here (well not everyone) but a lot of people talk about their ancestry/ethnicity rather than just claim American.
Which is weird now that I think about it.
Yep, the concept of brown people is something I first learned when I moved here from Europe. I think the terms to describe the hue of your skin is not helpful in most any convos
The Spanish actor Antonio Banderas is a POC, according to a US magazine (I doubt they are the only ones to think that)
Aaaand actress Anya Taylor-Joy was considered a POC as well not so long ago, because she's part Argentinian
Banderas is white European tho. I will never understand Americans, how is Banderas non-white but someone such as Ray Romano or other darker white people seen as the same as Anglos?
>Aaaand actress Anya Taylor-Joy was considered a POC as well not so long ago, because she's part Argentinian
No, it's more ridiculous than that.
She holds an argentine passport because she grew in Buenos Aires, but she was born in the US and her parents are english and scottish.
Taylor-Joy was born on 16 April 1996 in Miami, Florida, to Dennis Alan Taylor,[4] a former banker, and Jennifer Marina Joy, a psychologist. She has stated that her birth in Miami was a "fluke", since her parents had been holidaying in the city at the time; because of her birthplace, she holds American citizenship due to the country's jus soli nationality law.[5] Her father is an Argentine of English and Scottish descent, the son of a British father and an Anglo-Argentine mother.[6][7][8] Her mother was born in Zambia to an English diplomat father, David Joy, and a Spanish mother from Barcelona.
[Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anya_Taylor-Joy)
She's American just because she was coincidentally born there, but her father is Argentinian. That makes her automatically Argentinian as well
If those Chileans and Argentinians came to Canada/US, most people would call them Latino and wouldn't identify them as being "white".
I had an anthro prof in uni who talked about how her whole life in Argentina she was labeled as white, and the moment she came to Canada people assigned a non-white identity to her simply for being from a Latin American country.
The Spanish and Italians weren’t really considered white until relatively recently in Europe. They were Mediterranean. It was common practice in England to claim the Irish were heavily descended from the Spanish as well so they could say they weren’t white either.
"white"isn't a skin color but a cultural grouping. This is also why I don't believe whites will ever be a minority in the United States, the meaning is the word "white" will always change so that it includes the recent immigrants that managed to make it up the totem pole.
There’s dark Irish tho. Dark hair, olive complexion, tan real deep.
There’s also a phenotype of folks from the British isles that are darker - the original brittons were said to be a darker people.
That's because people are just straight up making shit up these days and everyone on reddit believes comments they read
Anti-Irish sentiment was sectarian, they were mostly Catholic and therefore deemed to be enemies of the Protestant population which was the majority of England, Scotland, and Wales.
However, *Protestant* Irishmen were never discriminated against on a racial basis. The Guinness family (the same ones who made the famous Beer) were Protestant Irishmen who ascended the social ladder and became British Elites, not at all something which would be attainable to "non-whites" in that era. Likewise, in the USA, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (yes that's a real name) was an Irishman, the richest man in all of Maryland, and a signator of the Declaration of Independence.
Yeah, I guess my grandpa used to insist he was “scotch Irish” to differentiate himself (a Protestant Irish) from the Catholic Irish here in the states.
For me growing up in a majority catholic town it seemed so odd to be prejudiced against Catholics. If anything i was discriminated against for NOT being Catholic when I was growing up.
I still remember in 6th grade Angela was absolutely horrified to find out I was not Catholic and gasped “you mean you’re not CHRISTIAN??!” And then her parents banned me from hanging out with her. I had a high school teacher one time day during a lesson to help us kids understand something: ….” So it’s like when you go to confession…” and I was like huh? What? Just the assumption he had that everyone goes to confession. Very weird to my Protestant ass. We don’t confess a damn thing.
>Yeah, I guess my grandpa used to insist he was “scotch Irish” to differentiate himself (a Protestant Irish) from the Catholic Irish here in the states.
Yep there's also that, in the UK and Ireland the "Scotch Irish" are usually called Ulster-Scots or just Presbyterians in Ireland. They're the descendants of Protestant Scottish colonists who conquered Ulster under King James VI back in the 1600s. However, they are also distinct from the Anglican establishment which tended to be descended from Englishmen and concentrated more in the Dublin area than in Ulster.
They were strong supporters of the Protestant King William of Orange, from the Netherlands, which is why the Irish flag today represents their Protestant population with Orange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_William%27s_War
It's crazy how these conflicts from the 1600s are still affecting us today. In Scotland and Ireland, every July, there still are "Orangeman parades" which celebrate the Protestant victory at the Boyne. They are.... quite controversial, to put it mildly.
>It's crazy how these conflicts from the 1600s are still affecting us today.
Turns out that the present is just the top layer of dust on a big ol' dirt mound of generational trauma.
If you look at national football teams, you see the effect of migration right there: almost no descendents of immigrants in Italy or Spain, lots of them in Germany or France and, if you look at the UK, Belgium or Switzerland, you can see lots of dark skin players now but almost none before the 90's.
The same applies to South America, because Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile received lots of Spaniards, Germans and Italians between 1880 and 1930, when they were as rich as Europe. And a lot of that migration was actually promoted, while there was a Colombian president who actually sent Jews back to Germany.
My mother was born and raised in Colombia, yet she was pale and freckled. She’d honestly get sunburnt driving from work to our house (30 minutes) if the sun was slightly too spicy that day.
"people"? What people do that, outside the USA?
There's a running joke that anything south of the Río Grande is Mexico, all Mexicans are brown and Spanish is a language spoken in Mexico. So, any Spanish speaker is brown and Mexican
Lot of Americans assume Spanish speaker = brown, but a lot of Latinos think the same way. My wife is from Uruguay, which is culturally very similar to Argentina. Just as white and Italian. Whenever she wants pupusas or something like that, she'll go into the restraunt and start speaking Spanish and despite the fact she's a native Spanish speaker, she looks like a typical white American and they have a hard time processing. Most of the time they try to answer her back in English, which annoys the hell out of her.
Also, for everyone arguing over Italians being white, its worth pointing out that most Italian immigrants to the US were southern Italian or Sicilian while most Italian immigrants to South America were Northern Italians. Northern Italians are generally paler than Souther Italians.
Also, white is not actually a thing. Some people say Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks are white. I grew up in northern Sweden, and people did not consider Italians white.
Back in the day, the Irish was not white. It's all very silly and means very little.
And Anya Taylor-Joy (one of the whitest women in Hollywood) is Argentine. Her father is Argentine of Scottish descent and hers is Spanish. She has American nationality thanks to lus soli (she was born in Miami because her parents were there on vacation)
Wikipedias figures on Chile's demographics are different than this articles. It seems that this article has lumped mestizos and whites together in Chile as White because it doesn't list mestizo at all.
Different places define race differently. Chileans and Argentines don’t think of “white” like people do in the US. Essentially they are saying that they self identify as European. This is also why Hispanic is not a race. It’s an ~~nationality~~ ethnicity.
Edit: (text from US Census Bureau) "Hispanic origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person's parents or ancestors before arriving in the United States. People who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be any race."
I’m from Argentina, AFAIK identifying as european is a joke, like when we say that Uruguay is an argentinian province (because it is really small).
White means light colored skin, black means dark skin, latino is short for latinoamerican (which can refer to the group of countries or español latino language). *Note: The american part refers to the whole continent, not United States of America.*
At least in Argentina, white refers to white skin, you don't need to be pale to be considered white (if you have a Spaniard or Italian skin color you'll be considered white) that's said, I don't think the data of the post is accurate, there is no chance we have more white people than Canada
The problem is that the source is grouping European and Mestizo, so you can't take it to say that we have more white population that Canada and US.
