Race in Latin America
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Race in Latin America
EDWARD TELLES
Abstract
Race has long been a primary cleavage in Latin American societies, where people
of African, Indigenous, and European origin have been present in large numbers.
Although they have promoted race mixture as central to their national identities
and often denied racism and racial discrimination, racial hierarchies have also been
prominent features up until the present. Today, most Latin American countries have
declared themselves multiculturalist and have begun to recognize their black and
indigenous populations, largely in response to minority social movements and as
these societies have begun to democratize. At the same time, the academic literature
on the subject has blossomed.
Social distinctions and ethnic hierarchies based on phenotype, ancestry, and
language have been prominent features of social life throughout the Western
Hemisphere for more than 500 years. Since 1492, Europeans’ incursions into
the Americas brought them into contact with the native peoples of the continent, whom they would soon decimate through war and disease or would
enslave or subject to various forms of servitude and harsh labor systems.
Facing the growing labor demand in these rapidly expanding economies,
the decimation of indigenous labor from disease and war with prohibitions
against enslaving them, the Spanish and Portuguese would enslave and
forcibly transport millions of Africans to the Americas for nearly 400 years,
up to the nineteenth century. Fully 15 times as many Africans—11 times in
Brazil only—were brought to Latin America compared to the United States.
The region’s racial complexity increased further through the extensive
mixture of Indians, Africans, and Europeans and a racial hierarchy, with
Europeans at the top and blacks and indigenous peoples at the bottom. Race
mixture would become a central concern in the nineteenth century with the
new independence of these republics with elites concerned that their large
nonwhite populations would doom national development and thus sought
ways to whiten their population. By the mid-twentieth century, as race
science was becoming discredited and openly racist societies were becoming
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
global pariahs, many Latin American elites turned their race mixture into
virtues, with a new ideology of mestizaje. Although the elites moved from
centuries of explicit racial domination toward seeking harmonious race relations, social hierarchies based on race, color, and language have nonetheless
persisted, as various analysts have shown (Flórez et al., 2001; Ñopo et al.,
2007; Patrinos & Psachoroupoulos, 1994; Telles and Steele, 2012).
Today, most Latin American countries have recently declared themselves
multiculturalist. With this multiculturalist turn, many Latin American
countries have begun to constitutionally recognize ethnoracial distinctions
and disadvantages and discrimination suffered by indigenous and Afrodescendants. Brazil has even instituted social policies to redress minority
disadvantages on a large scale; other countries are doing so to some extent.
Multiculturalism has also been accompanied by a growing consciousness
of ethnic diversity and the adoption of ethnoracial identification in the
censuses of nearly all Latin American countries, yet vast inequalities remain.
In the next section, we go through a general history of race in the region in
general but note that exceptions among the 20 or so countries in the region,
did sometimes exist. In addition, we refer to race (or racial) and race and
ethnicity (or ethnoracial) alternatively, for reasons we discuss later.
A SHORT ETHNORACIAL HISTORY
COLONIZATION, INDEPENDENCE, AND WHITENING
Throughout the colonial period, the biological reproduction of whites was
generally constrained by the high sex ratio among Spanish and Portuguese
colonists because their immigration to the Americas was, for the most part,
largely male. Spanish and Portuguese males, seeking to escape poverty in
Europe, came to the New World in search of wealth; in contrast, the English
settlement of the United States tended to be more family oriented, beginning with many families that were escaping religious persecution. In Latin
America, the result was a relatively small, and mostly male, European population; they, and their criollo descendants, were oriented toward resource
extraction economies, fueled by a large black, indigenous, and mixed race
population. The paucity of white women led to high rates of mixture among
nonwhite women and white men, especially lower-class white men whose
status reduced their marital prospects but whose whiteness gave them access
to nonwhite women Martinez Alier, 1974; Telles, 2004).
Although the idea of race came into being in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, systems of domination and power, based partly on ancestry,
were clearly present before that. During much of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Spanish colonial authorities became concerned with
Race in Latin America
3
mixture and the large nonwhite populations, and established a system of
castas (literally, castes), which defined the proportion of Spanish blood that
people carried. Spanish royal edicts mandated that subjects be taxed and
assigned trades and offices according to their casta. The casta system was
not a unified, coherent system throughout Spanish America because each
Audiencia could introduce local casta regulations. However, they often
used phenotype or skin color or other phenotypic markers as genealogies
were rarely available except in the most elite families. Spaniards and their
“pure-blooded” descendants were clearly aware of their privileged status
as they were given full legal and social rights, which granted them access
to elite jobs, schools, occupations, and various economic opportunities.
Whiteness also bestowed pureblood Spaniards with honor and pride; even
lower class whites treasured their racial purity as their “most precious and
inalienable asset, an inheritance which entitled them to unquestioned legal
superiority over non-whites.” (Andrews, 1980, p. 18) Whiteness also became
a valued property in the marriage market for both whites and nonwhites,
allowing the former to maintain high status for their children and permitting
the latter higher status for themselves and especially their children (Acuña
Leon & Chavarria Lopez, 1991; Martinez Alier, 1974).
Eventually, Spaniards began to deploy the term raza (literally, race) instead
of casta, especially in reference to persons of full or partial African ancestry (Martinez, 2009). However, local elites began to suspend casta laws with
Spain’s liberal constitution of 1812 making Spain and its colonies a single
nation, and these laws everywhere would fall with the independence movements of the 1820s, when most people (except slaves) became formally equal
before the law. Moreover, as generations of race mixing made castes unsustainable and as mercantile capitalism expanded, feudal-like ideas about lineage were gradually replaced by informal discourses about physical appearance (Graham, 1990; Martinez, 2009). The movement out of one casta and
into another, often associated with changing professions, seems to be early
evidence of Latin America’s substantial racial fluidity, which continues into
the present.
In the early nineteenth century, Latin American elites set out to create independent nations out of the remnants of the old Iberian colonies in the New
World; they often debated extensively about how to incorporate indigenous
and black people. Their concepts of nation were built largely around ideas
of race and mixture, motivated by concerns over their large nonwhite populations. Until the late nineteenth century, Latin American societies were
predominately rural and mostly nonwhite (Andrews, 2004).
