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There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all of Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially. In Mexico, for example, the category mestizo is not defined or applied the same as the corresponding category of mestiço in Brazil. In spite of these differences, the construction of race in Latin America can be contrasted with concepts of race and ethnicity in the United States. The ethno-racial composition of modern-day Latin American nations combines diverse indigenous American populations, with influence from Iberian colonizers and equally diverse African groups brought to the Americas as slave labor, and also recent immigrant groups from all over the world.
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Racial categories in Latin America are often linked to both continental ancestry or mixture as inferred from phenotypical traits, but also to socio-economic status. Ethnicity is often constructed either as an amalgam national identity or as something reserved for the indigenous groups so that ethnic identity is something that members of indigenous groups have in addition to their national identity. Racial and ethnic discrimination is common in Latin America where socio-economic status generally correlates with perceived whiteness, and indigenous status and perceived African ancestry is generally correlated with poverty and lack of opportunity and social status.
Concepts of race and ethnicity
In Latin American concepts of race, physiological traits is often combined with social traits such as socio-economic status, so that a person is categorized not only according to physical phenotype, but also according to social standing. Ethnicity on the other hand is a system that classifies groups of people according to cultural, linguistic and historic criteria. An ethnic group is normally defined by having a degree of cultural and linguistic similarity and often an ideology of shared roots. Another difference between race and ethnicity is that race is usually conceptualized as a system of categorization where membership is limited to one category, and is externally ascribed by other who are not members of that category without regards to the individuals own feeling of membership. Whereas Ethnicity is often seen as a system of social organization where membership is established through mutual identification between a group and its members.
The construction of race in Latin America is different from, for example, the model found in the United States, possibly because race mixing has been a common practice since the early colonial period, whereas in the US it has generally been avoided.
Blanqueamiento
Blanqueamiento, or whitening, is a social, political, and economic practice used to "improve" the race (mejorar la raza) towards whiteness. The term blanqueamiento is rooted in Latin America and is used more or less synonymous with racial whitening. However, blanqueamiento can be considered in both the symbolic and biological sense Symbolically, blanqueamiento represents an ideology that emerged from legacies of European Colonialism, described by Anibal Quijano’s theory of Coloniality of power, which caters to white dominance in social hierarchies Biologically, blanqueamiento is the process of whitening by marrying a lighter skinned individual in order to produce lighter-skinned offspring.
Blanqueamiento was enacted in national policies of many Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba, at the turn of the 20th century. In most cases, these policies promoted European immigration as a means to whiten the population.
Mestizaje
An important phenomenon described for some parts of Latin America such as Brazil and Mexico is "Whitening" or "Mestizaje" describing the policy of planned racial mixing with the purpose of minimizing the non-white part of the population. This practice was possible as in these countries one is classified as white even with very few white phenotypical traits and it has meant that the percentages of people identifying as fully black or indigenous has increased over the course of the twentieth century as the mixed class expanded. It has also meant that the racial categories have been fluid. Unlike the U.S where ancestry is used to define race, Latin American scholars came to agree by the 1970s that race in Latin America could not be understood as the “genetic composition of individuals” but instead “based upon a combination of cultural, social, and somatic considerations. In Latin America, a person's ancestry is quite irrelevant to racial classification. For example, full-blooded siblings can often be classified by different races (Harris 1964).
Casta
During the Spanish colonial period, Spaniards developed a complex caste system based on race, which was used for social control and which also determined a person's rights in society. There were four main categories of race: (1) Peninsular - a Spaniard born in Spain, (2) Criollo (fem. criolla) - a person of Spanish descent born in Mesoamerica, (3) Indio (fem. India) - a person who is a native of, or indigenous to, Mesoamerica, and (4) Negro (fem. Negra) - a person of African slave descent. There were also other caste groups like the Mestizos/Mestizas that had one Spanish and one Indian parent. The Castizos which had one Mestizo parent and one Spanish parent, the children of a Castizo were generally accepted as a Criollo. Mulatto/Mulatta were usually the ones with one Spanish and one Black parent, if a mulatto was born in slavery they were considered slaves as well unless the mother was free then they would be free too.
Mexico
Very generally speaking ethno-racial relations can be arranged on an axis between the two extremes of European and Amerindian cultural and biological heritage, this is a remnant of the colonial Spanish caste system which categorized individuals according to their perceived level of biological mixture between the two groups. Additionally the presence of considerable portions of the population with partly African and Asian heritage further complicates the situation. Even though it still arranges persons along the line between indigenous and European, in practice the classificatory system is no longer biologically based, but rather mixes socio-cultural traits with phenotypical traits, and classification is largely fluid, allowing individuals to move between categories and define their ethnic and racial identities situationally.
