Race and Ethnicity

The concept of race emerged with modernity and European expansion. Race was entrenched by the nineteenth century as a scientific category, only to have its validity questioned in the twentieth century. Scholars in the early twenty-first century widely view race as a social construct. Race (raza in Spanish, raça in Portuguese) has been used throughout the Americas to mark human difference with reference to geographical origin and to inherited bodily and cultural traits. Yet traits commonly used to differentiate among racial groups (such as skin color, cultural attributes, or facial features) are not used consistently. The boundaries between racial groups are not universally agreed upon; nor is it always evident how to categorize any specific individual. Indeed, Latin America is known for the complexity and fluidity of its racial categories, especially in comparison to the more racially rigid United States.

Ethnicity is another concept that is also used to mark differences among human groups. Like race, ethnicity often makes reference to geographic origin and is also passed on through the generations. Ethnicity tends to emphasize language and cultural heritage, and is often used as a subset of broader racial categories. But ethnicity and race are sometimes used interchangeably. No single definition of either race or ethnicity suffices to encompass their historical uses.

This essay encompasses both Brazil and Spanish America. Specialists tend to treat them separately when studying race, and indeed, there are some important historical differences between the areas colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese empires. But these differences are not necessarily greater than the historical variations within those areas. Similar historical patterns of colonization and exploitation have shaped race and ethnicity across Brazil and Spanish America.

Racial hierarchy is rooted historically in the European conquest of the Americas and the unequal development of global capitalism. In the colonial period, dominant ideologies of rigid segregation and hierarchy coexisted with dynamic processes of racial mixture. Since independence, ideologies of racial equality, harmony, and national unity have coexisted with ongoing discrimination, exploitation, violence, and prejudice along racial and ethnic lines. Time and again, revolutions have proclaimed the end of racism, yet every time the proclamation has proved premature.

Despite their status as social constructions that lack "fixed referents" (Wade, p. 5), race and ethnicity nonetheless affect the lives of Latin Americans. Across Latin America, racial and ethnic labels have varied widely from country to country, and from one era to the next. Yet an underlying pattern has persisted until the present: Latin Americans labeled as "black" or "Indian" have tended to inhabit the lowest socioeconomic strata of their respective societies. They are found disproportionately among the poor and they are underrepresented among the middle and elite classes. Race and class hierarchies, while not perfectly correlating, have been conjointly constructed.

ORIGINS, THEORIES, AND EVOLVING DEFINITIONS

Contemporary historians often use modern understandings of race and ethnicity, and variations on these terms (e.g., "racialization," "ethnic group," "racial hierarchy") as analytical terms to apply to places and historical periods when those terms were not explicitly used in the modern sense. Thus one can detect evidence of what is now called racism throughout world history. The specific terms "race" and "ethnicity," however, have their own histories, which are worth reviewing. These histories were initially shaped by European expansion and colonization.

"Race" first appeared in European languages during the early sixteenth century. The term referred simply to lineage, and was not widely used until the end of the eighteenth century. At the dawn of the Early Modern era, religion was paramount in the definition of Europe's emerging identity. Non-Christians were increasingly expelled or otherwise marginalized. Religion, not skin color, defined who belonged in Christendom. There was, however, already evidence of what in the early twenty-first century would be called "racial thought," whereby Europeans defined the Other with reference to bodily traits. Thus, Europeans called Africans—whom they were importing as slaves—"black." In the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, religion and lineage conjoined. With the forced conversion of Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Reconquest, "Old Christians" differentiated themselves from "New Christians" by claiming to have "clean blood" (limpieza de sangre in Spanish, limpeça de sangue in Portuguese) free of the "stain" of Jewish or Muslim ancestry.

As early modern Europeans explored and conquered ever more distant lands, they encountered peoples whose diversity they sought to explain. The resulting theories, not surprisingly, tended to favor European superiority and expansionism. Climate was thought to determine human appearance, temperament, and intellect. The course of civilization in each region was attributed to the environment's effects on its inhabitants. According to the predominant school of thought, the overly humid and astrologically ill-fated New World climate had negative effects on the bodies, minds, and civilizations of its inhabitants. Most explanations of human difference did acknowledge that individual traits were passed on from one generation to another, yet such traits were also viewed as mutable, even within an individual's lifetime. Skin color, for example, could presumably be changed by prolonged exposure to a different climate, or even spontaneously by maternal disposition during conception. Thus, Europeans living in the tropics would be transformed by their environments.

Historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has shown that as early as the seventeenth century, Spanish-American colonists viewed the difference between themselves and the other inhabitants of the Americas in what would considered present-day racial terms. Bristling at European assumptions of American inferiority, American-born (creole) Europeans did not view themselves as inferior simply because they had spent a lifetime in the tropics. They preferred to explain their physical and moral traits as resulting from lineage rather than environmental influences. Spanish creoles viewed themselves as bodily distinct from the indigenous peoples they colonized and the African peoples they imported. Thus the creole colonists racialized and justified the relationship between themselves and the peoples they exploited.

In the late eighteenth century, the pioneering Enlightenment naturalist Carolus Linneaus and his disciple Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided humanity into varieties by geographical origin, color, posture, and temperament. The Blumenbach scheme divided the species into Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays. Thus he provided the lasting template for modern-day racial categories of White, East Asian, Black, American Indian, and Southeast Asian/Pacific Islander.

By the nineteenth century, physical traits were widely understood to be inherited, and the Enlightenment's broad racial categories were accepted as biological facts that formed the basis for racial science. Scientific racists in Europe and North America elaborated theories that justified white supremacy, slavery, and colonialism. Influential racial theorists such as Gustave Le Bon and Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau viewed the "mongrel" races of Latin America with especial horror. Promiscuous racial mixture in the tropical zones, they believed, had caused racial "degeneration." Latin American intellectuals, such as the Brazilian Nina Rodrigues, made use of these theories, adapting them to their national context. Rodrigues drew on Cesare Lombroso's racial theories of criminality to recommend different criminal penalties for individuals of different races. Racial science culminated toward the end of the century with the emergence of eugenics, the science of racial improvement, founded by Francis Galton.