Often fearing dissension from their nonwhite populations, Latin American
elites often sought to include them in vital areas such as the military but
limited them from becoming part of the elite and middle classes. In their
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
fights for independence and during civil wars, as in Gran Colombia and
Cuba, many criollo (American-born descendants of Spaniards) leaders
sought alliances with nonwhites, largely because they perceived them as
essential in the fight for independence from European powers. Thus, they
sometimes promised nonwhites citizenship and freedom in the new nations,
although often as racial subordinates. Later wars in the nineteenth century
also involved slaves and indigenous persons who enlisted in the hope of
being freed, or acquiring land.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, and
had by far the largest slave population. Moreover, its independence period
was much different from that in Spanish Latin America. In 1821, Brazil
became independent from Portugal but it remained a monarchy headed by
the son of the Portuguese monarch, who had previously fled Portugal in
advance of Napoleon’s army. Because of this relatively smooth transition,
it had no significant war of independence with the great losses of life seen
in the former Spanish republics. As the exception to a relatively warless
nineteenth century, the Brazilian monarchy entered the bloody Paraguayan
War of 1864 to 1870, and promised manumission (freedom from slavery) to
its largely slave army recruits. By that time, although, most of the descendants of Africans had been freed, a significant African-born population was
still largely enslaved, as the slave trade ended in that country only in 1850
(Andrews, 2004).
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Latin American elites became increasingly concerned that their often large nonwhite
populations might imperil national development, largely in response to
contemporary scientifically endorsed ideas of a biological white supremacy
(Helg, 1990; Skidmore, 1976). To be modern like Europe and the United
States, they thought that a white (or nearly white) population was essential. Early pseudo-scientific theories that linked race to intelligence had
turned their large nonwhite populations into liabilities. Nevertheless,
the neo-Lamarckian ideas about the mutability of race and constructive
miscegenation in which white genes would predominate in successive
generations gave these elites hope that their populations could be whitened
(Skidmore, 1976; Stepan, 1991). Countries like Argentina, Chile, Cuba,
Uruguay, Venezuela, and (southern) Brazil also succeeded in attracting
European immigrants to meet their whitening goals but most other Latin
American countries such as Peru, and Colombia largely failed, despite their
efforts (Fitzgerald & Martín, 2014; Larson, 2004).
Race in Latin America
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MESTIZAJE
By the 1930s, leading thinkers in many Latin American countries (clearly
not all) would turn the previous racialist thinking of whitening on its head,
with their innovative nation-building ideas of mestizaje. Scientific racism, the
basis for whitening strategies in Latin America, began to come under fire in
the early twentieth century in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Its scientific undoing was largely at the hands of anthropologist Franz Boas,
who argued that so-called racial differences were rooted not in biology but
rather in culture. Moreover, Boas had a tremendous influence in Latin America as he trained arguably the most important thinkers of the new mestizaje
discourse in Brazil and Mexico: Gilberto Freyre and Manuel Gamio (Telles &
PERLA, 2014). Through such thinkers, the scientifically backed but increasingly discredited ideas of whitening began to lose support in favor of progressive ideologies that viewed race mixture as positive. Throughout much
of the twentieth century, Brazil touted itself as a racial democracy, which
could be contrasted with the horrors of explicitly racist regimes in the United
States under Jim Crow, South Africa with Apartheid and Nazi Germany. Mestizaje, referring to both biological and cultural mixture, had become a central
trope for understanding ethnicity, race, and nation in much of Latin America;
it continues to be used as a point of contrast with the United States.
In contrast to whitening, mestizaje would put a positive spin on the
region’s biological and cultural mixing by glorifying it as central to the
nation (although not necessarily discarding the scientifically endorsed ideas
of white biological supremacy). Latin American elites would often claim
that mestizaje signaled racial harmony; at the same time, they promoted the
idea that Latin America was morally superior to a racially segregated United
States, although instances of de jure racial exclusions were not entirely absent
in twentieth century Latin America.1 Moreover, Latin American societies
did not face the “American” dilemma of ethnoracial injustice in a country
that deemed itself the archetype of democracy and egalitarianism. However,
they could ensure a racial hierarchy (although not US-style segregation)
because they were generally authoritarian and black and indigenous people
were widely accepted as inferior.
More than just ideologies of race and ethnicity, mestizaje ideologies would
present racial mixture as an essential feature of these new nations and of a
national peoplehood, as they sought to proclaim that race and nation were
coterminous. Elites sought to create visions of the nation as homogeneous;
in these visions, national or mestizo identities would seek to replace the
previous ethnoracial identities (Knight, 1990; Telles, 2004; Wade, 1993).
1. Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Panama had de jure segregation at about the same time, though not at
the level of the United States. Also, there were instances of explicit racial exclusions as in the case of the
revocation of citizenship to West Indians in 1940s Panama and anti-Chinese movements in 1920s Mexico.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Their narratives presented Brazilians, Mexicans, and other national subjects
as metaraces that fused white, indigenous, and (sometimes) black blood
and/or culture; now, mestizos or mixed-race persons would be considered
the ideal or prototypical citizens (Knight, 1990; Mallon, 1992; Skidmore, 1976;
Whitten, 2004). Mestizo identities would appeal to many in the population,
even those who would often be seen as, and otherwise identify themselves
as, indigenous, black, and mulatto (de la Cadena, 2000; Telles and PERLA,
2014). On the other hand, mestizaje has also been criticized for erasing black
and indigenous peoples from the consciousness of the general population,
effectively leading to their cultural and statistical genocide (Bonfil Batalla,
1990; Nascimento, 1979).
Nevertheless, mestizaje ideologies varied within the region from strong
mestizaje ideologies in Mexico and Brazil to those that continued to explicitly
promote whitening, most notably Argentina (Graham, 1990; Telles & Garcia,
2013). Moreover, mestizaje tended to stress indigenous and European admixture and downplay or ignore African contributions, although the latter were
clearly recognized in Brazil and Cuba (Telles & PERLA, 2014).
Mestizaje has become a widely shared Latin American experience. At the
level of racial classification, racial categories are certainly numerous and classification is often ambiguous and fluid across these categories than in the
United States (Telles, 2004; Telles & PERLA, 2014; Wade, 1997). There was
arguably greater actual racial mixture in Latin America simply because of
its lopsided sex ratio among its colonizers and the region’s near absence of
legal prohibitions against intermarriage that were common in the United
States (Cottrol, 2013). Today, black–white intermarriage is clearly higher, at
least, in Brazil than in the United States (Telles, 2004). Perhaps more importantly, the presence of mixed-race categories and large numbers of people
identifying themselves as such demonstrates the widespread popularity of
mixed-raced identification and the fact that mestizaje has become established
in Latin America (Telles, 2004; Telles & Flores, 2013). As a lived experience,
Wade (2005) also shows how mestizaje is reflected in family relationships and
friendship networks. Mestizaje is also apparent in its cultural form, as in religion (Andrews, 2010; Telles, 2004), music (Sansone, 2003; Wade, 2005), and
literary expression (Bost, 2003; Martínez-Echazábal, 1998; Miller, 2004).
An ideology of mestizaje has also been consistent with a social scientific
tradition in Latin America which has emphasized class and treats race as
an epiphenomenon of class or as a distraction from class cleavages and
class struggle (Altria, 2004; González Casanova, 1965). According to various
scholarly traditions in Latin America that derive from the Marxist, Weberian,
Mertonian, and Bourdieuan traditions, stratification and mobility are based
mostly on class origins and the class structure (Altria, 2004). Indeed, current
studies of mobility in Latin America tend to ignore the influence of race
Race in Latin America
7
(Behrman, Gavira, & Székely, 2001), whether for reasons of theory or data
availability.