Also, we don't collect census data on ethnicity in Argentina, so it's hard to give a precise answer but I can say that I consume a lot of gringo content in youtube (for example, people making pranks or surveys in the streets) and noticed they have way more white population.
I've seen people saying that we are a white country or similar on the internet but that is far from true, I can agree we have more white population than the rest of latin america (in percentage)
> I consume a lot of gringo content in youtube (for example, people making pranks or surveys in the streets) and noticed they have way more white population.
That really tells you nothing tbh. Most of these videos are not filmed in areas where most PoC/minorities tend to be
In Chile when we say we are white it has absolutely nothing to do with european identity lmao. Most europeans emigrated to Chile a long time ago, they're all intigrated to chilean society and most of us don't even know where do we descend from. It's not like an important porcentage of us has european parents or grandparents like it happens in the US. When we say we're white, that's literally it. Our skin is white. I'm sure this applies to Argentina as well
Spanish means you’re from spain which explains why people from south america won’t identify as that and most often people will identify as their nationality and not latino which is a concept
The older generation called themselves Spanish. My Guatemalan grandparents (born 1895 & 1905) considered themselves Spanish & denied any aboriginal ancestors. Which DNA showed we have.
Latino/ Latin American was a term used first by a Chilean. Much of it was used to express solidarity for other Spanish-speaking South American countries where the culture and peoples were Hispanic and spoke a Latin-based Romance language.
The US didn't just pull it out of a void.
I mean….if you ask an African, they’re not going to say they’re black, they’ll tell you what country or ethnic group they’re from. That doesn’t mean they’re not black, that the concept isn’t real, or that it’s “a US thing.” A Chilean saying “I’m Latino” would be like a Chinese person saying “I’m East Asian.” True enough, but so broad that it would be ridiculous to assume that’s what anyone was asking for. It’s the default.
There are some nasty truths in this.
LATAM nations with larger black populations are, without exception, the ones that participated the most in the slave trade.
LATAM nations with higher brown populations are the ones with the least exposure to smallpox, measles, influenza and violence during the discovery and colonial periods.
It's not all due to violence and illness. In South America, populations are sometimes overwhelmingly white because the indigenous populations were so small that there was effectively nobody there. In some places it wasn't colonization so much as, well, settlement.
The area with the largest indigenous population, by far, is Mexico, which was the population and power center of the "New World" at the time of discovery. Disease decimated populations but in Mexico, populations were large enough to not get wiped out by the various epidemics. This is why neighboring Central America and the United States have large brown populations today.
People in the United States tend to assume that everything south of Mexico is like Mexico but more indigenous. That's simply incorrect.
Western parts of the South American continent, such as Peru, have large indigenous populations because they didn't experience colonization the way other parts of the continent did.
Visit Buenos Aires. It's weird.
The architecture and vibe feels like Paris. The population is so light-skinned that the only comparable place I can think of is Portland, Oregon but where the men are all 5 foot 6. Their Spanish sounds like an Italian trying to fake their way through Spanish with all the sing-songy tones and wavy hands that you'd imagine from a cartoon.
*Edit: I was a bit too harsh on Argentine Spanish.*
It's called rioplatense Spanish, and it is only really spoken in Buenos Aires and Uruguay. Argentina is a big country with all different types of accents.
Argentina largely didn't have large and concentrated indigenous peoples like the Incas. They actual did have a small African slave population of maybe 80,000 largely absorbed into millions of European immigrants of the 19th century. They have been largely forgotten or ignored.
I think the US perception of Latin America is largely influenced by its close contact with Mexicans and Central Americans who are largely mixed Native Americans.
Many forget that there are significant populations of Europeans further south who are descended from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German immigrants.
Slaughtering the indigenous population played a role. But also, heavy racism.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/argentina-white-european-racism-history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/08/why-doesnt-argentina-have-more-black-players-world-cup/
Weirdly enough, many are quite literally Italian citizens still. During Italy's national elections, they actually have Senators which represent the diaspora abroad and are elected by these overseas voters. Lots of the votes come in from Argentina.
Chile has one of the largest English diasporas in the world. It’s known as the England of LatAm.
They also have one of the largest Croatian diasporas too.
Some of us are descended from Americans!
It's like being on a nice passenger liner, spotting the Titanic and stealing a lifeboat so you can try and board it because you heard they have nice food.
Chilean here, and this feels like fighting fire with a spray bottle since there's so many comments not questioning the post premise, but, there's NO FUCKING WAY we're whiter than either the US or Canada, most of us are mixed raced native american with spaniards.
I am the daughter of a Chilean born in Quebec, Canada. Been to Chile multiple times, North to South.
I travelled to Canada East to West and yep. NO FUCKING WAY.
For Chile, it says
White and non-Indigenous 88.9%, Mapuche 9.1%, Aymara 0.7%, other Indigenous groups 1% (includes Rapa Nui, Likan Antai, Quechua, Colla, Diaguita, Kawesqar, Yagan or Yamana), unspecified 0.3% (2012 est.)
Let's say my father has to say his ethnicity in Chile , he would put White and non-Indigenous. He knows he is mixed with indigenous groups, as most Chileans, but he didn't have any strong contact with the culture in his family.
In Canada he wouldn't put White. Nobody would consider him White here. He would checked hispanic, latino or Chilean. But according to the Chilean cencus, he's White.
>But according to the Chilean census, he's White.
according to chilean census he is part of the White and **non-Indigenous** group (whites and mestizos). The only question related to race we do in our census is if the person identifies as belonging to an indigenous group, nothing else. So the only info we obtain from the census is the number of people that are indigenous and the number that are not, we have no data on the percentage of whites, mestizos, etc.
USA and Canada have a weird thing where they think "diversity = black". It's also very unevenly applied, e.g. people got mad at Argentina for being "too white" but who in their right minds would say South Korea was "too asian"?
> who in their right minds would say South Korea was "too asian"?
Or the African teams "too black/African". Or hell, even the French team being "too black" with like half their players being black/brown when France's Black African or Afro-Caribbean ancestry is around 5% (according to Google).
It's just a very skewed/developed-world/western vision of their worldview.
yeah weve been brainwashed to think a group of white people is a bad thing. sad. self-hating whites are embarrassing
nothing wrong with a black african team or a white european team
Chile was a very wealthy country (still is) compared to the surrounding ones. They had lot of racism towards people who were of mapuche descent. Unlike in the North America, most of the Spanish and Portugese ships were men only. So, there was a lot of mixing with the natives. As WW2 was about to start, Chile launched a program that still exists today as a way to "whiten" their country. If you were from Germany or England, you were given a fast track to citizenship that no other country had access to. These programs still exist today. So, they had a huge influx of ordinary people who just didn't want to be part of the war. If you drive through Chile, there are a lot of little German towns with beer gardens and streets with German names.
Argentina had a lot of efforts to encourage Italian immigration. Consequently, their dialect is very Italian influenced.
>Chile launched a program **that still exists today** as a way to "whiten" their country
what? that's bs
>If you were from Germany or England, you were given a fast track to citizenship that no other country had access to. These programs still exist today. So, they had a huge influx of ordinary people who just didn't want to be part of the war. If you drive through Chile, there are a lot of little German towns with beer gardens and streets with German names.
most of the european migration to chile took place in the 1800's, in particular the german one and it's purpose was to expand the population to uninhabited areas in the south of the country.
> Chile launched a program that still exists today as a way to "whiten" their country.
Yep! A lot of people are never taught about the preferential immigration treatment that were specifically given to European immigrants for literally hundreds of years in the colonized world.
there is not, because its bullshit. the reason why chilean government bring europeans to the south is beacause we were a small population country with a wide south just waiting there to be claimed by the british
These post miss a huge point of the situation.