Eugenicists split between "hard" eugenics that emphasized the immutability of races (especially popular in North America and Britain) and "soft" or "Neo-Lamarckian" eugenics (more popular in Latin America and parts of Continental Europe), that posited the "inheritance of acquired characteristics." According to the latter school of thought, environmental influences (such as climate, hygiene, nutrition, and education) could "improve" a race from one generation to the next. The hard eugenicists, drawing on the early genetic theories of Gregor Mendel, believed that races were immutable. The boundaries between hard and soft eugenics were themselves permeable, with many theorists borrowing freely from both. Eugenics peaked in the 1930s and then declined, largely discredited by the extremes to which the Nazis took it in World War II. Neo-Lamarckian theories regarding acquired characteristics were invalidated by Darwinian evolution and the modern science of genetics. The assumptions behind eugenics did not, however, disappear from popular thought or even entirely from scientific practice.

Enlightenment racial typologies persist in the early 2000s, and are used by doctors, demographers, bureaucrats, and rights activists—not to mention ordinary people in daily life—although scholars increasingly agree that "biologically speaking, races do not exist" (Wade, p. 13). Contemporary geneticists have found that genetic inheritance patterns are far more complex than simple overarching divisions according to continental origin would imply.

Despite the predominance of the Enlightenment five-race scheme, additional usages and definitions of race have continued to operate in Latin America and elsewhere. In the mid-1850s, intellectuals from several Latin American republics started using the terms "Latin race" (raza latina) and "Latin America." Concerned with nineteenth-century U.S. expansionism and filibusterism, the Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo defined the Latin race in explicit opposition to the "Saxon race." In a poem of 1856 he wrote: "The race of Latin America / Finds itself confronted by the Saxon Race" (Aims McGuinness, in Appelbaum, et al., p. 99). His Panamanian contemporary Justo Arosemena, angry about U.S. actions on the Isthmus of Panamá, referred to his northern neighbors as la raza Yankee, which he described as a conquering and materialistic race. Spanish Americans commonly refer to October 12 as "The Day of the Race" (el día de la raza). Race has also been used with reference to much smaller geographical entities: to denote the people of a particular republic (e.g. la raza chilena, of Chile), region (la raza antioqueña, of the Colombian province of Antioquia), town, or even neighborhood.

In these various usages, race has encompassed ideas about biology, blood, culture, nation, morality, phenotype, or even spirituality. It has sometimes referred to skin color, although Latin Americans have often conceptually separated race from color (thus, the "Brazilian race" is made up of many colors). Underlying the various Latin American definitions of race has been a reference to geography and an assumption that "essential" traits, whether physical or moral, are passed on from one generation to the next.

"Ethnic" is a closely related concept which has often been used as a synonym for racial type. Ethnography emerged as a field of research on "primitive" or "uncivilized" peoples in the nineteenth century (ethnicity was thus a foundational component of the emerging social science of anthropology). The use of "ethnic groups" to refer to minority identities within a given country, however, dates largely to the mid-twentieth century. This usage gained in popularity with the discrediting of racial science after World War II and the codification of minority rights in international treaties. In Latin America, ethnicity (etnia in Spanish, etnicidade in Portuguese) is most often used to refer to the multitude of groups that maintain an "indigenous" (Indian) cultural identity, or sometimes to differentiate among peoples of African or European origin, or to refer to immigrants from Asia or the Middle East. In recent decades, Afro-Latin American activists have sometimes referred to themselves as an "etnia," because ethnicity has fewer negative historical connotations than race.

Scholars have, since the latter part of the twentieth century, emphasized the creative and innovative aspects of ethnicity formation, showing how individuals and groups reshape and revise their identities rather than simply passing them along unchanged from generation to generation. The final decades of the twentieth century saw a renaissance of indigenous identities in Latin America, such as the pan-Mayan movement in Mesoamerica. Indigenous communities that had long stopped identifying as "Indian" have reconstituted themselves throughout the Americas, putting forth land claims and grappling with complex issues over who should or should not be considered truly indigenous.

The boundaries between different races and ethnicities vary from one country to the next. For example, many Latin Americans who have viewed themselves as white have traveled to the United States or Europe only to discover themselves labeled "black," "Indian," or "of color." A pardo ("brown" or of mixed ancestry) in Brazil might be "black" in the United States. The traditional U.S. "one-drop rule," whereby anyone with any trace of African ancestry is considered black, is exceptional in the larger context of the Americas; likewise the "blood quantum" used to measure "percentage" of Indian, black, or other "blood" is more common in the United States. In most of the Americas, whiteness tends to be a more inclusive category, though just how inclusive varies widely; in areas that experienced a significant influx of European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (such as southern Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) whiteness tends to be a prerogative of people who consider themselves to be of exclusively European lineage. Whiteness can be more inclusive in a country such as the Dominican Republic or Costa Rica, which did not experience such large-scale immigration.

Even within one country, such definitions can vary from one region to the next. A person considered in his native highland Andean community to be mestizo (mixed), might be viewed as Indian when he migrates to Lima, by virtue of his sierra origins, mother tongue, clothing, and other cultural habits. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, a native of Lima, reported in the 1990s that her young informants in the highland Peruvian city of Cuzco viewed her as white and themselves as indigenous, despite her observation that her phenotype was very similar to theirs. The Cuzco informants differentiated themselves from her in part because she did not practice indigenous cultural rituals. Also important in the differentiation of de la Cadena from her informants was the fact that she was from Lima, not the highlands, illustrating that race and region in Latin America are often conflated. Even more intriguingly, the cuzqueños viewed themselves as simultaneously indigenous and mestizo, because as urban students they were more cultured and educated than poor rural Indians from surrounding villages.