THE MULTICULTURAL TURN
The contexts for understanding race and ethnicity in much of Latin America are rapidly changing in what is often called the multicultural turn. This
has occurred in the context of an economic transition and growing democratization. The domestically focused economic model of industrial growth of
the 1980s, based on import substitution, seems to have run its course; now
Latin Americans are involved in neoliberal and globalized models of economic development, which have exposed these countries to greater external
pressure and scrutiny, including the monitoring of human rights norms by
private international organizations and UN human rights committees, legislation, and forums (Telles, 2004; Van Cott, 2000).
In a rapid transition taking less than three decades, nearly all Latin American countries are now considered representative democracies, in contrast
to only 4 of the 19 in the mid-1970s (Mainwaring & Perez-Linan, 2013). As
part of their democratization process, more nations are officially recognizing the identities, dignity, and rights of Afrodescendants and indigenous
people; many have declared themselves multicultural in their constitutions,
providing communal and other rights for the indigenous and sometimes for
Afrodescendants (Hooker, 2005). Democratization and greater transparency
are being promoted by domestic civil society, including black and indigenous movements. These forces have started to weaken the mestizaje ideas
that tended to homogenize the nation.
Since the 1980s, black and indigenous movements have emerged as
important new global and domestic actors, pointing out and challenging
the region’s inequalities. The 2001 United Nations Conference on Racism in
Durban, South Africa, was promoted by black movements, including groups
of Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Colombians; it increased awareness of racial
inequalities throughout Latin America. At the same time, truth commissions
in Peru and Guatemala discovered that most victims of internal armed conflict were indigenous peoples and the Zapatista rebellion, beginning in 1994
(and still unresolved), reminded Mexicans and the Mexican government that
indigenous communities are severely marginalized and have the capacity
to hinder national development plans. Often backed by an international
network of human rights supporters and institutions, including UN forums
to promote human rights, indigenous and black movement activists are now
strong enough to pressure their governments to address their persistent
social exclusion. In Brazil, both class- and race-based affirmative action now
exists in most public institutes of higher education, upheld by the Brazilian
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Supreme Court and legislatively mandated for all federal universities and
other federal institutes of higher education (Telles & Paixão, 2013).
Under multiculturalism, ethnic and racial identities are finally being
allowed to flourish and discrimination can no longer be hidden easily.
Hale (2002) considers multiculturalism a new form of mestizaje as the state
continues to administer and provide a narrative for ethnoracial difference,
despite the actions and sentiments of minorities. One outcome of the
multiculturalist turn is the latest round of national censuses, which collect
data on race, in almost all cases.
OFFICIAL ETHNIC STATISTICS IN LATIN AMERICA
Official efforts at data collection largely run parallel to this history. As many
countries sought to assess their progress in whitening their populations in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they took ethnoracial censuses
(Appelbaum et al. 2003; Stepan, 1991). The inclusion of race queries peaked
in the 1920s and was then dropped in many countries for ideological and
political reasons but also because the scientific consensus began to invalidate
race as a concept or category for understanding human behavior (Loveman,
2014). Liberals and conservatives alike also believed that using the census
to count their people by race would reify any belief that their country was
racialized or even racist, and would thus fuel the specter of a racially divided
society.
By the 1990s, although, race and ethnic data began to appear with the
shift to multiculturalism and the demand for ethnoracial recognition and
the growing acceptance that race and ethnicity were social constructs that
were associated with societal inequalities. Largely as a result of pressure
by international human rights groups and international conventions,
particularly the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 (Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention), adopted in 1989 and ratified by
most Latin American countries by 2000, many Latin American countries
began collecting ethnoracial data for the first time in decades. In addition,
Latin American activists at the 2001 UN Conference in Durban demanded
that their governments collect data on ethnicity and race. Without such
data to document ethnoracial inequities, governments could easily turn a
blind eye to racial inequality and stick to a national mestizaje narrative of
nondiscrimination, racial harmony, and equality. Collecting data on race
and ethnicity was also considered an important first step in the transition to
multiculturalism. Indeed, many countries in the region began this process
through their national censuses.
As of this writing, almost all countries now have census data for ethnic
minorities since 2000. Nearly all countries have data on the indigenous as
Race in Latin America
9
mandated by the ILO Convention 169, although Bolivia began collecting such
data in 1850 and Mexico in 1895 (Del Popolo, 2008; Loveman, 2014). Countries such as Mexico and Peru do not collect data on Afrodescendants. Cuba
has census information for its Afrodescendants but not for its indigenous
people. Both Uruguay and Peru have collected information on both groups
in national household surveys and each plans to collect such data in its next
census. The Dominican Republic has not collected official data on race since
1960 but is considering it for its next census (Republica Dominicana, 2012).
Besides Brazil, only Cuba has collected data on its black population in most
of its censuses since the late nineteenth century.
Table 1 shows the current proportion of the population that identifies as
indigenous or Afrodescendant for each Latin American country, according
to, in order of priority: (i) the latest census; (ii) where census information is
not available, recent national survey data, and (iii) where neither is available, estimates from the 2010 America’s Barometer (of the Latin American
Public Opinion Project or LAPOP). The complete source list can be found in
Telles and PERLA (2014). The second, third, and fourth columns refer to the
Afrodescendant population, while the fifth, sixth, and seventh columns refer
to the indigenous population. The final column refers to the total national
population according to the most recent Census.
On the basis of these figures, we calculated a range of 113–133 million
Afrodescendants, or 20.4–24.0% of the entire Latin American population
of 554 million. This range is due to the ambiguity inherent in particular
categories in two countries: moreno in Venezuela and Indio in the Dominican
Republic, both of which do not specifically name persons of African or black
ancestry and may contain others as well. For that matter, many pardos in
Brazil are probably not Afrodescendants (Telles and Paschel, 2014) but in
that case, pardos and pretos, collectively, are widely and officially considered
Afrodescendants (Telles and PERLA, 2014). On the other hand, others might
argue that even the 133 million figure is an underestimate because many
Afrodescendants might not declare themselves as such because of their
stigmatization and their ability to move out of these categories in the Latin
American system.
By far, the largest Afrodescendant population resides in Brazil.