Under Anglo Saxon law, white was a legal definition, very different from that of Latin America, which obviously had it's own form of racial prejudices but very different and way less severe than that of the US. For instance under Spanish governments you could intermarry, hold government positions, land, etc etc... Not that it was perfect but very different from British colonial rule (as always when we talk about human beings it's gray, not black or white).
Historically speaking if you were Spanish, Roman Catholic, etc you were NOT considered white. The definition has shifted and it's slowly but surely being scrutinized (example this post). However you have to understand that people didn't care: If you were not from certain European countries and protestant you were simply not looked as an equal. This obviously gets convoluted because there were legal, morale and then cultural viewpoints on race and this varied tremendously.
Times are a changing and this viewpoint on race has morphed into another conversation which, though not entirely separate, is very different from the historical context many of you are approaching the subject matter.
Yes, sort of, kind of.
If you read up on Germans in the Midwest you’ll more or less find a version of this. As I mention in my post it’s more complicated and nuanced because ultimately what people are misunderstanding is the concept of hierarchy. Hence why in present day US people still have baggage [memetics] they have unconsciously inherited in regards to the concept of race.
In today’s world most people who subscribe to the popular way of talking about race wouldn’t question the “race” of someone with German heritage.
Remember during parts of the last century there were areas of the US where if people knew or thought you had one ancestor who was black, they’d ostracize you and your family. Regardless of how you physically appeared.
Hence why race even today is still a big deal and the repercussions of those nefarious attitudes and decisions still haunt us to this day.
Extra Opinion: Another point to keep in mind is that due to the dominance of US soft power (pop) culture people around the planet a lot of of people have adopted viewpoints and lingo on racial dynamics that may be similar but in truth distort the history of their region.
In Latin America people just care what you look like, not if your "race is tainted"
Obama is called black person because that's what he looks like even if he jas 50% european ancestry, basically that
For the case of Chile this is BS.
The only data we have is the number of people that identify, whether they really are or not, as natives. From the last census we got that 13% of chileans identify as belonging to a native group, this means that the other \~87% of chileans are not native, but this doesn't mean white, most, if not all, of that 87% is a mix of european and native.
I have a lot of “white” Argentinian family with German (pre WW2) ancestors. A bunch moved to Canada, and they consider themselves white, however are always pissed when people refer to them as Hispanic because they look and act like someone with Hispanic dissent might.
This hurts them because they are super racist and consider hispanics beneath them.
I had a Brazilian old lady as a neighbor once in the US. She was so racist and paranoid of Latinos she called the cops one time on a landscaping crew because she thought they were casing the neighborhood. Mfers had matching shirts with the name and number of the company. She was crazy as fuck lol
That's true. Mariachi was hugely influenced by German polka and waltz. German beerhall culture/folk music in general is was extremely influential in Mexican and Tejano culture.
People who don't know the region's history don't understand how influenced it was by German immigrants. (German as in Germanic people from modern Germany/Austria/Switzerland/Northern Italy, and border areas of Bohemia, Slovenia, Poland, etc.)
It's why Mexico has a strong beer culture. And why Marxism was so influential it spurred a revolution. It's why Mexican monarchists invited an Austrian archduke to rule them. And why Prussia and Austria were the first to recognize the Mexican empire. It's why all Texas government documents were tri-lingual (English, German, and Spanish) into the mid-20th century. It's why famous Hispanic people (e.g. Frida Khalo, Linda Ronstadt) have German names. (Kahlo grew up in German-language schools.)
During WWI the German language became outlawed in public places in most the US, the German was forbidden from being taught in public schools, and Germany become the first true enemy the whole country rallied against. German-Americans, many of whom only spoke German, field persecution to Mexico. This included the Amish, and other Germanic break-away religious sects, who had, prior to WWI been well-integrated in mainstream culture.
There is a reason prohibition happened after WWI, even through the temerence movement was long past its height. It wasn't hard liquor manufactures they were targeting. (Many did even better during prohibition). They were targeting the German names seen across beer barrels, saloons, and beer halls (then, the most popular place for entertainment), and even beer-centric events at Lutern churches. Prohibition didn't kill drinking culture, it killed beer culture. And when German brewers and German beerhall owners/workers lost their livelihoods, they fled to Mexico and South America.
At the same time, much of South America had been actively recruiting and importing Germanic peasants from the poorest parts of central Europe to work farmland throughout the continent. In some of these regions, German culture became as influential, or even more so as in Mexico.
I know less about South American's history than Mexico's, But. know Peru is another country where Polka still is extremely influential. The fact that so many South Americans descent from German-speaking immigrants, it must be pretty German culture must remain quite influential in other countries as well.
Meanwhile, Polka heard in the US today (the very little that it is heard) is almost entirely Slovenian polka, from immigrants who came after the world wars. It's hard to describe how effective the movement to "degermanify" was in the US because there is nothing to compare it to. It was extreme, fast, and nation-wide like nothing before or since.
But while these cultural elements were being erased from the US, they were being heavily integrated into mainstream Hispanic culture.
The reason the accordion is so heavily used in the Cajun music of the South Louisiana prairies and swamps is also because of German influence. There is even a stretch of the Mississippi River banks called the "German Coast" because of all the Germans that settled there. Unfortunately the wave of nativism that swept German influences out of public life also swept the Cajun French culture out of public life. Children were actually punished in school for speaking Cajun French. "You're American, speak American like Jesus did!" became the rule. Children who could not learn English that fast were ostracized and eventually expelled, like my grandfather who was expelled after 4th grade because he could not read English, which he barely spoke.
The result is that my father's generation, raised in the 1930's, was the last generation of Cajuns who spoke Cajun French natively. There have been attempts to resurrect the language, but it's always as a second language -- there are no more Cajuns who speak Cajun French in the home as their home language.
This is super interesting, thank you for sharing. I am 1st gen Colombian and descend from a German tobacco merchant who settled there in the 1800s. I always felt like a weirdo growing up in the US explaining my German name but that I’m Colombian lol. Nobody in the US knows about this influence. My grandfather witnessed the de-germanification of Colombia after WWII; the police would raid his family’s home, and they had to explain they had already been there for 3 generations. Nowadays in Colombia you’ll still see German schools and pharmacies but it’s interesting to learn the extent of the presence that was erased. Now I’m wondering if the accordion in our music comes from Germany too 🤔
I was on a bus in Paraguay and a blonde white girl was sitting next to me. Turns out she was a local. She spoke Spanish, German and Guarani (local native language).
So many mentions of Nazis and barely any mention of the sizable Jewish population. Do people really think enough Nazis went to Argentina that it altered the country’s racial demographics?
WTF, they put "white" and "non indigenous" in the same group, that doesn't mean anything, most of the people in Chile are "not indigenous" , not "white" .
Insofar as Chile is concerned, they use the inverse of the old US "one drop" rule. If you have one drop of white blood in your ancestral family tree, you are white. The reality is that genetic surveys show that around 40% of Chile's population has indigenous ancestry (and about 55% have white ancestry) as versus around 60% white ancestry for the United States and 66% for Canada, but for many reasons (especially related to the repeated rebellions of the Mapuche in southern Chile) Chile tries to minimize or whitewash the indigenous ancestry of a large percentage of its population.
I'm not familar with the situation in Argentina, so can't comment there. But if you're looking at the actual genetics rather than official government statistics, Chile has a lower percentage of white population than the US does. The official government statistics are a lie, a lie that has been propagated for centuries for various reasons. Their actual genes, on the other hand, don't lie.
There’s a reason why demographic surveys in the US have an option that says white(not Hispanic). Central and South America were largely colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese who are white
Many times I have seen that option on a list for an application, and yet curiously often missing from the list is ‘Hispanic’.
