White Latin Americans

This article deals with the white classified population of Latin America. For the white classified Hispanic population of the United States, please see White Hispanic.

White Latin American
Latinoamericano Blanco

File:RickyMartin.jpgFile:Cheministro.png File:ShakiraRipoll cropped.jpg Notable White Latin Americans Ricky Martin · Che Guevara · Vicente Fox Quesada Gisele Bündchen · Juanes · Shakira
Total population
White People 188,000,000 - 217,000,000 *Figure excludes Belize, Guyana, Suriname, or non-Romance-speaking areas of the Caribbean
Regions with significant populations
Brazil	101,000,000
Argentina	37,200,000
Mexico	16,300,000
Colombia	8,700,000
Cuba	7,300,000
Venezuela	6,900,000
Chile	4,800,000
Peru	4,200,000
Uruguay	3,300,000
All other areas	9,000,000 – 10,400,000
Languages
Portuguese, Spanish, and others
Religion
Predominantly Christian (mainly Roman Catholic); minorities practicing Judaism, Islam, or no religion
Related ethnic groups
Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Dutch, Poles, Arabs, White Americans, White Africans, Ashkenazi Jews, Lithuanians

Of Latin America's total population of close to 550 million people, about one-third, roughly 217 million, are classified as white or predominantly white. They are the region's largest self-identified "single-race" racial group. Most are criollos, the descendants of colonial-era Iberian settlers, although in the countries of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, the colonial white populations were augmented and overwhelmed by larger European immigration waves of non-Iberian origin in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Whiteness in Latin America

The evolution of Latin America's modern population is embedded in a long and widespread history of intermixing between Europeans, Amerindians and sub-Saharan Africans, and racial categories are more so a social construct there than in other parts of the world. Consequently, many White Latin Americans have a degree of Amerindian and/or sub-Saharan African ancestry.

This is not to say that "whiteness" elsewhere isn't also a social construct. Nor does it imply that other populations, as examples, non-Hispanic White Americans or White Australians do not have a degree of admixture from groups indigenous to their own countries or later non-Europeans such as African slaves in the USA or indentured Chinese labourers during Australia's colonial history. In fact, according to recent genetic discoveries, up to one third of non-Hispanic White Americans do possess residual African ancestry from ancestors who had passed the colour barrier as white, and up to one fourth of the self-identified White Australian population acknowledges distant Chinese ancestry.

As far as Amerindian admixture in the White Latin American population is concerned, under the casta system of colonial Latin America, a person of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry would legally and automatically regain their limpieza de sangre (lit. "purity of blood") and be classified as criollo with others in that category (a designation denoting pure Spaniards born in the Americas), if they were of one-eighth or less Amerindian ancestry. These would be the offspring of a castizo (1/4th Amerindian 3/4th Spanish) with a Spaniard or a criollo (who may himself have been mixed). [1]

In practice, many castizos did themselves also subversively purchase their Whiteness all over Latin America, for a steep price [2], with relevant "probanzas de limpieza de sangre" records altered, consolidating themselves within the lawfully white population. Additionally, at least in the parts of Latin America under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (from the modern Southwest United States plus Florida, all of modern Mexico then down as far south as the southern border of modern Costa Rica, as well as Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic), officials in the late 16th century did actually decide "to grant limpieza certification to those who had no more than a fourth of native ancestry," [3] that is, to castizos.

In regards to sub-Saharan African ancestry, while legal formulas of the Spanish colonial system did not allow for people of increasingly distant African admixture to legally regain any automatic "purity of blood" (African ancestry was considered unredeemable no matter how distant), "as individuals, they might be able to purchase the status of purity from the crown (and some did), but not to prove it through their bloodlines." [4]

Heritage

The heritage of White Latin Americans comes from two primary European sources:

• Spaniards
• Portuguese

Other Europeans that have contributed significantly include:

• Italians
• Germans
• French
• Poles
• Other Slavic peoples
• Other Germanic peoples
• Ashkenazi Jews from Western and Eastern Europe

Some countries may include minorities of Middle Eastern heritages of all religious backgrounds (although most are Christian) in their definitions of white, and these are mainly:

• Turks
• Lebanese
• Syrian
• Palestinian

Latin American Population

The largest white populations in Latin America are found in:

Country	%local	Population
Argentina	95% - 97%	up to 37,260,923
Brazil	53.7%	up to 101,000,000
Chile	25% - 30%	up to 4,800,000
Colombia	20%	up to 8,418,100
Cuba	37% - 65%	up to 7,271,926
Mexico	9% - 15%	up to 16,300,000
Nicaragua	17% -	up to 953,000
Peru	15%	up to 4,200,000
Uruguay	88%	up to 3,900,100
Venezuela	[21%]	up to 5,573,956

See also

• Latin America Population
• Peninsulares
• White Hispanic
• Criollo (people)
• Casta
• Mestizo
• Mulatto

References

• CIA - The World Factbook -- Field Listing - Ethnic groups