Afro-Brazilians, comprised of the preto and pardo categories, constitute roughly half (50.4%) of the population in the region’s largest country, as
a result, comprising a large majority (73.0–85.9%) of all Afrodescendants in
Latin America. Relatively large numbers also reside in Colombia, Cuba, and
the Dominican Republic. Based on the 2010 America’s Barometer, Mexico
also registers a surprisingly large number of persons that self-identified as
black or mulatto, although it is a small percentage of that large country’s
10
2010
2012
2010
2012
2005
2011
2012
2010
2010
2007
2011
2011
2010
2005
2010
2012
2007
2011
2011
Argentina
Bolivia
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cuba
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Nicaragua
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Uruguay
Venezuela
150
24
97,083
97
4274
334
3885
(A) 2267
(B) 8980
1.043
7
5.0
59
2366
23
313
234
411
255
(A)953
(B)14,534
(A) 112,035
(B) 133,027
Afrodescendant
Population
Source: See Telles and PERLA (2014) for extensive sources list.
Total
Year
Countries
0.4
0.2
50.9
0.6
10.5
7.8
34.8
(A) 24.0
(B) 89.0
7.2
0.13
0.0
1.0
2.2
0.4
9.2
3.5
1.5
7.8
(A)3.5
(B)53.4
(A) 20.2
(B) 24.0
Percentage
2010
2007
2011
2001
2010
2005
2010
2012
2007
2011
2011
2010
2012
2010
2012
2005
2011
2012
2010
Year
34,317
1014
13
4428
428
11,133
444
418
116
7600
159
953
955
4068
897
1700
1393
104
—
2267
Indigenous
Population
6.2
7.0
0.23
30.0
7.0
9.9
8.6
12.3
1.7
27.0
4.8
3.5
2.4
40.6
0.5
10.3
3.4
2.4
—
24
Percentage
Table 1
Afrodescendant and Indigenous Population (in 1000s) and Percentages in Latin America by Country
554,298
14,484
5744
14,713
8448
112,337
5142
3454
6673
27,412
3286
27,228
40,117
10,027
190,733
16,636
41,468
4302
11,163
9445
Total
National
Population
Race in Latin America
11
population. By contrast, six countries in the region (Argentina, Bollivia, Chile,
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) have Afrodescendant populations
that comprise less than 1%.
Indigenous people, based on the best available figures, number 34 million
people, which is 6.2% of the Latin American population. The largest numbers
of indigenous people live in Mexico and Peru, although higher percentages
of national populations are found in Guatemala and Bolivia. Like Afrodescendants, estimates of the indigenous population are often an artifact of the
indicator used, including the way questions are worded and the response categories available, as we continue to show throughout this essay.Estimates of
black and indigenous populations are sensitive to the census question wording and response categories as illustrated by such changes in the Bolivian
Census, which resulted in an indigenous population of 42% in 2012 compared
to 62% in 2001.
Human relations in Latin America often involve relationships among persons of various phenotypes and cultures, but they also often involve power
differentials (racism), in which humans are classified according (racialized)
to characteristics such as color, culture, or language. In the Americas, these
characteristics are often denoted by categories that are popularly known as
races (or more politely, ethnic groups). While the idea of race is not a valid
biological category as it once was thought to be, it is important as a social construct, with very real consequences for one’s life chances (Telles and PERLA,
2014).
Today as in the past, one’s ethnoracial position often becomes naturalized:
whites or lighter-skinned mestizos tend to be privileged while indigenous
peoples, Afrodescendants, and dark-skinned persons are often seen and
treated as less deserving. In this way, Latin Americans often use distinctions
based on “race,” culture—whether real, self-identified, or putative—and
skin color as markers of social worth and class origins. As people continue
this everyday behavior, they reproduce ethnoracial hierarchies and inequalities. As a clear example of how white (or near white in the Latin American
case) privilege is naturalized, consider television and magazine propaganda:
light-skinned actors and models predominate, while dark-skinned persons,
although they arguably represent most Latin Americans, are nearly absent.
As a result, someone unfamiliar with Latin America who watches Latin
American television, whether produced in Mexico, Brazil, or any other
Latin American country, could mistakenly conclude that Latin Americans
look like Europeans. This example is just at the level of representation.
Compelling sociological evidence for several Latin American countries is
emerging, which shows that educators, employers, and voters use race to
make important decisions (Aguilar, 2012; Rodriguez Garavito et al., 2014;
Telles, 2004).
12
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The visible manifestation of “color” is particularly important in Latin
America, which involves a continuum of visible difference and which is
masked by the usual ethnoracial categories (Nogueira, 1955; Telles, Flores, &
Urrea Giraldo, 2012). Language is arguably the main marker distinguishing
indigenous people from others, a distinction that has been referred to as
racial.
Distinct ideas about indigenous and Afrodescendant people emerged early
in colonial Spanish America as well as in anthropological thought; ideas
about one group or the other were often clearly related to each other. Von
Vacano (2012) notes how American ideas of whiteness began in European
encounters with natives but the bulk of thinking about race was built on
the population descended from enslaved Africans. Bartolomé de las Casas
advocated strongly for an end to the indigenous slavery of the sixteenth
century, although at first he suggested alternative sources of slaves, particularly Africans, an idea he would later renounce (Gutiérrez, 1991). Indeed,
Baker (2010) argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists
to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth
century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race, which was
eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century.
With the turn to multiculturalism, such comparisons have become more
important, especially as governments seek to recognize ethnoracial minorities. In his comparisons of blacks and indigenous people, Wade (1997) argues
that the indigenous have occupied a more privileged position than blacks
in Latin America, and that early on the Catholic Church considered them
more worthy of redemption and made more attempts to assimilate them,
compared to Afrodescendants. Hooker (2005) also notes that national policies have often favored indigenous claims over those of Afrodescendants as
a result of distinct ideas about the two groups. The indigenous are seen as
culturally distinct, while Afrodescendants are considered largely acculturated (Hooker, 2005). Moreover, the indigenous inhabited the Americas long
before Columbus arrived and therefore Latin Americans thus perceive that
they are entitled to certain rights such as their own land and way of life that
are often not extended to blacks (Hooker, 2005). Symbolically and perhaps
politically, then, the indigenous seem to occupy a higher status than Afrodescendants, especially in relation to nation-making narratives in the region
which often ignore or downplay the black contribution to mestizaje. Still, as
Telles et al. (2012) have shown, the indigenous have the lowest socioeconomic
status of all ethnoracial groups in Latin America.
This essay represents only a snippet of the long and nationally diverse paths
that the idea of race has taken in Latin America. In recent years, academic
interest in the topic of race in Latin America has grown exponentially. We
refer readers to only a small part of that literature.
Race in Latin America
13
REFERENCES
Aguilar, R. (2012). Los tonos de los desafíos democráticos: El color de piel y la raza
en México. In Política y Gobierno. México: CIDE.
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Race in Latin America
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Latin America. Hispanic American Historical Review, 93(3), 411–449.
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10–11.