What constitutes a distinct race or ethnicity in Latin America is a hotly contested political and cultural question. It is a very personal issue for many individuals grappling with how best to define themselves in rapidly changing societies that value both tradition and modernity. Definitions of race and ethnicity have varied over time and space and have been fluid and contested. Yet an examination of Latin American history demonstrates that, regardless of such fluidity, beliefs about racial hierarchy and ethnic identity have had a profound impact on people's lives.

CONQUEST AND THE CREATION OF COLONIAL HIERARCHY

At the time of the Iberian conquest, the Americas were inhabited by a plethora of peoples with their own languages and collective identities. Although the traditional view of pre-Columbian America has been one of stasis, more recent scholarship has shown that the political and cultural landscape was quite dynamic. Sophisticated imperial states such as the Inca and Mexica empires had emerged during the century before the Conquest, absorbing the technological innovations of previous empires and conquering their neighbors. As political entities rose and fell, and as peoples migrated from one region to another, new identities emerged and others disappeared.

The Conquest brought Old-World pathogens, which, in combination with violence and exploitation, triggered a catastrophic demographic decline in the New World. Many of the indigenous identities that had existed in 1500 were gone by the mid-sixteenth century. New communities and new identities emerged out of the mixture and relocation of survivors of older communities. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz have referred to this process of mixture as "intra-indigenous mestizaje" (p. 460) and to the emergence of new ethnicities as "ethno genesis" (p. 443).

Sedentary indigenous groups in core areas of Spanish America, mainly in the Andes and Mesoamerica, reconstituted their identities and cultural practices in local communities, blending pre-Columbian institutions with Iberian ones, while providing labor to their conquerors. Many of them were accustomed to providing labor for pre-Columbian empires. Over the centuries, their communal lands, villages, and communal councils—institutions created by the Spanish state to facilitate evangelization and tribute collection—became integral elements of "traditional" indigenous culture that indigenous communities would struggle to conserve.

Brazil lacked these sedentary indigenous societies. Much of its indigenous population was semisedentary, living in relatively small autonomous units rather than large kingdoms or empires. In contrast to Spanish America, the state did not seriously attempt to segregate the Indian population from settlers. Portugal was even less effective than Spain in prohibiting Indian slavery, and until about 1600, Portuguese settlers relied heavily on the enslavement of Indians for their labor force.

Nonsedentary indigenous groups in peripheral regions of both the Spanish and Portuguese empires remained relatively autonomous, but most of them also experienced dramatic changes. They selectively adapted some European technology for their own purposes. In some cases, Europeans raided these communities for slaves. Indigenous groups that successfully resisted colonization attracted new members, including members of other Indian communities as well as runaway African and Indian slaves, forming new ethnic identities in the process. Some of these new entities, such as the Miskito nation of Central America, survived in part by taking advantage of the territorial competition between European colonial powers, allying with one or the other as circumstances dictated (the Miskitos, for example, allied with the British).

"White" was not commonly used to identify people of European extraction until the late colonial period, but "Indian" and "black" provided central organizing concepts for the organization of colonial labor regimes from the outset (historians nonetheless often translate the terms español and portugués in colonial documents as "white"). Beginning with Columbus, Iberian colonizers collapsed the diverse indigenous identities into the category of indio, which, according to Salomon and Schwartz "quickly evolved from a cursory overgeneralization to an innovative juridical category … and then, more slowly and ambivalently, to a sign by which peoples identified themselves" (p. 446). Even as they increasingly identified as Indian, many indigenous peoples maintained strong ethnic identities of their own.

A similar process of ethnic homogenization was imposed upon the Africans forcibly brought to the New World. The diverse peoples of Africa were lumped together as "black," a term often used as synonymous with "slave." Africans were torn from their communities of origin by African slavers, sold to Europeans, and imported to the New World in notoriously inhumane conditions. The survivors of this ordeal were scattered throughout the plantations, mines, and cities of the Americas. Ethnic divisions between groups from different regions of Africa persisted, especially in areas with large concentrations of slaves from specific areas, but the boundaries were also often blurred by dispersal and intermixture. Throughout the African Diaspora, Africans and their descendants reconstituted and reinvented African cultural practices, combining elements from various regions of Africa with European customs. As was also the case for Indians, Africans blended their original religious beliefs and rituals with Christianity.

In Spanish America, colonial administrators sought to keep Indians separate from Europeans and newly imported African slaves, but to little avail: From the beginning the conquerors had children with indigenous and African women. Such mixing was likely even more widespread in Brazil. New categories emerged to describe the results: In Spanish America, "mestizo" initially referred to the child of an Indian and a European, mulato to the child of a European and African, zambo to the child of an Indian and African. Castizo, which had originally suggested purity, came to mean the child of a mestizo and an español. The Portuguese adapted an Ottoman military term to call the children of Portuguese-Indian unions mamelucos. Additional "castes" proliferated to denote the offspring of people of mixed background, and colloquial terms particular to various regions also took hold. The term ladino, for example, came to refer to mestizos and later to all non-Indians in parts of Central America; the term cholo was used for a kind of mestizo in parts of the Andes.

This process of mestizaje, which resulted in proliferating caste categories, was diagrammed with some apparent irony by eighteenth-century Spanish-American artists in a genre known as casta. Casta paintings, originating mainly in Mexico City but also in the Andes, consisted of series of captioned images, each showing a family unit of a father and mother, each of a different caste, and a child of another caste resulting from that mixture. The family groups were usually placed in a local context of home or work, and usually organized in sets of sixteen. Each set of images would begin with an image such as "Spaniard and Indian beget Mestizo" and then go on to document a series of mixtures, which by the end would degenerate into absurdities: "from a Spaniard and an Albino comes a Black Turn-Backwards."