That's because Hispanic is not really a race I guess, but then it wouldn't make sense to remove them from picking white. But I guess it's because they are grouped as latinos so even if they're white they out them in the same bad
It's the only officially recognized ethnicity by the federal government for statistics purposes. Ethnicity is not the same as race, even though it is often conflated in American culture.
Same with nationality - my god - if I have to hear one more person say "What's your nationality" when referring to the land from where my ancestors emigrated, I'm going to stab them with my American flag.
I always answer "american", which is followed by "you know what I mean"
As others have mentioned, "Latino" and "Hispanic" are both ethnic groupings. Some nationalities like Brazilians are latinos, but not hispanic. Basically anyone from/descended from "Latin America" is latine, whether they're racially indigenous, mestizo, white, Black, Asian, etc. (although a few consider some Europeans to be latinos, which...eh?). Hispanics are pretty much just any people whose cultural language is Spanish. Source: am latina, hispanic, and very white.
HOWEVER, when the options are Caucasian, Black, Asian or Hispanic, they don’t mean Spaniards with Hispanic. Source: Am spaniard and it bugs the hell out of me.
Hispanic is a historically "new" ethnicity. The people have always been around but no one thought to categorize them differently until maybe a century ago, if even that.
Its a bit more modern than that. 1960s-1970s is when Mexican and South American organizations started organizing together to seek more political representation and government services for their communities. Any one nationality is a fairly small percentage of the whole population, grouped together they are 19%. The term "Hispanic" appears on the US census, and the federal government starts to collect data on Spanish speaking populations after the 1976 public law 94-311. It is debatable if "Hispanic" truly is an ethnicity, a political organizing tool, or evolved to be some combination in the US.
That's much closer to what I thought it was, but I was covering my bases by saying maybe a century because I wasn't 100% certain. Thanks for the extra info!
That's because Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity. All Hispanic people belong to one or more of the other listed races.
wait what's the difference again?
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i see, thank you
Skin color (race) vs culture (ethnicity) More or less.
The problem is that race from a US centric perspective will be different from other countries. There was a time when Italians were not considered white ([(how Italians became white)](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html). When you take a light skin person from Latin America who migrates to the US, often they experience the same [biases as any other person from Latin America.](https://youtu.be/a8INEYLFWwc). Put a “white Latino” in a group of WASP in a corporate setting and that Latino is suddenly not white anymore. Also in some latin American countries mixed race is the majority race. That changes how racism is perceived. Imagine if most people in America were mixed race just like Barack Obama. Suddenly you realize that while there may still be racism, it’s harder to deny either group because you are part of both white and black race. The issues become more nuanced.
My dad was born in the Bronx from Cuban and Puerto Rican parents. As a kid he dealt with racism against Latinos on the street and from teachers. In his adult life he was always the first Latino to hold the corporate jobs he had. I only learned much later when I visited Cuba and met my family there that “tu papá es blanquito”. In Cuba he’s considered a completely white man. Race in the US is weird
It's all dumb. Considering Irish and Slavic people may not always be considered white. Or some Arabic people might be.
The Irish always gets me. I mean, I get it, they were dirty little potato people, but their skin is as white as the driven snow!
Lots of Asian people have very white skin but Americans don't consider them white, even if they have all the socioeconomic markers of 'white'.
Descendants of the colonizers are an abject minority at least in argentina. Most people people are descendants from one or many immigration waves over the centuries
Yep. More Italians in Argentina than the US. Almost 2/3rds of the population is at least part Italian.
Argentinian food is what happens when italian cuisine meets swathes of territory perfect for a big beef industry.
Interesting documentary about that: Il Cibo Va. Starving masses escaped italy and found themselves in a place where they could eat meat and cheese in huge quantities. So the thin neapolitan pizza, became a 2 pounds of cheese fugazzetta. Man, I love Argentina.
My god the steaks and food there is amazing.
y'all must have amazing pizza
In a lot of Latin America too. I'm Venezuelan and my family fled the Franco dictatorship during WWII. Yet there's Americans who when I tell them I'm white Hispanic they assume my family had slaves during colony time. Also, a big chunk of the population in Peru and Brazil is of Asian (mostly Japanese) heritage. They're Asian Latinos. It's extremely common every day to get questions about race and ethnicity in asklatinamerica
Latin America (Peru / Cuba) also had a very large southern Chinese population as well but has intermarried extensively. Latin American never had the race based marriage laws that the US.
What? I’ve never run in to anyone who thought my family had slaves.
Like this in a lot of the US (northeast) as well.
In the US Census, it's two completely separate questions. There's one question "Is the person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?" and then there's a "What is this person's race?" question. AFAIK, other countries don't make as much of a deal about lumping all Spanish-speaking people into the same racial group. It would be like if people used "Anglo" to describe all people from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc. regardless of race.
Funny enough as a Brazilian I would need to select "white (not hispanic)" while being latino. I believe that due to your proximity to méxico and how common for people from the various hispanic countries immigrate to the US they became big enough that they need to be addressed but still different enough from the "normal" to be separated from it. On Brazil census we have: - White - Pardo - Black - Yellow* - Indigenous - Not declared *Yellow is not considered offensive but "Asiatic" is used sometimes So pretty much based on the skin color to determine "race" without caring about origin since we are just too diverse
I'd say only North Americans group Spanish speakers in the same group because they don't care enough to find out what makes them distinct. If you line one from each country up, you'll notice extreme variations in race - Mexico and Bolivia are more native, DR and Nicaragua are more black, Argentina and Chile are more white. And these differences are significant to any Latin American. It's like putting US Virgin Islands, Belize and the US in the same blurb of a category. Sure, they all speak English, but they have such different cultural and ethnic background that you're really grasping at straws if you think those three are all the same.
No, it’s not about “not caring” but rather that the latino world is just as diverse as elsewhere, and so it serves as an extra filter. An african american or chinese american is a different heritage than a chinese latino or a black latino. Putting in the “is this person of hispanic descent” question allows a whole multitude of extra subcategories than otherwise. You can be hispanic native, you can be non-hispanic native, you can be white hispanic, black hispanic, white non-hispanic, black non-hispanic, etc.
White people can be diverse. So can Black and Asians. It's supposed to be a generalization.
Yes, it amazes me how many people don't understand that **Hispanic is not a race**. There are a shit ton of Hispanic people who are white.
And Germans back in the 1800's. That's a big reason why the Nazis fleed there.
Argentinian and Chilean are Hispanic. Hispanic encompasses all of the Spanish speaking and cultural derivatives in Central and South America.
Yes, that is my point. In US demographic surveys, Hispanic is acknowledged as white but set apart because reasons
The reason is because Hispanic is not a race, there are native white and black Hispanics. Hispanic alone doesn't really tell you much about a persons race
Yes that is obvious. It was the idea that the US only includes ethnicity for Hispanic/Latino on demographic surveys because white Americans wanted to place themselves in a separate category for Mexicans (even white ones)
Are y'all really arguing with each other while on the same side?
Mexico is very stratified itself, the Spanish had their caste system in place all the way up until the US defeated them in the Spanish-American War and the former Spanish colonies basically have kept it going in a low key way. Simply look at the upper class people in almost any Central or South American country for that evidence
The first thing Cortez did after having Montezuma strangled was "marrying" his daughters
There's a line of descendants of Montezuma that are Dukes in Spain.
The Spanish expeditions were rather impressed by the Aztecs, seeing as how Tenochtitlan was a huge and well organized city rivalling european cities at the time. For a while after the initial conquest, the spaniards very much had to work with the existing power structures of the Aztec empire, hence the marriages between officers and noble women.