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EDWARD TELLES SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Edward Telles is a professor of Sociology at Princeton University, a principal
investigator for the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA),
and a director of the Center for Migration and Development (CMD). His
books include Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil
(2004), Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race (with
Vilma Ortiz, 2008), and Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America (with Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), 2014).
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-
Race in Latin America
EDWARD TELLES
Abstract
Race has long been a primary cleavage in Latin American societies, where people
of African, Indigenous, and European origin have been present in large numbers.
Although they have promoted race mixture as central to their national identities
and often denied racism and racial discrimination, racial hierarchies have also been
prominent features up until the present. Today, most Latin American countries have
declared themselves multiculturalist and have begun to recognize their black and
indigenous populations, largely in response to minority social movements and as
these societies have begun to democratize. At the same time, the academic literature
on the subject has blossomed.
Social distinctions and ethnic hierarchies based on phenotype, ancestry, and
language have been prominent features of social life throughout the Western
Hemisphere for more than 500 years. Since 1492, Europeans’ incursions into
the Americas brought them into contact with the native peoples of the continent, whom they would soon decimate through war and disease or would
enslave or subject to various forms of servitude and harsh labor systems.
Facing the growing labor demand in these rapidly expanding economies,
the decimation of indigenous labor from disease and war with prohibitions
against enslaving them, the Spanish and Portuguese would enslave and
forcibly transport millions of Africans to the Americas for nearly 400 years,
up to the nineteenth century. Fully 15 times as many Africans—11 times in
Brazil only—were brought to Latin America compared to the United States.
The region’s racial complexity increased further through the extensive
mixture of Indians, Africans, and Europeans and a racial hierarchy, with
Europeans at the top and blacks and indigenous peoples at the bottom. Race
mixture would become a central concern in the nineteenth century with the
new independence of these republics with elites concerned that their large
nonwhite populations would doom national development and thus sought
ways to whiten their population. By the mid-twentieth century, as race
science was becoming discredited and openly racist societies were becoming
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
global pariahs, many Latin American elites turned their race mixture into
virtues, with a new ideology of mestizaje. Although the elites moved from
centuries of explicit racial domination toward seeking harmonious race relations, social hierarchies based on race, color, and language have nonetheless
persisted, as various analysts have shown (Flórez et al., 2001; Ñopo et al.,
2007; Patrinos & Psachoroupoulos, 1994; Telles and Steele, 2012).
Today, most Latin American countries have recently declared themselves
multiculturalist. With this multiculturalist turn, many Latin American
countries have begun to constitutionally recognize ethnoracial distinctions
and disadvantages and discrimination suffered by indigenous and Afrodescendants. Brazil has even instituted social policies to redress minority
disadvantages on a large scale; other countries are doing so to some extent.
Multiculturalism has also been accompanied by a growing consciousness
of ethnic diversity and the adoption of ethnoracial identification in the
censuses of nearly all Latin American countries, yet vast inequalities remain.
In the next section, we go through a general history of race in the region in
general but note that exceptions among the 20 or so countries in the region,
did sometimes exist. In addition, we refer to race (or racial) and race and
ethnicity (or ethnoracial) alternatively, for reasons we discuss later.
A SHORT ETHNORACIAL HISTORY
COLONIZATION, INDEPENDENCE, AND WHITENING
Throughout the colonial period, the biological reproduction of whites was
generally constrained by the high sex ratio among Spanish and Portuguese
colonists because their immigration to the Americas was, for the most part,
largely male. Spanish and Portuguese males, seeking to escape poverty in
Europe, came to the New World in search of wealth; in contrast, the English
settlement of the United States tended to be more family oriented, beginning with many families that were escaping religious persecution. In Latin
America, the result was a relatively small, and mostly male, European population; they, and their criollo descendants, were oriented toward resource
extraction economies, fueled by a large black, indigenous, and mixed race
population. The paucity of white women led to high rates of mixture among
nonwhite women and white men, especially lower-class white men whose
status reduced their marital prospects but whose whiteness gave them access
to nonwhite women Martinez Alier, 1974; Telles, 2004).
Although the idea of race came into being in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, systems of domination and power, based partly on ancestry,
were clearly present before that. During much of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Spanish colonial authorities became concerned with
Race in Latin America
3
mixture and the large nonwhite populations, and established a system of
castas (literally, castes), which defined the proportion of Spanish blood that
people carried. Spanish royal edicts mandated that subjects be taxed and
assigned trades and offices according to their casta. The casta system was
not a unified, coherent system throughout Spanish America because each
Audiencia could introduce local casta regulations. However, they often
used phenotype or skin color or other phenotypic markers as genealogies
were rarely available except in the most elite families. Spaniards and their
“pure-blooded” descendants were clearly aware of their privileged status
as they were given full legal and social rights, which granted them access
to elite jobs, schools, occupations, and various economic opportunities.
Whiteness also bestowed pureblood Spaniards with honor and pride; even
lower class whites treasured their racial purity as their “most precious and
inalienable asset, an inheritance which entitled them to unquestioned legal
superiority over non-whites.” (Andrews, 1980, p. 18) Whiteness also became
a valued property in the marriage market for both whites and nonwhites,
allowing the former to maintain high status for their children and permitting
the latter higher status for themselves and especially their children (Acuña
Leon & Chavarria Lopez, 1991; Martinez Alier, 1974).
Eventually, Spaniards began to deploy the term raza (literally, race) instead
of casta, especially in reference to persons of full or partial African ancestry (Martinez, 2009). However, local elites began to suspend casta laws with
Spain’s liberal constitution of 1812 making Spain and its colonies a single
nation, and these laws everywhere would fall with the independence movements of the 1820s, when most people (except slaves) became formally equal
before the law. Moreover, as generations of race mixing made castes unsustainable and as mercantile capitalism expanded, feudal-like ideas about lineage were gradually replaced by informal discourses about physical appearance (Graham, 1990; Martinez, 2009). The movement out of one casta and
into another, often associated with changing professions, seems to be early
evidence of Latin America’s substantial racial fluidity, which continues into
the present.
In the early nineteenth century, Latin American elites set out to create independent nations out of the remnants of the old Iberian colonies in the New
World; they often debated extensively about how to incorporate indigenous
and black people. Their concepts of nation were built largely around ideas
of race and mixture, motivated by concerns over their large nonwhite populations. Until the late nineteenth century, Latin American societies were
predominately rural and mostly nonwhite (Andrews, 2004).