COLONIAL CASTE SOCIETY: ADAPTATION AND CONTESTATION

Over generations, casta paintings notwithstanding, the intermediate casta categories tended to collapse into mestizo and mulato. The term "pardo," in Brazil and many regions of Spanish America, was widely used by the late colonial period to denote some degree of African ancestry. Creoles struggled to maintain their own privilege and control over this demographically complex society; they emphasized their own "pure" ancestry as separating themselves from the subordinate castas. Colonists had imported the ideal of purity of bloodlines from Iberia. In the Indies, "limpieza de sangre" came to include the absence of African or Indian "blood." But the Creoles' purity was suspect in European eyes. Some Peninsula-born Iberian bureaucrats and commentators derided Creole elites as polluted by the climate, unacknowledged non-European ancestors, and even "bad milk" (because many Creoles had been suckled by indigenous or African wet nurses; "milk" was also a metaphor for nurture).

The notion of clean bloodlines was closely related to the Iberian concept of honor. Honor was used to justify and explain colonial hierarchies; individuals and families insisted that their honor be publicly recognized and thus their place in the colonial hierarchy assured. The elite, in particular, associated honor with birth status and limpieza de sangre. Families sought to preserve their honor by policing the sexuality and marital choices of their members. Parents especially tried to guard the virginity of their daughters. Male offspring were generally allowed greater latitude to mix with and sexually exploit women of the lower orders, as long as such informal unions did not end in marriage. The state, and more ambiguously the church, colluded with parents in guarding family honor. In the 1770s, the Spanish state promulgated the Royal Pragmatic on marriage, which allowed white parents (and later those of other castes) to prevent their children from choosing marital partners deemed socially or racially inferior, in an effort to preserve a hierarchical social order.

People born into lower castes often emphasized their own honorable behavior in an effort to claim honor for themselves, but elites and officials tended to assume that people of higher birth status behaved more honorably. Thus, as historians have shown, an elite unmarried Creole woman was assumed to be a virgin unless she flagrantly and publicly flouted the norms of sexual modesty. A poor market woman or a slave woman, meanwhile, was generally assumed not to be virtuous; her station in life was assumed to leave her unprotected from sexual assault and seduction and her "nature," if she were not white, predisposed her to dishonorable acts. Such assumptions were manifest in legal rulings that discriminated by caste. The transcript of a 1688 Mexico City Inquisition case, studied by the historian R. Douglas Cope, epitomizes this tendency. A poor mulata named Josefa and her roommate, an española named Mariana, were accused of harassing another woman. Although the accused were of similar economic means, one inquisitor placed full blame on "the sad mulata, Josefa," whom he found "gravely suspect because of her status, her way of life, and her nature and caste; and although a similar presumption could be made of Mariana … because Mariana is married and is an española, such a presumption would not have much force" (Cope, p. 40). Josefa was assumed to be guilty because of her intrinsic nature as a member of a subordinate caste, in addition to the fact that she was an unattached female without a male authority figure to protect and control her.

The colonial legal order determined different privileges, duties, and legal sanctions for each caste, ranging from allowable clothing to admission to educational institutions, suitable occupations, taxes owed, and appropriate punishments for crimes. "Clean blood" was a requirement for admittance to universities, honorable professions, most government positions, religious orders, and the secular priesthood. The military was off-limits to nonwhites, with the exception of segregated militias. Yet, despite seemingly rigid legal discrimination and caste labeling, the caste hierarchy was nonetheless somewhat fluid. Individuals of mixed heritage did enter prohibited institutions and professions, either by obtaining royal dispensation for their ancestral "defect" or by circumventing the law. Exceptionally intrepid and fortunate individuals and families could ascend the hierarchy by migrating out of their birth communities, becoming wealthier, dressing differently, and obtaining higher-status marital partners. Such ascension was usually incremental: A black might become a mulatto, a mulatto might become a white. The same individual might be labeled "india" on her baptismal record and "mestiza" in her marriage document. Escaping from the category of Indian or mulatto could be a way of escaping the burden of tribute imposed on those castes. Economic class affected caste affiliation; money whitened. Public recognition of one's caste status mattered more than actual ancestry. The state tried to visibly mark off one group from another through sumptuary laws, but numerous court cases attest to the difficulty with which these laws were enforced; likewise, numerous court cases in which individuals' caste identities were the subject of competing sworn depositions also demonstrate the fluid and contested nature of caste. Mestizaje was as much a cultural and socioeconomic process as a genetic one.

"Whitening" was not the only tendency. A mestizo might redefine himself as indio and thus gain access to Indian lands. One way to do this was through marriage. For example, in 1664 some indigenous officials in the Puna area in the southern Andes denounced their cacique (chief or leader), Francisco Castillo, an originally non-Indian man who had married into the community (Salomon and Schwartz, p. 485). The great eighteenth-century indigenous rebel leader Tupac Amaru II, according to some historians, was a mestizo before he assumed the identity of heir to the Inca Empire.

At the top of the hierarchy, Creole elites in Brazil and Spanish America selectively allowed wealthy individuals of mixed ancestry into their midst. But they did not tend to look favorably on upwardly mobile subordinate groups. Spanish American elites disdained pardo militiamen. The colonial state antagonized some Creole leaders when it offered meritorious pardos the option of purchasing exemptions from their subordinate caste status—effectively of purchasing whiteness. Although very few pardos throughout the empire took advantage of this opportunity, it was controversial, especially in a city such as Caracas, where pardos had come to dominate several key sectors of the urban economy, much to the chagrin of the elite. In a famous 1796 letter to the crown, Creole councilmen complained that pardo impudence threatened the social hierarchies upon which the colonial economy was based. Even the Caracas leaders implied, however, that an occasional exceptional person of mixed ancestry might receive dispensation. The councilmen suggested that they, not royal officials, should decide who merited such an honor.

Within a few decades, the colonial order would crumble and the caste hierarchy would come under attack by a new generation of leaders. The colonial order had been characterized by tension between institutional caste rigidity and discrimination, on the one hand, and mestizaje and individual mobility on the other. Subsequently, the national era would be characterized by racial tensions of its own.