Generally, it can be said that in scholarship, as well as popular discourse, there has been a tendency of talking about indigenous peoples in terms of ethnicity, about afro-minorities and white socio-economic privilege in terms of race, and about mestizos in tems of national identity. It is now however becoming recognized that processes of identity formation and social stratification in regards to all population groups in Mexico can be analyzed both in terms of race and of ethnicity.
Mestizos
The large majority of Mexicans can be classified as "Mestizos", meaning that they neither identify fully with any indigenous culture or with a particular non-Mexican heritage, but rather identify as having cultural traits and heritage that is mixed by elements from indigenous and European traditions. By the deliberate efforts of post-revolutionary governments the "Mestizo identity" was constructed as the base of the modern Mexican national identity, through a process of cultural synthesis referred to as mestizaje. Mexican politicians and reformers such as José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio were instrumental in building a Mexican national identity on the concept of mestizaje (see the section below).
The term "Mestizo" is not in wide use in Mexican society today and has been dropped as a category in population censuses, it is however still used in social and cultural studies when referring to the non-indigenous part of the Mexican population. The word has somewhat pejorative connotations and most of the Mexican citizens who would be defined as mestizos in the sociological literature would probably self-identify primarily as Mexicans. In the Yucatán peninsula, the word Mestizo is even used about Maya speaking populations living in traditional communities, because during the caste war of the late 19th century those Maya who did not join the rebellion were classified as mestizos. In Chiapas the word "Ladino" is used instead of mestizo.
Sometimes, particularly outside of Mexico, the word "mestizo" is used with the meaning of a person with mixed Indigenous and European blood. This usage does not conform to the Mexican social reality where, like in Brazil, a person of mostly indigenous genetic heritage would be considered Mestizo either by rejecting his indigenous culture or by not speaking an indigenous language, and a person with a very low percentage of indigenous genetic heritage would be considered fully indigenous either by speaking an indigenous language or by identifying with a particular indigenous cultural heritage. Additionally the categories carry additional meanings having to do with social class so that the term indigena or the more pejorative "indio" (Indian) is connected with ideas of low social class, poverty, rural background, superstition, being dominated by traditional values as opposed to reason. Commonly, instead of the term Mestizo, which also has a somewhat pejorative usage, the term "gente de razón" ("people of reason") is used and contrasted with "gente de costumbre" ("people of tradition"), cementing the status of indigeneity being connected to superstition and backwardness. For example, it has been observed that upwards social mobility is generally correlated with "whitening", if persons with indigenous biological and cultural roots rise to positions of power and prestige they tend to be viewed as more "white" than if they belonged to a lower social class.
Indigenous groups
Prior to contact with Europeans the indigenous peoples of Mexico had not had any kind of shared identity. Indigenous identity was constructed by the dominant Euro-Mestizo majority and imposed upon the indigenous people as a negatively defined identity, characterized by the lack of assimilation into modern Mexico. Indian identity therefore became socially stigmatizing. Cultural policies in early post-revolutionary Mexico were paternalistic towards the indigenous people, with efforts designed to "help" indigenous peoples achieve the same level of progress as the rest of society, eventually assimilating indigenous peoples completely to Mestizo Mexican culture, working toward the goal of eventually solving the "indian problem" by transforming indigenous communities into mestizo communities .
The category of "indigena" (indigenous) can be defined narrowly according to linguistic criteria including only persons that speak one of Mexico's 62 indigenous languages, this is the categorization used by the National Mexican Institute of Statistics. It can also be defined broadly to include all persons who self-identify as having an indigenous cultural background, whether or not they speak the language of the indigenous group they identify with. This means that the percentage of the Mexican population defined as "indigenous" varies according to the definition applied, cultural activists have referred to the usage of the narrow definition of the term for census purposes as "statistical genocide".
Mestizaje
In Mexico in the post-revolutionary period, Mestizaje was a racial ideology that combined elements of the Euro-American ideologies of the racial superiority of the "white race" with the social reality of a postcolonial, multiracial setting. It promoted the use of planned miscegenation as a eugenic strategy designed to improve the overall quality of the population by multiplying white genetic material to the entire population. This ideology was very different from the way the eugenics debate was carried out in Europe and North America, where racial "purity" and anti-miscegenation legislation was the eugenic strategy of choice. The ideology of Mestizaje came from the long tradition of tolerance of racial mixing that existed in the Spanish colonies.
The ideology was also a part of the strategy of forging a national identity to serve as the basis of a modern nation state, and for this reason mestizaje also became a way of fusing disparate cultural identities into a single national ethnicity.
The ideology was influently worded by José Vasconcelos who in his La Raza Cósmica formulated a vision of how a "race of the future" would be created by mixing the mongoloid, negroid, and caucasian races. As the place where this mixing was already well underway, Mexico, and Latin America in general, was the center of the creation of this new and improved species of human beings, the mestizo.