Often fearing dissension from their nonwhite populations, Latin American
elites often sought to include them in vital areas such as the military but
limited them from becoming part of the elite and middle classes. In their
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
fights for independence and during civil wars, as in Gran Colombia and
Cuba, many criollo (American-born descendants of Spaniards) leaders
sought alliances with nonwhites, largely because they perceived them as
essential in the fight for independence from European powers. Thus, they
sometimes promised nonwhites citizenship and freedom in the new nations,
although often as racial subordinates. Later wars in the nineteenth century
also involved slaves and indigenous persons who enlisted in the hope of
being freed, or acquiring land.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, and
had by far the largest slave population. Moreover, its independence period
was much different from that in Spanish Latin America. In 1821, Brazil
became independent from Portugal but it remained a monarchy headed by
the son of the Portuguese monarch, who had previously fled Portugal in
advance of Napoleon’s army. Because of this relatively smooth transition,
it had no significant war of independence with the great losses of life seen
in the former Spanish republics. As the exception to a relatively warless
nineteenth century, the Brazilian monarchy entered the bloody Paraguayan
War of 1864 to 1870, and promised manumission (freedom from slavery) to
its largely slave army recruits. By that time, although, most of the descendants of Africans had been freed, a significant African-born population was
still largely enslaved, as the slave trade ended in that country only in 1850
(Andrews, 2004).
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Latin American elites became increasingly concerned that their often large nonwhite
populations might imperil national development, largely in response to
contemporary scientifically endorsed ideas of a biological white supremacy
(Helg, 1990; Skidmore, 1976). To be modern like Europe and the United
States, they thought that a white (or nearly white) population was essential. Early pseudo-scientific theories that linked race to intelligence had
turned their large nonwhite populations into liabilities. Nevertheless,
the neo-Lamarckian ideas about the mutability of race and constructive
miscegenation in which white genes would predominate in successive
generations gave these elites hope that their populations could be whitened
(Skidmore, 1976; Stepan, 1991). Countries like Argentina, Chile, Cuba,
Uruguay, Venezuela, and (southern) Brazil also succeeded in attracting
European immigrants to meet their whitening goals but most other Latin
American countries such as Peru, and Colombia largely failed, despite their
efforts (Fitzgerald & Martín, 2014; Larson, 2004).
Race in Latin America
5
MESTIZAJE
By the 1930s, leading thinkers in many Latin American countries (clearly
not all) would turn the previous racialist thinking of whitening on its head,
with their innovative nation-building ideas of mestizaje. Scientific racism, the
basis for whitening strategies in Latin America, began to come under fire in
the early twentieth century in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Its scientific undoing was largely at the hands of anthropologist Franz Boas,
who argued that so-called racial differences were rooted not in biology but
rather in culture. Moreover, Boas had a tremendous influence in Latin America as he trained arguably the most important thinkers of the new mestizaje
discourse in Brazil and Mexico: Gilberto Freyre and Manuel Gamio (Telles &
PERLA, 2014). Through such thinkers, the scientifically backed but increasingly discredited ideas of whitening began to lose support in favor of progressive ideologies that viewed race mixture as positive. Throughout much
of the twentieth century, Brazil touted itself as a racial democracy, which
could be contrasted with the horrors of explicitly racist regimes in the United
States under Jim Crow, South Africa with Apartheid and Nazi Germany. Mestizaje, referring to both biological and cultural mixture, had become a central
trope for understanding ethnicity, race, and nation in much of Latin America;
it continues to be used as a point of contrast with the United States.
In contrast to whitening, mestizaje would put a positive spin on the
region’s biological and cultural mixing by glorifying it as central to the
nation (although not necessarily discarding the scientifically endorsed ideas
of white biological supremacy). Latin American elites would often claim
that mestizaje signaled racial harmony; at the same time, they promoted the
idea that Latin America was morally superior to a racially segregated United
States, although instances of de jure racial exclusions were not entirely absent
in twentieth century Latin America.1 Moreover, Latin American societies
did not face the “American” dilemma of ethnoracial injustice in a country
that deemed itself the archetype of democracy and egalitarianism. However,
they could ensure a racial hierarchy (although not US-style segregation)
because they were generally authoritarian and black and indigenous people
were widely accepted as inferior.
More than just ideologies of race and ethnicity, mestizaje ideologies would
present racial mixture as an essential feature of these new nations and of a
national peoplehood, as they sought to proclaim that race and nation were
coterminous. Elites sought to create visions of the nation as homogeneous;
in these visions, national or mestizo identities would seek to replace the
previous ethnoracial identities (Knight, 1990; Telles, 2004; Wade, 1993).
1. Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Panama had de jure segregation at about the same time, though not at
the level of the United States. Also, there were instances of explicit racial exclusions as in the case of the
revocation of citizenship to West Indians in 1940s Panama and anti-Chinese movements in 1920s Mexico.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Their narratives presented Brazilians, Mexicans, and other national subjects
as metaraces that fused white, indigenous, and (sometimes) black blood
and/or culture; now, mestizos or mixed-race persons would be considered
the ideal or prototypical citizens (Knight, 1990; Mallon, 1992; Skidmore, 1976;
Whitten, 2004). Mestizo identities would appeal to many in the population,
even those who would often be seen as, and otherwise identify themselves
as, indigenous, black, and mulatto (de la Cadena, 2000; Telles and PERLA,
2014). On the other hand, mestizaje has also been criticized for erasing black
and indigenous peoples from the consciousness of the general population,
effectively leading to their cultural and statistical genocide (Bonfil Batalla,
1990; Nascimento, 1979).
Nevertheless, mestizaje ideologies varied within the region from strong
mestizaje ideologies in Mexico and Brazil to those that continued to explicitly
promote whitening, most notably Argentina (Graham, 1990; Telles & Garcia,
2013). Moreover, mestizaje tended to stress indigenous and European admixture and downplay or ignore African contributions, although the latter were
clearly recognized in Brazil and Cuba (Telles & PERLA, 2014).
Mestizaje has become a widely shared Latin American experience. At the
level of racial classification, racial categories are certainly numerous and classification is often ambiguous and fluid across these categories than in the
United States (Telles, 2004; Telles & PERLA, 2014; Wade, 1997). There was
arguably greater actual racial mixture in Latin America simply because of
its lopsided sex ratio among its colonizers and the region’s near absence of
legal prohibitions against intermarriage that were common in the United
States (Cottrol, 2013). Today, black–white intermarriage is clearly higher, at
least, in Brazil than in the United States (Telles, 2004). Perhaps more importantly, the presence of mixed-race categories and large numbers of people
identifying themselves as such demonstrates the widespread popularity of
mixed-raced identification and the fact that mestizaje has become established
in Latin America (Telles, 2004; Telles & Flores, 2013). As a lived experience,
Wade (2005) also shows how mestizaje is reflected in family relationships and
friendship networks. Mestizaje is also apparent in its cultural form, as in religion (Andrews, 2010; Telles, 2004), music (Sansone, 2003; Wade, 2005), and
literary expression (Bost, 2003; Martínez-Echazábal, 1998; Miller, 2004).
