There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern 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 and other Western European colonizers, and equally diverse African groups brought to the Americas as slave labor, and also recent immigrant groups from all over the world.
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, while 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 are often combined with social traits such as socio-economic status, so that a person is categorized not only according to physical phenotype but also 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 United States it has generally been avoided or severely sanctioned. Moreover, phenotypical appearance determines racial classification more than strict ancestry.Tanya Katerí Hernández, “Colorism and the Law in Latin America – Global Perspectives on Colorism Conference Remarks,” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 14, no. 683 (2015): 684-685.
Blanqueamiento
Blanqueamiento, or whitening, is a social, political, and economic practice used to "improve" the race (mejorar la raza) towards whiteness.Rahier, J.M. “Body politics in black and white: Senoras, Mujeres, Blanqueamiento and Miss Esmeraldes 1997-1998, Ecuador.” Ecuador, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 11.1 (1999): 103-120. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07407709908571317 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 Sawyer, M.Q., and T.S. Paschel. “‘We didn’t cross the color line, the color line crossed us’ Blackness and Immigration in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States.” Du Bois Review 4.2 (2007): 303-315. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=1917568&jid=DBR&volumeId=4&issueId=02&aid=1917560&bodyId=&membershipNumber=&societyETOCSession= 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 Montalvo, F. F., and G. E. Codina. "Skin Color and Latinos in the United States." Ethnicities 1.3 (2001): 321-41. Print.http://www.cedla.uva.nl/50_publications/pdf/revista/80RevistaEuropea/80Chaves&Zambrano-ISSN-0924-0608.pdf 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.Agier, M. “Racism, Culture, and Black Identity in Brazil.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 14.3 (1995): 245-264. Print.Telles, E.E. Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp. (pbk)Cuba: The next revolution [Web series episode]. (2011). In Black in Latin America. Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/video/black-in-latin-america-cuba-the-next-revolution/. In most cases, these policies promoted European immigration as a means to whiten the population.Andrews, G.R. Afro-Latin America 1800-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Mestizaje
An important phenomenon described for some parts of Latin America 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 decreased 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 United States 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).
North and Central America Mexico
Racial and ethnic ideologies
Very generally speaking ethno-racial relations can be arranged on an axis between the two extremes of European and Indigenous American 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.Bartolomé (1996:2)"En primer lugar cabe destacar que en México la pertenencia racial no es un indicador relevante ni suficiente para denotar una adscripción étnica específica. El proceso de mestizaje no ha sido sólo biológico sino básicamente social y cultural, por ello personas racialmente indígenas pueden asumirse y definirse culturalmente como mestizas. De esta manera ser o no ser indígena representa un acto de afirmación o de negación lingüística y cultural, que excluye la pertenencia a un fenotipo racial particular. Por lo tanto es relativamente factible realizar el llamado tránsito étnico, es decir que un indígena puede llegar a incorporarse al sector mestizo a través de la renuncia a su cultura tradicional y si sus condiciones materiales se lo permiten. Este acto supone tanto la aceptación de un estilo de vida alterno como la negación del propio, incluyendo la no enseñanza de la lengua a sus hijos. Pero muy difícilmente ocurre lo contrario; esto es que individuos fenotípicamente "blancos", pretendan reivindicar una adscripción indígena. Sin embargo, y con gran frecuencia, esas mismas personas considerarán a los indígenas como sus antepasados, fundadores de una "nación mexicana" que ahora les pertenece en calidad de herederos."Knight (1990:74)
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 terms 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.
Racial and ethnical terms
Mestizaje
In Mexico's 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 (in their conception) 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.
Mestizos
The large majority of Mexicans classify themselves 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).Wade (1981:32)Knight (1990:78-85)