RACIAL EQUALITY AND RACISM IN REPUBLICAN LATIN AMERICA

In the early nineteenth century, a radical liberal republican ideal of racial equality and unity among all male citizens gained adherents across Spanish America and even in imperial Brazil. The egalitarianism of this ideology was in constant tension, however, with panicky fears of "race war" and elite desires to safeguard privilege. Despite the rhetoric of republican citizenship, racial division and discrimination remained part of everyday life.

In stark contrast to the United States, the other newly independent American nations abolished caste distinctions and enshrined equality in their constitutions for all free and native-born men, regardless of color or ancestry. This about-face on the part of the Creole elite had several causes. Enlightenment liberal philosophy played a part, as did the Spanish Americans' efforts to increase their political representation in the liberal Spanish parliament of 1812 in Cádiz, by claiming political rights for men of African descent. If men of African descent were granted political representation, the Spanish American representatives would vastly outnumber peninsular Spaniards. Spanish intransigence in Cádiz allowed the Creoles to claim that they, not the Spaniards, were the true champions of racial equality.

Possibly the most important factor contributing to identify patriotism with racial equality was the crucial military role played by the subordinate castes in the independence wars. Without the participation of Indians, free castas, and even slaves, independence would have been impossible. In South America, the Creole patriot leaders Simón Bolívar, in the north, and José de San Martín, in the south, needed the mixed-race expert horsemen of their respective interior grasslands to fight on their side in the military struggles for independence. In Mexico, meanwhile, the first movement for independence, the Hidalgo Revolt in 1810, was largely composed of Indians, mestizos, and mulattos, inspiring more revulsion than support among the creole population. Mexico waited a decade for the creole military commander of the Spanish forces to ally with the patriot guerrilla leader Vicente Guerrero to push for independence. A few nonwhite men who had emerged from humble beginnings, such as Guerrero, became presidents and power brokers in the new republics.

The independence wars eroded the institution of slavery. The plantation sectors of war-torn regions were devastated and many slaves gained freedom in the conflict, which they did not want to give up when the fighting ended. Yet, despite the racially egalitarian, anticolonial ideology of the independence movements and the "free-womb" laws that several new republics enacted, slavery did linger on for several more decades. In some areas, the gradual termination of slavery included transitional forms of bondage, referred to with euphemistic terms such as "apprenticeship." Even with such setbacks, within a generation slavery disappeared from the Spanish-American republics, in part because of pressure from below by the slaves themselves, who took every opportunity to extricate themselves from bondage. Slavery lasted until the last quarter of the century, however, in the remaining Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico and in the Brazilian Empire, which did not experience the disruptions of the early nineteenth-century independence wars. The continuation of slavery in these areas was accompanied by institutionalized segregation, discrimination, and repression targeted at free people of color as well as at slaves.

Throughout Latin America, a discourse of racial harmony was adopted, yet racial discrimination remained part of everyday life. Any efforts by members of subordinate groups to demand real equality sparked accusations of racism and sedition against the individuals who brought the complaints. Recent research on early nineteenth-century Colombia suggests that individuals of African descent who protested discrimination were more likely to be punished by the courts than vindicated. Rumors of Haitian-style "race war" proliferated. As long as slavery persisted, moreover, any plots or rumored plots of slave rebellion were brutally repressed.

As national politics divided along Liberal-Conservative lines, Liberal leaders viewed former slaves and other free blacks and mulattos as potential constituents. Thus, in some regions, midcentury Liberals actively promoted manumission and emancipation, making sure to portray themselves publicly as the champions of freedom and equality, in contrast to Conservatives. In these regions, blacks and mulattos flocked to the Liberal cause. In the province of Cauca, Colombia, for example, blacks and mulattos were heavily recruited into radical Liberal political clubs known as Democratic Societies in the 1850s and 1860s; they participated avidly in civil strife and wars against Conservative landowners who had tried to prolong slavery. These "popular" Liberals of Cauca reframed Liberal ideals of equality and citizenship to suit their own needs, pressuring for access to land and the end of hated taxes and government monopolies on liquor production. Ultimately, by the 1870s, many upper-class Liberals recoiled in horror at the assertiveness and violence of the popular Liberals and allied with Conservatives to bring an end to the era of Afro-Colombian Liberal mobilization. Universal male suffrage, which Colombian men had enjoyed since the 1850s, was revoked in 1886, at a time when Latin American governments were generally becoming more authoritarian and distancing themselves from the egalitarian ideals of radical Liberalism. Economic restrictions on suffrage effectively excluded most blacks and Indians from the full rights of male citizenship in many countries.

Regarding Indians, the republican elite was also ambivalent. The ideologues of national progress drew on the legacy of pre-Columbian empires as a source of national pride, while disparaging the contemporary Indian descendants of the people who created those empires. With the end of the colonial caste system, Indians were rechristened with the less derogatory label "indigenous" (indígena), but in several countries they continued to pay a special Indian tribute well into the nineteenth century. Republican leaders, particularly those who believed in liberal ideals of individualism and private property, argued that indígenas should be educated and assimilated into the modern national citizenry and labor force. Liberals sought to privatize Indian landholdings, as part of a larger assault on corporate privileges and colonial institutions. As a result, many Indians lost their communal lands and self-governing institutions. With these losses, they often lost their identities as indigenous; the members of many former communities and their descendents became known as mestizos, even if other citizens continued to refer them pejoratively as indios. Some community members benefited from the partition of their communal lands and formed rural middle classes, others lost their land and became laborers or poor tenant farmers. This process of land privatization and concomitant cultural mestizaje intensified during the late nineteenth-century export boom.