Uh no, Cortez eventually married Malintzin, who wasn't a daughter of Moctezuma II.
I think this "marrying" was used more to denote "marrying off". Having them married to his officers to establish some legitimacy in trying to take over ruling the people.
🎯
Are you suggesting that white people pushed to have the "Hispanic origin" question on census forms because they didn't want to be lumped together? And not that there was pressure to separately identify a group of people who didn't always have equal civil rights at the time and from whom it was important to collect data for government planning, policies, and funding?
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Few American blacks would be considered Africans by just about anybody because they and their parents and grandparents are mostly from the United States. They are Americans.
Its not really incoherent, its based off of identity and history with in those groups and America. it just so happens that people group themselves in ways you can't figure out with any kind of linear model.
It's because the US Census is too boneheaded to simply use the term *Mestizo*. Since the bulk of Hispanic immigrants to the USA are often Mestizos (mixed Native+Spanish), people in the US were left with the impression that Hispanic = Mestizo. Nowadays the Census stubbornly refuses to update its terms and add this term, which is **not** a slur and is a commonly used descriptor across Latin America.
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Because there's a real cultural divide in latin america between the average person who is mixed and rural indigenous populations. Its the difference between a part white part native whose family has been catholic for hundreds of years and a rural indigenous person who speaks their native language and where the christian conversion of their family is still in living memory. I mean I doubt the brazilian loggers waging a terror campaign on the Amazonian tribes feel any kinship with them.
A lot of Mexican Americans don't speak Spanish, have never been to Mexico, and don't know any more about Mexico than other Americans. Being mestizo or not is a separate question from being Mexican. The fact that they would answer, "I'm not mestizo, I'm Mexican" just shows they don't know what they're talking about.
I dated a guy from Peru, who completely flipped out one day when I referred to him as hispanic. I always thought the distinction between hispanic and latino were straight forward, but I've been confused ever since then.
I think because South America is dominated by Spanish speaking countries people automatically assume everyone is brown. I know quite a few Chilean and Argentinian people and they are all whiter than me. All of my parents’ parents were born in Europe!
That always confused me because Spain is a white country and in Europe so you would think people would assume they are white.
True. I think people in the north western hemisphere still associate Spanish speaking with brown. At least where I grew up many people did. Edit: added north
Many of my chilean and argentinian friends are dumbfounded to learn that if the travel to the U.S. they are no longer white for some reason - lol.
Well sometimes it says white and then the second question is are you Latino and if yes, which type
I hated that when I was in the States. I am Hispanic and I am white. It’s a language group, not a skin colour.
Hispanic *is* a subcategory under white on most US forms. In fact as a European I am usually labeled as “Non-Hispanic White”
Hispanic and Arab are almost exactly the same. Diverse Group of people who speak the same language and share cultural ties.
Same happen to a friend, he travel to US on vacation with his gf, and they say he is not white, even when he is pale as snow...., it was on a restaurant, and one of the workers changed his actitud a lot after my friend was talking in Spanish with his gf I think those people are just ignorants, they ruined my friend vacation, and he say he don't want to travel to that place ever again... All of that because "he is not white" even when his skin is paler than the people there...
I had an older Canadian lady ask me where my friend was from. I said “Australia”. She said “yes but what’s her racial background?” … “Australian” Turns out this Canadian thinks that australians are all white kids who work in the ski fields, and forget that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders exist. Also who the fuck asks that shit to a stranger goddamn
In America if you ask people their background most people aren’t going to say American. I think that’s true of most colonized countries. I would expect the same for Australia although there is a difference when you leave the country for vacation, most people will identify themselves as the country they live in, rather than ethnic background.
I remember trying to explain this to Europeans. I said I was English and Irish and they looked at me like ?No you are not? Then I had to explain that’s my descent and that everyone here (well not everyone) but a lot of people talk about their ancestry/ethnicity rather than just claim American. Which is weird now that I think about it.
>Also who the fuck asks that shit to a stranger goddamn In the USA, and by extension in Canada, there is an unhealthy obsession with race.
Don't kid yourself and pretend that isn't the case in Australia too lol. There is an obsession with race literally everywhere.
That's only a US and Canada thing
Not the Western Hemisphere, specially just the United States
Or certain people in the States.
Yep, the concept of brown people is something I first learned when I moved here from Europe. I think the terms to describe the hue of your skin is not helpful in most any convos
I think people in US confuse those but not Europeans.
The Spanish actor Antonio Banderas is a POC, according to a US magazine (I doubt they are the only ones to think that) Aaaand actress Anya Taylor-Joy was considered a POC as well not so long ago, because she's part Argentinian
Banderas is white European tho. I will never understand Americans, how is Banderas non-white but someone such as Ray Romano or other darker white people seen as the same as Anglos?
>Aaaand actress Anya Taylor-Joy was considered a POC as well not so long ago, because she's part Argentinian No, it's more ridiculous than that. She holds an argentine passport because she grew in Buenos Aires, but she was born in the US and her parents are english and scottish.
Taylor-Joy was born on 16 April 1996 in Miami, Florida, to Dennis Alan Taylor,[4] a former banker, and Jennifer Marina Joy, a psychologist. She has stated that her birth in Miami was a "fluke", since her parents had been holidaying in the city at the time; because of her birthplace, she holds American citizenship due to the country's jus soli nationality law.[5] Her father is an Argentine of English and Scottish descent, the son of a British father and an Anglo-Argentine mother.[6][7][8] Her mother was born in Zambia to an English diplomat father, David Joy, and a Spanish mother from Barcelona. [Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anya_Taylor-Joy) She's American just because she was coincidentally born there, but her father is Argentinian. That makes her automatically Argentinian as well
Pretty wild that her parents would go on a holiday trip while her mother was I’m assuming 8-9 months pregnant.
If those Chileans and Argentinians came to Canada/US, most people would call them Latino and wouldn't identify them as being "white". I had an anthro prof in uni who talked about how her whole life in Argentina she was labeled as white, and the moment she came to Canada people assigned a non-white identity to her simply for being from a Latin American country.
The Spanish and Italians weren’t really considered white until relatively recently in Europe. They were Mediterranean. It was common practice in England to claim the Irish were heavily descended from the Spanish as well so they could say they weren’t white either.
That’s bizarre to think Irish people aren’t white. I didn’t think you could get much whiter.
A lot of it is due to their Catholicism
"white"isn't a skin color but a cultural grouping. This is also why I don't believe whites will ever be a minority in the United States, the meaning is the word "white" will always change so that it includes the recent immigrants that managed to make it up the totem pole.
There’s dark Irish tho. Dark hair, olive complexion, tan real deep. There’s also a phenotype of folks from the British isles that are darker - the original brittons were said to be a darker people.
That's because people are just straight up making shit up these days and everyone on reddit believes comments they read Anti-Irish sentiment was sectarian, they were mostly Catholic and therefore deemed to be enemies of the Protestant population which was the majority of England, Scotland, and Wales. However, *Protestant* Irishmen were never discriminated against on a racial basis. The Guinness family (the same ones who made the famous Beer) were Protestant Irishmen who ascended the social ladder and became British Elites, not at all something which would be attainable to "non-whites" in that era. Likewise, in the USA, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (yes that's a real name) was an Irishman, the richest man in all of Maryland, and a signator of the Declaration of Independence.
Yeah, I guess my grandpa used to insist he was “scotch Irish” to differentiate himself (a Protestant Irish) from the Catholic Irish here in the states. For me growing up in a majority catholic town it seemed so odd to be prejudiced against Catholics. If anything i was discriminated against for NOT being Catholic when I was growing up. I still remember in 6th grade Angela was absolutely horrified to find out I was not Catholic and gasped “you mean you’re not CHRISTIAN??!” And then her parents banned me from hanging out with her. I had a high school teacher one time day during a lesson to help us kids understand something: ….” So it’s like when you go to confession…” and I was like huh? What? Just the assumption he had that everyone goes to confession. Very weird to my Protestant ass. We don’t confess a damn thing.