An ideology of mestizaje has also been consistent with a social scientific
tradition in Latin America which has emphasized class and treats race as
an epiphenomenon of class or as a distraction from class cleavages and
class struggle (Altria, 2004; González Casanova, 1965). According to various
scholarly traditions in Latin America that derive from the Marxist, Weberian,
Mertonian, and Bourdieuan traditions, stratification and mobility are based
mostly on class origins and the class structure (Altria, 2004). Indeed, current
studies of mobility in Latin America tend to ignore the influence of race
Race in Latin America
7
(Behrman, Gavira, & Székely, 2001), whether for reasons of theory or data
availability.
THE MULTICULTURAL TURN
The contexts for understanding race and ethnicity in much of Latin America are rapidly changing in what is often called the multicultural turn. This
has occurred in the context of an economic transition and growing democratization. The domestically focused economic model of industrial growth of
the 1980s, based on import substitution, seems to have run its course; now
Latin Americans are involved in neoliberal and globalized models of economic development, which have exposed these countries to greater external
pressure and scrutiny, including the monitoring of human rights norms by
private international organizations and UN human rights committees, legislation, and forums (Telles, 2004; Van Cott, 2000).
In a rapid transition taking less than three decades, nearly all Latin American countries are now considered representative democracies, in contrast
to only 4 of the 19 in the mid-1970s (Mainwaring & Perez-Linan, 2013). As
part of their democratization process, more nations are officially recognizing the identities, dignity, and rights of Afrodescendants and indigenous
people; many have declared themselves multicultural in their constitutions,
providing communal and other rights for the indigenous and sometimes for
Afrodescendants (Hooker, 2005). Democratization and greater transparency
are being promoted by domestic civil society, including black and indigenous movements. These forces have started to weaken the mestizaje ideas
that tended to homogenize the nation.
Since the 1980s, black and indigenous movements have emerged as
important new global and domestic actors, pointing out and challenging
the region’s inequalities. The 2001 United Nations Conference on Racism in
Durban, South Africa, was promoted by black movements, including groups
of Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Colombians; it increased awareness of racial
inequalities throughout Latin America. At the same time, truth commissions
in Peru and Guatemala discovered that most victims of internal armed conflict were indigenous peoples and the Zapatista rebellion, beginning in 1994
(and still unresolved), reminded Mexicans and the Mexican government that
indigenous communities are severely marginalized and have the capacity
to hinder national development plans. Often backed by an international
network of human rights supporters and institutions, including UN forums
to promote human rights, indigenous and black movement activists are now
strong enough to pressure their governments to address their persistent
social exclusion. In Brazil, both class- and race-based affirmative action now
exists in most public institutes of higher education, upheld by the Brazilian
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Supreme Court and legislatively mandated for all federal universities and
other federal institutes of higher education (Telles & Paixão, 2013).
Under multiculturalism, ethnic and racial identities are finally being
allowed to flourish and discrimination can no longer be hidden easily.
Hale (2002) considers multiculturalism a new form of mestizaje as the state
continues to administer and provide a narrative for ethnoracial difference,
despite the actions and sentiments of minorities. One outcome of the
multiculturalist turn is the latest round of national censuses, which collect
data on race, in almost all cases.
OFFICIAL ETHNIC STATISTICS IN LATIN AMERICA
Official efforts at data collection largely run parallel to this history. As many
countries sought to assess their progress in whitening their populations in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they took ethnoracial censuses
(Appelbaum et al. 2003; Stepan, 1991). The inclusion of race queries peaked
in the 1920s and was then dropped in many countries for ideological and
political reasons but also because the scientific consensus began to invalidate
race as a concept or category for understanding human behavior (Loveman,
2014). Liberals and conservatives alike also believed that using the census
to count their people by race would reify any belief that their country was
racialized or even racist, and would thus fuel the specter of a racially divided
society.
By the 1990s, although, race and ethnic data began to appear with the
shift to multiculturalism and the demand for ethnoracial recognition and
the growing acceptance that race and ethnicity were social constructs that
were associated with societal inequalities. Largely as a result of pressure
by international human rights groups and international conventions,
particularly the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 (Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention), adopted in 1989 and ratified by
most Latin American countries by 2000, many Latin American countries
began collecting ethnoracial data for the first time in decades. In addition,
Latin American activists at the 2001 UN Conference in Durban demanded
that their governments collect data on ethnicity and race. Without such
data to document ethnoracial inequities, governments could easily turn a
blind eye to racial inequality and stick to a national mestizaje narrative of
nondiscrimination, racial harmony, and equality. Collecting data on race
and ethnicity was also considered an important first step in the transition to
multiculturalism. Indeed, many countries in the region began this process
through their national censuses.
As of this writing, almost all countries now have census data for ethnic
minorities since 2000. Nearly all countries have data on the indigenous as
Race in Latin America
9
mandated by the ILO Convention 169, although Bolivia began collecting such
data in 1850 and Mexico in 1895 (Del Popolo, 2008; Loveman, 2014). Countries such as Mexico and Peru do not collect data on Afrodescendants. Cuba
has census information for its Afrodescendants but not for its indigenous
people. Both Uruguay and Peru have collected information on both groups
in national household surveys and each plans to collect such data in its next
census. The Dominican Republic has not collected official data on race since
1960 but is considering it for its next census (Republica Dominicana, 2012).
Besides Brazil, only Cuba has collected data on its black population in most
of its censuses since the late nineteenth century.
Table 1 shows the current proportion of the population that identifies as
indigenous or Afrodescendant for each Latin American country, according
to, in order of priority: (i) the latest census; (ii) where census information is
not available, recent national survey data, and (iii) where neither is available, estimates from the 2010 America’s Barometer (of the Latin American
Public Opinion Project or LAPOP). The complete source list can be found in
Telles and PERLA (2014). The second, third, and fourth columns refer to the
Afrodescendant population, while the fifth, sixth, and seventh columns refer
to the indigenous population. The final column refers to the total national
population according to the most recent Census.
On the basis of these figures, we calculated a range of 113–133 million
Afrodescendants, or 20.4–24.0% of the entire Latin American population
of 554 million. This range is due to the ambiguity inherent in particular
categories in two countries: moreno in Venezuela and Indio in the Dominican
Republic, both of which do not specifically name persons of African or black
ancestry and may contain others as well. For that matter, many pardos in
Brazil are probably not Afrodescendants (Telles and Paschel, 2014) but in
that case, pardos and pretos, collectively, are widely and officially considered
Afrodescendants (Telles and PERLA, 2014). On the other hand, others might
argue that even the 133 million figure is an underestimate because many
Afrodescendants might not declare themselves as such because of their
stigmatization and their ability to move out of these categories in the Latin
American system.
By far, the largest Afrodescendant population resides in Brazil.