Some indigenous communities protected the integrity of their communal landholdings by allying with Conservative or Liberal elites in the factional strife that roiled Spanish America. Conservative elites, who were less critical of colonial hierarchies than were Liberals, often looked more favorably on communal indigenous land holdings than did Liberals, but ideology was mitigated by expediency. Generally, both Liberal and Conservative leaders sought to privatize and alienate indigenous lands whenever they deemed it in their best economic interests, for example when Indian lands were coveted for coffee or other export crops. Leaders in both parties, meanwhile, were more willing to protect communal lands when they needed indigenous military or electoral support. Moreover, impoverished indigenous communities were sometimes useful to the elite; poor Indian villages provided nearby elite-owned haciendas and mines (often located on former communal lands) with a convenient seasonal labor force. When Indians resisted working for private enterprises or on public works projects such as roads and railroads, moreover, the state would respond with forced labor drafts and harsh vagrancy laws. Thus, the integration of nineteenth-century Latin American republics into the capitalist world economy was facilitated in part by coerced labor organized along racial lines as well as the privatization of communal lands.

Nineteenth-century elite intellectuals in the fragile new republics associated human diversity with a frightening disunity. They hoped that their motley populations would be replaced by unitary national races. Colombian liberal intellectual and diplomat Manuel Ancízar, writing in the early 1850s (when Colombia was called New Granada) predicted optimistically that "when the absorption of the indigenous race by the European has been completed … a homogenous, vigorous and well formed race will be left, the character of which will be half way between the impetuousness of the Spaniard and the calm and patience of the Chibcha Indian" (Ancízar, p. 120). While he clearly viewed race as the product of inherited stereotypical traits, he also stated "today the indigenous race is being substituted by the Granadan race, diverse from the first in character, in intelligence, and in moral necessities, and, moreover, galvanized by democratic institutions and modified in its way of life by liberty of industry and of movement" (p. 121). Thus, race was not only inherited, it was also shaped by the social and political environment. This dualism echoed the debates of the Early Modern era and foreshadowed the twentieth-century discourse of mestizo nationalism (discussed below) whereby mestizaje and social improvements were supposed to produce a superior national race. Ancízar and his contemporaries construed the existence of Indians and Afro-Latin Americans as a problem that would be overcome in the process of national progress and unification.

That Ancízar wrote these lines while reporting on his travels as part of a national mapping commission underscores the extent to which the goal of racial unification was identified with the goal of territorial integration. Nineteenth-century writers, geographers, naturalists, and illustrators—both Creole and foreign—explored, mapped, and illustrated the flora and fauna of the national landscapes. Their expeditions chronicled the diversity of national populations and topographies. By identifying particular races of humans with particular environmental niches, geographers organized each nation conceptually into discrete regions with particular racial characteristics. Ancízar briefly joined Colombia's Chorographic Commission, which in the 1850s produced maps, paintings, and texts that portrayed particular regional and racial "types"—the blacks, whites, Indians, mestizos, and mulattos particular to each area of the country—with their particular modes of dress, occupation, and complexion. He was also part of the costumbrista literary movement that produced stories and travel narratives that highlighted the customs and racial characteristics of each locality. The new technology of photography and the new science of anthropology contributed to the proliferation of images of regional racial types linked to particular places.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the conflation of regional and racial identities was firmly entrenched in national imaginaries. Argentine Liberals such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento portrayed their interior plains as a place of racial savagery, inhabited by "barbarous" Indians and mixed-race gauchos. But the pampa was also, these writers hoped, the future home for waves of "civilized" European immigrants who would bring progress to their nation. The Colombian and Venezuelan frontier plains known as the llanos occupied a similar symbolic place in the aspirations of elite writers in those countries. In Brazil, the northeastern "backlands" region was described as populated by mixed-race hordes, most notably in Euclides da Cunha's 1902 classic Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands).

Over the nineteenth century, the elites had to grapple with European and North American racial theories that emphasized white supremacy. By the last quarter of the century, as Latin American elites became wealthy through the export of primary commodities to industrialized countries, they increasingly disdained their mixed-race populations; the elites associated modernity with whiteness. Policymakers viewed European immigration as the panacea for a host of racial and social ills. European immigrants, it was hoped, would not only bring their reputedly superior work ethic and educational level; they would intermarry with the native population and thus supposedly improve it. European traits would predominate over African and indigenous in this intermixture, intellectuals argued, and thus the population would whiten.

European immigration accelerated rapidly in fast-growing late nineteenth-century economies on the Atlantic seaboard, such as Argentina, southern Brazil, and Cuba. European immigrants were accompanied by less-celebrated and more controversial immigrant waves from the Caribbean, the Middle East, and East Asia that further complicated Latin America's racial and ethnic landscape. But most Latin American countries, even as their export economies grew, were not successful in attracting European immigrants. The leaders of these countries had to turn to alternative means—coerced labor drafts, for example, or non-European immigration—to generate a low-cost labor force for their growing export sectors and infrastructures. They also turned to alternative theories for "improving" their national races, such as neo-Lamarckism.

As eugenics swept the Atlantic world around the turn of the twentieth century, Latin Americans tended to embrace the neo-Lamarckian school of eugenics that assumed the inheritability of acquired characteristics. Echoing Ancízar's emphasis on institutions, this "optimistic" or "soft" eugenics allowed for the promise of racial improvement through societal improvements—education, nutrition, hygiene, urban planning—as well as beneficial breeding. As in Europe and North America, eugenics constituted both a science and a social movement. Eugenics proliferated through scholarly conferences and local eugenics clubs. It influenced jurists, legislators, educators, doctors, and social reformers on both right and left. Social reformers targeted poor women, in particular, for reform and surveillance. Reformers sought to promote motherhood, improve maternal and child health and nutrition, and stop the spread of venereal disease in order to improve the national race.

RACIAL DEMOCRACY AND MESTIZO NATIONALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the first half of the twentieth century, the oligarchic "white republic" of "progress and order" gave way to mestizo nationalism and "racial democracy." In much of Latin America, revolutionaries and reformists swept out the old oligarchic orders of the late nineteenth century. Populist leaders tapped into the newly emerging sectors of the urban working and middle classes to build more inclusive (though not necessarily democratic) political movements. Leading intellectuals, ranging from Gilberto Freyre in Brazil to José Vasconcelos in Mexico, viewed cultural and genetic melding as the basis of national identity. The national race, the pueblo, was a mestizo race. This putatively inclusive ideology had exclusive aspects. It was usually predicated on uniformity and the bleaching out of unwanted racial stains rather than a full acceptance of ethnic or racial diversity.