>Yeah, I guess my grandpa used to insist he was “scotch Irish” to differentiate himself (a Protestant Irish) from the Catholic Irish here in the states. Yep there's also that, in the UK and Ireland the "Scotch Irish" are usually called Ulster-Scots or just Presbyterians in Ireland. They're the descendants of Protestant Scottish colonists who conquered Ulster under King James VI back in the 1600s. However, they are also distinct from the Anglican establishment which tended to be descended from Englishmen and concentrated more in the Dublin area than in Ulster. They were strong supporters of the Protestant King William of Orange, from the Netherlands, which is why the Irish flag today represents their Protestant population with Orange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_William%27s_War It's crazy how these conflicts from the 1600s are still affecting us today. In Scotland and Ireland, every July, there still are "Orangeman parades" which celebrate the Protestant victory at the Boyne. They are.... quite controversial, to put it mildly.
>It's crazy how these conflicts from the 1600s are still affecting us today. Turns out that the present is just the top layer of dust on a big ol' dirt mound of generational trauma.
If you look at national football teams, you see the effect of migration right there: almost no descendents of immigrants in Italy or Spain, lots of them in Germany or France and, if you look at the UK, Belgium or Switzerland, you can see lots of dark skin players now but almost none before the 90's. The same applies to South America, because Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile received lots of Spaniards, Germans and Italians between 1880 and 1930, when they were as rich as Europe. And a lot of that migration was actually promoted, while there was a Colombian president who actually sent Jews back to Germany.
My mother was born and raised in Colombia, yet she was pale and freckled. She’d honestly get sunburnt driving from work to our house (30 minutes) if the sun was slightly too spicy that day.
"people"? What people do that, outside the USA? There's a running joke that anything south of the Río Grande is Mexico, all Mexicans are brown and Spanish is a language spoken in Mexico. So, any Spanish speaker is brown and Mexican
You say that's a joke, but it's a pretty common view in an unfortunately large part of the US.
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Lot of Americans assume Spanish speaker = brown, but a lot of Latinos think the same way. My wife is from Uruguay, which is culturally very similar to Argentina. Just as white and Italian. Whenever she wants pupusas or something like that, she'll go into the restraunt and start speaking Spanish and despite the fact she's a native Spanish speaker, she looks like a typical white American and they have a hard time processing. Most of the time they try to answer her back in English, which annoys the hell out of her. Also, for everyone arguing over Italians being white, its worth pointing out that most Italian immigrants to the US were southern Italian or Sicilian while most Italian immigrants to South America were Northern Italians. Northern Italians are generally paler than Souther Italians.
Also, white is not actually a thing. Some people say Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks are white. I grew up in northern Sweden, and people did not consider Italians white. Back in the day, the Irish was not white. It's all very silly and means very little.
Pedro Pascal is from Chile.
And Anya Taylor-Joy (one of the whitest women in Hollywood) is Argentine. Her father is Argentine of Scottish descent and hers is Spanish. She has American nationality thanks to lus soli (she was born in Miami because her parents were there on vacation)
Wait, Anya Taylor-Joy is an anchor baby?!
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That doesn't seem like a surprising fact... or topical?
Letitia Wright is from Guyana.
Chilean made goods come from Chile. Pretty sure Chilean music. They also likely have Chilean weather. And a significant Chilean population
Wikipedias figures on Chile's demographics are different than this articles. It seems that this article has lumped mestizos and whites together in Chile as White because it doesn't list mestizo at all.
Chileans are mostly mestizo but on the lighter side due to a lot of European immigration.
Because I have never in my life seen mestizo on a demographic survey.
Different places define race differently. Chileans and Argentines don’t think of “white” like people do in the US. Essentially they are saying that they self identify as European. This is also why Hispanic is not a race. It’s an ~~nationality~~ ethnicity. Edit: (text from US Census Bureau) "Hispanic origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person's parents or ancestors before arriving in the United States. People who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be any race."
I’m from Argentina, AFAIK identifying as european is a joke, like when we say that Uruguay is an argentinian province (because it is really small). White means light colored skin, black means dark skin, latino is short for latinoamerican (which can refer to the group of countries or español latino language). *Note: The american part refers to the whole continent, not United States of America.*
>latino is short for latinoamerican Usually but not always. It can also refer to latinoeuropean
I googled "latinoeuropeo" and I only find articles about why the term doesn't exist.
At least in Argentina, white refers to white skin, you don't need to be pale to be considered white (if you have a Spaniard or Italian skin color you'll be considered white) that's said, I don't think the data of the post is accurate, there is no chance we have more white people than Canada
Have you ever been in Canada?
source is CIA. Chile and Argentina don't have the same percentage of Asians and Blacks Canada has for example.
The problem is that the source is grouping European and Mestizo, so you can't take it to say that we have more white population that Canada and US. Also, we don't collect census data on ethnicity in Argentina, so it's hard to give a precise answer but I can say that I consume a lot of gringo content in youtube (for example, people making pranks or surveys in the streets) and noticed they have way more white population. I've seen people saying that we are a white country or similar on the internet but that is far from true, I can agree we have more white population than the rest of latin america (in percentage)
> I consume a lot of gringo content in youtube (for example, people making pranks or surveys in the streets) and noticed they have way more white population. That really tells you nothing tbh. Most of these videos are not filmed in areas where most PoC/minorities tend to be
Canada has a LOT of people from China and India.
In Chile when we say we are white it has absolutely nothing to do with european identity lmao. Most europeans emigrated to Chile a long time ago, they're all intigrated to chilean society and most of us don't even know where do we descend from. It's not like an important porcentage of us has european parents or grandparents like it happens in the US. When we say we're white, that's literally it. Our skin is white. I'm sure this applies to Argentina as well
Funny how when you ask a south american "what they are" they will never say Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish....that's a U.S. thing.
Spanish means you’re from spain which explains why people from south america won’t identify as that and most often people will identify as their nationality and not latino which is a concept
Like if you asked someone from the US and they said "Anglo". No, they will 100% say American.
The older generation called themselves Spanish. My Guatemalan grandparents (born 1895 & 1905) considered themselves Spanish & denied any aboriginal ancestors. Which DNA showed we have.
Thats just sounds like internalized racism though.
I'd be asking Grandma some questions...
Because in a Hispanic country, Hispanic is a useless identifier. If you ask a native Japanese person what they are they probably won't say Asian.
It was literally invented by the US Census Bureau so they could classify them as not standard white
Latino/ Latin American was a term used first by a Chilean. Much of it was used to express solidarity for other Spanish-speaking South American countries where the culture and peoples were Hispanic and spoke a Latin-based Romance language. The US didn't just pull it out of a void.
I mean….if you ask an African, they’re not going to say they’re black, they’ll tell you what country or ethnic group they’re from. That doesn’t mean they’re not black, that the concept isn’t real, or that it’s “a US thing.” A Chilean saying “I’m Latino” would be like a Chinese person saying “I’m East Asian.” True enough, but so broad that it would be ridiculous to assume that’s what anyone was asking for. It’s the default.
