by EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY
Mexico saw itself as a ‘mixed-race’ nation, Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’, Venezuela a ‘café au lait’ nation. A few countries, such as Argentina and Chile, thought of themselves as white Europeans
The story of race in Latin America is complex and multi-layered, involving conquest, colonialism and independence movements. This is a challenge for politicians and activists today seeking to frame the struggle for racial justice.
In Latin America, capitalism has built its class hierarchies on top of pre-existing ethnic and racial distinctions. The European conquests of the 16th century initially divided people into two categories — the vanquished and the victors (Spanish and Portuguese colonists) — and slavery added a third. These categories had different legal, ethnic and social statuses, but the distinctions between them did not survive racial mixing. In the 17th century a caste system emerged which assigned those who were not strictly white to separate legal categories according to their racial makeup.
Inspired by the Enlightenment, Latin America’s independence revolutions officially abolished castes, and declared that all (except, initially, for slaves) were equal before the law. However, skin colour and hair type remained subtle markers of social class, creating a hierarchy based on skin tone, in which ‘purity’ of blood did not determine whiteness: depending on place and context, the category of ‘white’ could sometimes accommodate people of ‘uncertain’ lineage or colour if they were educated and rich enough.
A whole range of ambiguous and sometimes overlapping terms developed to describe those who were not indubitably white: Indian (indio), brown (pardo), dark-skinned (moreno), swarthy (morocho), mixed-race (mestizo and cholo), mulatto (mulato), black (negro), café au lait (café con leche), Chinese (chino), creole (criollo) etc. The system was flexible and porous enough to adapt to circumstances.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, where racial mixing was less common and white colonists more numerous, the racial hierarchy had just two clearly differentiated categories: white and black.
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