Afro-Brazilians, comprised of the preto and pardo categories, constitute roughly half (50.4%) of the population in the region’s largest country, as
a result, comprising a large majority (73.0–85.9%) of all Afrodescendants in
Latin America. Relatively large numbers also reside in Colombia, Cuba, and
the Dominican Republic. Based on the 2010 America’s Barometer, Mexico
also registers a surprisingly large number of persons that self-identified as
black or mulatto, although it is a small percentage of that large country’s
10
2010
2012
2010
2012
2005
2011
2012
2010
2010
2007
2011
2011
2010
2005
2010
2012
2007
2011
2011
Argentina
Bolivia
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cuba
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Nicaragua
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Uruguay
Venezuela
150
24
97,083
97
4274
334
3885
(A) 2267
(B) 8980
1.043
7
5.0
59
2366
23
313
234
411
255
(A)953
(B)14,534
(A) 112,035
(B) 133,027
Afrodescendant
Population
Source: See Telles and PERLA (2014) for extensive sources list.
Total
Year
Countries
0.4
0.2
50.9
0.6
10.5
7.8
34.8
(A) 24.0
(B) 89.0
7.2
0.13
0.0
1.0
2.2
0.4
9.2
3.5
1.5
7.8
(A)3.5
(B)53.4
(A) 20.2
(B) 24.0
Percentage
2010
2007
2011
2001
2010
2005
2010
2012
2007
2011
2011
2010
2012
2010
2012
2005
2011
2012
2010
Year
34,317
1014
13
4428
428
11,133
444
418
116
7600
159
953
955
4068
897
1700
1393
104
—
2267
Indigenous
Population
6.2
7.0
0.23
30.0
7.0
9.9
8.6
12.3
1.7
27.0
4.8
3.5
2.4
40.6
0.5
10.3
3.4
2.4
—
24
Percentage
Table 1
Afrodescendant and Indigenous Population (in 1000s) and Percentages in Latin America by Country
554,298
14,484
5744
14,713
8448
112,337
5142
3454
6673
27,412
3286
27,228
40,117
10,027
190,733
16,636
41,468
4302
11,163
9445
Total
National
Population
Race in Latin America
11
population. By contrast, six countries in the region (Argentina, Bollivia, Chile,
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) have Afrodescendant populations
that comprise less than 1%.
Indigenous people, based on the best available figures, number 34 million
people, which is 6.2% of the Latin American population. The largest numbers
of indigenous people live in Mexico and Peru, although higher percentages
of national populations are found in Guatemala and Bolivia. Like Afrodescendants, estimates of the indigenous population are often an artifact of the
indicator used, including the way questions are worded and the response categories available, as we continue to show throughout this essay.Estimates of
black and indigenous populations are sensitive to the census question wording and response categories as illustrated by such changes in the Bolivian
Census, which resulted in an indigenous population of 42% in 2012 compared
to 62% in 2001.
Human relations in Latin America often involve relationships among persons of various phenotypes and cultures, but they also often involve power
differentials (racism), in which humans are classified according (racialized)
to characteristics such as color, culture, or language. In the Americas, these
characteristics are often denoted by categories that are popularly known as
races (or more politely, ethnic groups). While the idea of race is not a valid
biological category as it once was thought to be, it is important as a social construct, with very real consequences for one’s life chances (Telles and PERLA,
2014).
Today as in the past, one’s ethnoracial position often becomes naturalized:
whites or lighter-skinned mestizos tend to be privileged while indigenous
peoples, Afrodescendants, and dark-skinned persons are often seen and
treated as less deserving. In this way, Latin Americans often use distinctions
based on “race,” culture—whether real, self-identified, or putative—and
skin color as markers of social worth and class origins. As people continue
this everyday behavior, they reproduce ethnoracial hierarchies and inequalities. As a clear example of how white (or near white in the Latin American
case) privilege is naturalized, consider television and magazine propaganda:
light-skinned actors and models predominate, while dark-skinned persons,
although they arguably represent most Latin Americans, are nearly absent.
As a result, someone unfamiliar with Latin America who watches Latin
American television, whether produced in Mexico, Brazil, or any other
Latin American country, could mistakenly conclude that Latin Americans
look like Europeans. This example is just at the level of representation.
Compelling sociological evidence for several Latin American countries is
emerging, which shows that educators, employers, and voters use race to
make important decisions (Aguilar, 2012; Rodriguez Garavito et al., 2014;
Telles, 2004).
12
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The visible manifestation of “color” is particularly important in Latin
America, which involves a continuum of visible difference and which is
masked by the usual ethnoracial categories (Nogueira, 1955; Telles, Flores, &
Urrea Giraldo, 2012). Language is arguably the main marker distinguishing
indigenous people from others, a distinction that has been referred to as
racial.
Distinct ideas about indigenous and Afrodescendant people emerged early
in colonial Spanish America as well as in anthropological thought; ideas
about one group or the other were often clearly related to each other. Von
Vacano (2012) notes how American ideas of whiteness began in European
encounters with natives but the bulk of thinking about race was built on
the population descended from enslaved Africans. Bartolomé de las Casas
advocated strongly for an end to the indigenous slavery of the sixteenth
century, although at first he suggested alternative sources of slaves, particularly Africans, an idea he would later renounce (Gutiérrez, 1991). Indeed,
Baker (2010) argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists
to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth
century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race, which was
eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century.
With the turn to multiculturalism, such comparisons have become more
important, especially as governments seek to recognize ethnoracial minorities. In his comparisons of blacks and indigenous people, Wade (1997) argues
that the indigenous have occupied a more privileged position than blacks
in Latin America, and that early on the Catholic Church considered them
more worthy of redemption and made more attempts to assimilate them,
compared to Afrodescendants. Hooker (2005) also notes that national policies have often favored indigenous claims over those of Afrodescendants as
a result of distinct ideas about the two groups. The indigenous are seen as
culturally distinct, while Afrodescendants are considered largely acculturated (Hooker, 2005). Moreover, the indigenous inhabited the Americas long
before Columbus arrived and therefore Latin Americans thus perceive that
they are entitled to certain rights such as their own land and way of life that
are often not extended to blacks (Hooker, 2005). Symbolically and perhaps
politically, then, the indigenous seem to occupy a higher status than Afrodescendants, especially in relation to nation-making narratives in the region
which often ignore or downplay the black contribution to mestizaje. Still, as
Telles et al. (2012) have shown, the indigenous have the lowest socioeconomic
status of all ethnoracial groups in Latin America.
This essay represents only a snippet of the long and nationally diverse paths
that the idea of race has taken in Latin America. In recent years, academic
interest in the topic of race in Latin America has grown exponentially. We
refer readers to only a small part of that literature.
Race in Latin America
13
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EDWARD TELLES SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Edward Telles is a professor of Sociology at Princeton University, a principal
investigator for the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA),
and a director of the Center for Migration and Development (CMD). His
books include Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil
(2004), Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race (with
Vilma Ortiz, 2008), and Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America (with Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), 2014).
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