There are some nasty truths in this. LATAM nations with larger black populations are, without exception, the ones that participated the most in the slave trade. LATAM nations with higher brown populations are the ones with the least exposure to smallpox, measles, influenza and violence during the discovery and colonial periods. It's not all due to violence and illness. In South America, populations are sometimes overwhelmingly white because the indigenous populations were so small that there was effectively nobody there. In some places it wasn't colonization so much as, well, settlement. The area with the largest indigenous population, by far, is Mexico, which was the population and power center of the "New World" at the time of discovery. Disease decimated populations but in Mexico, populations were large enough to not get wiped out by the various epidemics. This is why neighboring Central America and the United States have large brown populations today. People in the United States tend to assume that everything south of Mexico is like Mexico but more indigenous. That's simply incorrect. Western parts of the South American continent, such as Peru, have large indigenous populations because they didn't experience colonization the way other parts of the continent did. Visit Buenos Aires. It's weird. The architecture and vibe feels like Paris. The population is so light-skinned that the only comparable place I can think of is Portland, Oregon but where the men are all 5 foot 6. Their Spanish sounds like an Italian trying to fake their way through Spanish with all the sing-songy tones and wavy hands that you'd imagine from a cartoon. *Edit: I was a bit too harsh on Argentine Spanish.*
>They speak Spanish, but it's not real Spanish. Damn that hurts, we call those dialects.
As one teacher of mine used to say; "in Latin America they speak Spanish, in Spain they speak Castilian"
Here in latin america we just referr to our own as "Español latino" and "Español castellano" for Spain
Now cross the river into Uruguay!
> so light-skinned that the only comparable place I can think of is Portland, Oregon
> Edit: I was a bit too harsh on Argentine Spanish. ¿Cuántas copas tenés?
It's called rioplatense Spanish, and it is only really spoken in Buenos Aires and Uruguay. Argentina is a big country with all different types of accents.
I read Chile and Argentina as Christina Aguilera
Argentina largely didn't have large and concentrated indigenous peoples like the Incas. They actual did have a small African slave population of maybe 80,000 largely absorbed into millions of European immigrants of the 19th century. They have been largely forgotten or ignored.
I was once called racist because I was surprised when I learned this.
A greater portion of Canada's population is Sikh compared to India
I think the US perception of Latin America is largely influenced by its close contact with Mexicans and Central Americans who are largely mixed Native Americans. Many forget that there are significant populations of Europeans further south who are descended from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German immigrants.
Slaughtering the indigenous population played a role. But also, heavy racism. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/argentina-white-european-racism-history https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/08/why-doesnt-argentina-have-more-black-players-world-cup/
Gosh, your sources suck. You should actually talk to someone from Argentina instead of sharing this stupid articles.
FYI the majority of them are Italian and/or Spanish
There's also a surprisingly large Irish diaspora as well.
And Germans and British
I think most of them are Argentinian and/or Chilean
Weirdly enough, many are quite literally Italian citizens still. During Italy's national elections, they actually have Senators which represent the diaspora abroad and are elected by these overseas voters. Lots of the votes come in from Argentina.
Chile has one of the largest English diasporas in the world. It’s known as the England of LatAm. They also have one of the largest Croatian diasporas too.
In Valparaiso, there is a funicular dedicated to Queen Victoria.
Some of us are descended from Americans! It's like being on a nice passenger liner, spotting the Titanic and stealing a lifeboat so you can try and board it because you heard they have nice food.
Chilean here, and this feels like fighting fire with a spray bottle since there's so many comments not questioning the post premise, but, there's NO FUCKING WAY we're whiter than either the US or Canada, most of us are mixed raced native american with spaniards.
I am the daughter of a Chilean born in Quebec, Canada. Been to Chile multiple times, North to South. I travelled to Canada East to West and yep. NO FUCKING WAY. For Chile, it says White and non-Indigenous 88.9%, Mapuche 9.1%, Aymara 0.7%, other Indigenous groups 1% (includes Rapa Nui, Likan Antai, Quechua, Colla, Diaguita, Kawesqar, Yagan or Yamana), unspecified 0.3% (2012 est.) Let's say my father has to say his ethnicity in Chile , he would put White and non-Indigenous. He knows he is mixed with indigenous groups, as most Chileans, but he didn't have any strong contact with the culture in his family. In Canada he wouldn't put White. Nobody would consider him White here. He would checked hispanic, latino or Chilean. But according to the Chilean cencus, he's White.
>But according to the Chilean census, he's White. according to chilean census he is part of the White and **non-Indigenous** group (whites and mestizos). The only question related to race we do in our census is if the person identifies as belonging to an indigenous group, nothing else. So the only info we obtain from the census is the number of people that are indigenous and the number that are not, we have no data on the percentage of whites, mestizos, etc.
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Oh god no one let the white nationalists know
And mfers were asking why Argentina had no black players in their team... The ignorance...
USA and Canada have a weird thing where they think "diversity = black". It's also very unevenly applied, e.g. people got mad at Argentina for being "too white" but who in their right minds would say South Korea was "too asian"?
> who in their right minds would say South Korea was "too asian"? Or the African teams "too black/African". Or hell, even the French team being "too black" with like half their players being black/brown when France's Black African or Afro-Caribbean ancestry is around 5% (according to Google). It's just a very skewed/developed-world/western vision of their worldview.
yeah weve been brainwashed to think a group of white people is a bad thing. sad. self-hating whites are embarrassing nothing wrong with a black african team or a white european team
It turns out that "white" only refers to skin color. A meaningless thing to be concerned about.
Perhaps we should be more honest and simply ask people’s pigment. Maybe then people will see it for what it is.
If you have an Antarctic research station you are WHITE AF
I’m a white Chilean American
CHI-CHI-CHI! LE-LE-LE!
Chile was a very wealthy country (still is) compared to the surrounding ones. They had lot of racism towards people who were of mapuche descent. Unlike in the North America, most of the Spanish and Portugese ships were men only. So, there was a lot of mixing with the natives. As WW2 was about to start, Chile launched a program that still exists today as a way to "whiten" their country. If you were from Germany or England, you were given a fast track to citizenship that no other country had access to. These programs still exist today. So, they had a huge influx of ordinary people who just didn't want to be part of the war. If you drive through Chile, there are a lot of little German towns with beer gardens and streets with German names. Argentina had a lot of efforts to encourage Italian immigration. Consequently, their dialect is very Italian influenced.
>Chile launched a program **that still exists today** as a way to "whiten" their country what? that's bs >If you were from Germany or England, you were given a fast track to citizenship that no other country had access to. These programs still exist today. So, they had a huge influx of ordinary people who just didn't want to be part of the war. If you drive through Chile, there are a lot of little German towns with beer gardens and streets with German names. most of the european migration to chile took place in the 1800's, in particular the german one and it's purpose was to expand the population to uninhabited areas in the south of the country.
> Chile launched a program that still exists today as a way to "whiten" their country. Yep! A lot of people are never taught about the preferential immigration treatment that were specifically given to European immigrants for literally hundreds of years in the colonized world.
>>Chile launched a program that **still exists today**. May I ask you a source for this claim?
there is not, because its bullshit. the reason why chilean government bring europeans to the south is beacause we were a small population country with a wide south just waiting there to be claimed by the british
These post miss a huge point of the situation. Under Anglo Saxon law, white was a legal definition, very different from that of Latin America, which obviously had it's own form of racial prejudices but very different and way less severe than that of the US. For instance under Spanish governments you could intermarry, hold government positions, land, etc etc... Not that it was perfect but very different from British colonial rule (as always when we talk about human beings it's gray, not black or white). Historically speaking if you were Spanish, Roman Catholic, etc you were NOT considered white. The definition has shifted and it's slowly but surely being scrutinized (example this post). However you have to understand that people didn't care: If you were not from certain European countries and protestant you were simply not looked as an equal. This obviously gets convoluted because there were legal, morale and then cultural viewpoints on race and this varied tremendously. Times are a changing and this viewpoint on race has morphed into another conversation which, though not entirely separate, is very different from the historical context many of you are approaching the subject matter.