The role of Indians in the mestizo nation remained ambivalent. In Mexico, the new bureaucracy produced by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) justified the revolution as having redeemed the Indians. A new agency was staffed by Indian advocates, mainly anthropologists, who were known as indigenistas. These official indigenists promoted various projects to benefit Indian communities, such as bilingual education, at the same time that the Mexican state was redistributing massive amounts of land into communal landholdings. The first international indigenist congress was held in Mexico City in 1940 and indigenista organizations sprang up around the Latin America. But a strong paternalist strain ran through the indigenistas' agenda of Indian redemption; despite a conscious effort on the part of indigenists to reject racism, they still tended to view Indians as culturally (and even physically) deficient, in need of improvement and tutelage.

Indigenous ethnicity was increasingly celebrated by non-Indians in the Andes and Mesoamerica, but, at the same time, Indian cultural practices were relegated to the realm of folklore, outside of the national cultural mainstream. Indian markets, crafts, and rituals became tourist attractions, but most indigenous communities remained mired in poverty, with precarious access to land. In the Amazon basin, in particular, development and deforestation eroded the resource base of Amazonian indigenous groups. In Brazil the ideology of racial democracy and the imperatives of national integration precluded any concerted national effort to fully include remaining Indian groups or to protect their environmental niche. As the state built roads and cities in the Amazon in the mid-twentieth century, several remaining Amazonian indigenous groups were displaced; some disappeared altogether or saw their numbers tragically reduced. The government agency charged with protecting Indians collaborated in their displacement. Indians were largely ignored, and in fact the census—which categorized Brazilians as black, brown, and white—had no category for "indigenous" during most of the twentieth century. Until 1991, Indians were simply lumped into the "pardo" category.

The place of blacks and black identity in the nation was even more problematic. The ideologues of racial democracy such as Freyre acknowledged and even celebrated African contributions to the cultural heritage and gene pool of their nations. This was a radical change from the nineteenth century, but elite proponents of racial democracy still tended to see the presence of blacks as a problem that would be overcome through interracial whitening; white traits would prevail over black and Indian in the formation of the mestizo nation. Afro-Latin American cultural and religious practices, moreover, were often viewed, even by successful mulattos and blacks, as barbaric and uncivilized, with little place in the modern nation outside of anthropology museum exhibits. This was true even in Cuba, where the writings of celebrated Cuban nationalist José Martí, among others, had identified Cuban patriotism with racial fraternity and inclusion. Afro-Cubans had participated notably in the late-nineteenth-century independence struggles; Antonio Maceo, the great independence military leader, was remembered as a national hero even though he was mulatto. Nonetheless, the upper and middle classes in early twentieth-century Cuba were uncomfortable with Cuba's vibrant Afro-Cuban cultural practices; they feared and persecuted black "witchcraft" practiced by believers in Afro-Cuban religions. Cubans of noticeable African descent were often excluded from restaurants, hotels, schools, beaches, clubs, and parks, as they had been under the Spanish Empire, even though the new constitution provided for full equality and universal male suffrage.

By the 1920s and 1930s, sanitized and Europeanized versions of Afro-Latin American music, dance, and celebrations were incorporated into the national imaginaries of countries with significant populations of African descent. Populist politicians promoted popular cultural manifestations such as Carnival; avant-garde literary figures looked to African and indigenous culture for inspiration. The emerging recording industry, radio, and traveling bands popularized African-influenced dance music, which the middle classes embraced and made respectable. Yet, to emphasize one's black identity in a country such as Brazil or Cuba, or to organize an ethnic- or race-based autonomous social movement anywhere in Latin America, was still to open oneself to accusations of antipatriotism and even racism.

Mestizo nationalism and racial democracy had a violent side. Ironically, some of the worst episodes of large-scale, racially motivated or racially tinged violence occurred in the early twentieth century, the era of mestizo nationalism: the massacre of black Cubans in 1912; the massacres and expulsions of Chinese immigrants from post-Revolutionary Mexico; the 1932 matanza of indigenous peasants in El Salvador; and the massacre of ethnic Haitians along the Dominican-Haitian border in 1937. Violence against Indians continued in frontier areas of countries such as Brazil and Colombia. These atrocities claimed thousands of lives. Buenos Aires even saw pogromlike violence against its Jewish inhabitants. The perpetrators of such violence were not only immune to prosecution, they were celebrated, in some cases, for carrying out their patriotic duty by helping to purge their nations of unwanted, putatively unassimilated racial elements. Nonetheless, forced sterilization as a means of racial improvement never caught on in Latin America.

Despite the continent-wide celebration of mestizaje, some nations have continued to identify as white. In a country such as Argentina, this white identity is largely based on the massive European immigration it experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The image of the white nation obscures the continued existence of Afro-Argentines, Indians, and mestizos. A population's whiteness can also be a relational concept; Costa Ricans and Dominicans tend to define themselves as white in contrast to the inhabitants of neighboring countries. And within countries, inhabitants of some regions—such as Antioquia and Santander in Colombia, Sonora in Mexico, or São Paulo in Brazil, to name a few—pride themselves on their whiteness in comparison to neighboring regions. Whether on a regional or national level, however, the notion of a homogeneous people elides internal diversity.

CONTEMPORARY MULTICULTURALISM

The last three decades of the twentieth century brought both gains and suffering to people of African and indigenous heritage. National myths of racial homogeneity were questioned. National identities were redefined. New racial and ethnic-rights movements emerged, but Indians and blacks suffered disproportionately from political violence and social strife.

Guerrilla warfare and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns profoundly affected indigenous and rural black communities. Marxist guerrilla movements often proclaimed themselves the champions of oppressed indigenous peasants, among whom they recruited. But the guerrillas were largely unable to protect these communities from devastating scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaigns. In Guatemala and Peru, in particular, tens of thousands of Indians died in the 1980s; in Guatemala, most of the deaths were at the hands of state forces, while in Peru, both the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the state brutalized indigenous communities. Such violence was both political and racially tinged; the Guatemalan and Peruvian elites disdained and feared the indigenous masses, and they indoctrinated their troops—many of whom had been born in Indian communities—with this disdain. In Colombia, indigenous leaders have been salient among the thousands of political leaders assassinated by right-wing paramilitaries; neither the Colombian Marxist guerrillas nor the anticommunist paramilitaries have much respect for the Indians' insistence on their own political autonomy. Thousands of black Colombians from isolated coastal regions, meanwhile, have fled the violence and flooded into dismal refugee camps and urban slums.

The last several decades have seen the emergence of national and continent-wide ethnic-rights movements proudly espousing black and indigenous identities. The contemporary indigenous movement, which emerged in the 1970s and mushroomed in the 1980s and 1990s, has been particularly successful. In alliance with leftists, international nonprofit organizations, celebrities, and activist academics, indigenous activists have achieved considerable political gains. They have lobbied successfully for constitutional reform. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, most Latin American countries had enacted constitutional reforms that recognized the existence of indigenous ethnicities and the rights of Indian communities to their own lands, culture, and institutions. New constitutions have redefined nations such as Colombia or Bolivia as "multiethnic."

Indians have become powerful political forces in several countries, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador, where they have succeeded in making or breaking presidencies. Indians have become mayors, congressional representatives, provincial governors, and presidents, most notably Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who became president of Bolivia in 2006. In Guatemala, after bearing the brunt of the atrocious counterinsurgency repression of the early 1980s, indigenous Mayans have formed a pan-Mayan movement.

The black movement has been somewhat less successful, even in countries such as Colombia or Brazil where people of African descent far outnumber people who identify as Indian. In part, this has to do with the lack of any unifying racial or ethnic identity among most people with African heritage; they tend to identify with their region, their social class, their neighborhood, or their political party. For decades, black Brazilian activist leaders have explicitly decried Brazil's vaunted racial democracy, and the idealization of mestiçagem, as a facade for the continued racial discrimination that has been amply documented at every level of Brazilian society. Brazilian black activists have campaigned to convince more Brazilians to identify as black on the national census, but little more than 5 percent of Brazilians do so; most prefer to mark "pardo." Affirmative action is a subject of much controversy in Brazil in the early twenty-first century.

Throughout Latin America, the new state-endorsed multiculturalism has been resisted by those who fear that national unity will be fragmented. Local political bosses do not tend to look favorably on autonomous indigenous governing institutions that threaten entrenched patronage networks. The recognition of indigenous landholdings is resisted by private property owners and impeded by social strife. Official multiculturalism has also been criticized of glossing over class inequalities and of conceptually dividing national populations into overly discrete, reified ethnic components.

Social scientists have since the 1950s consistently demonstrated that, to an alarming degree, race continues to correlate roughly with social class. The correlation is of course not complete: Numerous individuals defy the odds and challenge the prevailing stereotypes by obtaining professional success. Nonetheless, disproportionate numbers of people who consider themselves, or are considered by others, to be indigenous or black live in abject poverty. They tend to be overrepresented in the lowest paid sectors of the economy: domestic service and agricultural labor. For example, half the Afro-Brazilian (preto or pardo) workforce in 1987 worked in agriculture or the service industry, mainly domestic service; at that time, one fourth of Afro-Brazilian workers "earned monthly incomes of US$20 or less; another one-quarter earned between $20 and $40"; 60 percent of Afro-Brazilian women worked in agriculture or domestic service (Andrews, p. 173). As this last statistic reflects, the situation is especially dire for women, and thus for their children.

In 1997 a study showed that half of Afro-Uruguayan women surveyed worked as domestic servants, while a 1980 study in Brazil showed that black male earnings exceeded black female earnings by 70 percent or more (Andrews, p. 176). Interpretation of such numbers must be contextualized, however, by the blurriness of racial categories and, moreover, the general association of blackness and Indianness with poverty. When successful individuals and families do succeed in rising out of poverty, they are less likely to be counted as black or Indian and more likely to be labeled "brown"; money tends to whiten. Nonetheless, it is often these rising middle classes of color that feel the sting of racism most explicitly, when they come up against racial discrimination on the part of lighter-complexioned compatriots who habitually deem darker-looking people—or people who hail from a particular province or who speak an indigenous language—inappropriate for professional promotion. Limpieza de sangre, or the cleanliness of the blood, has long ceased serving as a prerequisite for entry into high-status professions, but light complexions are often still favored.

Race and ethnicity are thus variable social constructs with enormous social impact. Historically emerging out of imperialism, beliefs about race and ethnicity have structured Latin American labor systems, social hierarchies, and political alliances ever since the Conquest. Racial and ethnic discrimination have at times been institutionalized through the legal system, but even during those periods when discriminatory regimes were overthrown and equality was embraced, informal discrimination and prejudice continued. Racial and ethnic boundaries can be blurry; they have been drawn differently from one nation to the next, and even from one neighborhood to the next. Despite (or perhaps because of) their fluidity and flexibility, race and ethnicity are tenacious in their persistence. Although the lines of demarcation continually shift, race and ethnicity continue to shape people's lives in profound ways.

See alsoAfrican Brazilians, Color Terminology; Africans in Hispanic America; Arosemena, Justo; Caste and Class Structure in Colonial Spanish America; Creole; Family; Freyre, Gilberto (de Mello); Gaucho; Indigenous Peoples; Liberalism; Martí y Pérez, José Julián; Mestizo; Morales, Evo; Pardo; Slavery: Brazil; Slavery: Spanish America; Vasconcelos Calderón, José.

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                                  Nancy P. Appelbaum