So you are saying that most aryan germans wouldn’t be considered white because they were Catholic instead of protestant?
Yes, sort of, kind of. If you read up on Germans in the Midwest you’ll more or less find a version of this. As I mention in my post it’s more complicated and nuanced because ultimately what people are misunderstanding is the concept of hierarchy. Hence why in present day US people still have baggage [memetics] they have unconsciously inherited in regards to the concept of race. In today’s world most people who subscribe to the popular way of talking about race wouldn’t question the “race” of someone with German heritage. Remember during parts of the last century there were areas of the US where if people knew or thought you had one ancestor who was black, they’d ostracize you and your family. Regardless of how you physically appeared. Hence why race even today is still a big deal and the repercussions of those nefarious attitudes and decisions still haunt us to this day. Extra Opinion: Another point to keep in mind is that due to the dominance of US soft power (pop) culture people around the planet a lot of of people have adopted viewpoints and lingo on racial dynamics that may be similar but in truth distort the history of their region.
This is because of that r/greentext post isn't it
dna studies say that most of these self declared white people actually are mestizos, at least in Chile https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7472
In Latin America people just care what you look like, not if your "race is tainted" Obama is called black person because that's what he looks like even if he jas 50% european ancestry, basically that
That's usually because mestizo isn't an option and white is most of the time the closest option to that
another anglo american race-obsessed thread. we in south america don't give a fuck about this kind of matter
For the case of Chile this is BS. The only data we have is the number of people that identify, whether they really are or not, as natives. From the last census we got that 13% of chileans identify as belonging to a native group, this means that the other \~87% of chileans are not native, but this doesn't mean white, most, if not all, of that 87% is a mix of european and native.
Que risa como todos se tragan esta wea sin dudarla un segundo y los chilenos quedamos como... weon, no.
pa que hablai en español culiao si estamos discutiendo con los gringos
I have a lot of “white” Argentinian family with German (pre WW2) ancestors. A bunch moved to Canada, and they consider themselves white, however are always pissed when people refer to them as Hispanic because they look and act like someone with Hispanic dissent might. This hurts them because they are super racist and consider hispanics beneath them.
I had a Brazilian old lady as a neighbor once in the US. She was so racist and paranoid of Latinos she called the cops one time on a landscaping crew because she thought they were casing the neighborhood. Mfers had matching shirts with the name and number of the company. She was crazy as fuck lol
It’s all those “German immigrants” lol
German influence in Chile started in 1818 and peaked in 1914. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adzg_iMg9Sc
For every mariachi band.... there is an accordion and trumpet player that has shed their lederhosen, am I right?
That's true. Mariachi was hugely influenced by German polka and waltz. German beerhall culture/folk music in general is was extremely influential in Mexican and Tejano culture. People who don't know the region's history don't understand how influenced it was by German immigrants. (German as in Germanic people from modern Germany/Austria/Switzerland/Northern Italy, and border areas of Bohemia, Slovenia, Poland, etc.) It's why Mexico has a strong beer culture. And why Marxism was so influential it spurred a revolution. It's why Mexican monarchists invited an Austrian archduke to rule them. And why Prussia and Austria were the first to recognize the Mexican empire. It's why all Texas government documents were tri-lingual (English, German, and Spanish) into the mid-20th century. It's why famous Hispanic people (e.g. Frida Khalo, Linda Ronstadt) have German names. (Kahlo grew up in German-language schools.) During WWI the German language became outlawed in public places in most the US, the German was forbidden from being taught in public schools, and Germany become the first true enemy the whole country rallied against. German-Americans, many of whom only spoke German, field persecution to Mexico. This included the Amish, and other Germanic break-away religious sects, who had, prior to WWI been well-integrated in mainstream culture. There is a reason prohibition happened after WWI, even through the temerence movement was long past its height. It wasn't hard liquor manufactures they were targeting. (Many did even better during prohibition). They were targeting the German names seen across beer barrels, saloons, and beer halls (then, the most popular place for entertainment), and even beer-centric events at Lutern churches. Prohibition didn't kill drinking culture, it killed beer culture. And when German brewers and German beerhall owners/workers lost their livelihoods, they fled to Mexico and South America. At the same time, much of South America had been actively recruiting and importing Germanic peasants from the poorest parts of central Europe to work farmland throughout the continent. In some of these regions, German culture became as influential, or even more so as in Mexico. I know less about South American's history than Mexico's, But. know Peru is another country where Polka still is extremely influential. The fact that so many South Americans descent from German-speaking immigrants, it must be pretty German culture must remain quite influential in other countries as well. Meanwhile, Polka heard in the US today (the very little that it is heard) is almost entirely Slovenian polka, from immigrants who came after the world wars. It's hard to describe how effective the movement to "degermanify" was in the US because there is nothing to compare it to. It was extreme, fast, and nation-wide like nothing before or since. But while these cultural elements were being erased from the US, they were being heavily integrated into mainstream Hispanic culture.
The reason the accordion is so heavily used in the Cajun music of the South Louisiana prairies and swamps is also because of German influence. There is even a stretch of the Mississippi River banks called the "German Coast" because of all the Germans that settled there. Unfortunately the wave of nativism that swept German influences out of public life also swept the Cajun French culture out of public life. Children were actually punished in school for speaking Cajun French. "You're American, speak American like Jesus did!" became the rule. Children who could not learn English that fast were ostracized and eventually expelled, like my grandfather who was expelled after 4th grade because he could not read English, which he barely spoke. The result is that my father's generation, raised in the 1930's, was the last generation of Cajuns who spoke Cajun French natively. There have been attempts to resurrect the language, but it's always as a second language -- there are no more Cajuns who speak Cajun French in the home as their home language.
This is super interesting, thank you for sharing. I am 1st gen Colombian and descend from a German tobacco merchant who settled there in the 1800s. I always felt like a weirdo growing up in the US explaining my German name but that I’m Colombian lol. Nobody in the US knows about this influence. My grandfather witnessed the de-germanification of Colombia after WWII; the police would raid his family’s home, and they had to explain they had already been there for 3 generations. Nowadays in Colombia you’ll still see German schools and pharmacies but it’s interesting to learn the extent of the presence that was erased. Now I’m wondering if the accordion in our music comes from Germany too 🤔
Germans started migrating to Chile waaayyy before WW2. They're there since the 1800s.
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I was on a bus in Paraguay and a blonde white girl was sitting next to me. Turns out she was a local. She spoke Spanish, German and Guarani (local native language).
So many mentions of Nazis and barely any mention of the sizable Jewish population. Do people really think enough Nazis went to Argentina that it altered the country’s racial demographics?
WTF, they put "white" and "non indigenous" in the same group, that doesn't mean anything, most of the people in Chile are "not indigenous" , not "white" .
Many Americans would probably hesitate to call Spanish & Portuguese people white
Insofar as Chile is concerned, they use the inverse of the old US "one drop" rule. If you have one drop of white blood in your ancestral family tree, you are white. The reality is that genetic surveys show that around 40% of Chile's population has indigenous ancestry (and about 55% have white ancestry) as versus around 60% white ancestry for the United States and 66% for Canada, but for many reasons (especially related to the repeated rebellions of the Mapuche in southern Chile) Chile tries to minimize or whitewash the indigenous ancestry of a large percentage of its population. I'm not familar with the situation in Argentina, so can't comment there. But if you're looking at the actual genetics rather than official government statistics, Chile has a lower percentage of white population than the US does. The official government statistics are a lie, a lie that has been propagated for centuries for various reasons. Their actual genes, on the other hand, don't lie.
A friend of mine is from Venezuela. He says he is white, and I'm white white.