Eric Jacobs
4/21/15
Race and Ethnicity – Issue Brief Final Draft
Title: The challenge of grouping multiracial Latinos
Key Words: Latino, Origins, “Some Other Race”, Culture, Mestizo, Mulatto, Mixed
Description: While the census certainly has its problems, one benefit is that it can help
us understand challenges faced by ethno-racial groups. A person of mixed-race Latino
descent has no natural place on this list, and making one would require remarkably broad
generalizations.
Key Points:
1. Latin American’s are deserving of their own census category – but would this
even be productive?
2. Latin America contains people from all five census groups and mixtures between
many of these groups
3. Even countries within Latin America are extraordinarily diverse (within Mexico,
for instance, 68 indigenous languages are recognized)
4. A huge percentage of Latin Americans are of Mixed descent
5. In the 2010 census 37 percent of Latino respondents called themselves “Some
other Race”
Images:
Image I:
Image II:
Issue Brief:
As it stands today Latinos do not have their own census category. I will discuss
briefly the racial history of the region, to describe how even if Latino was the sixth
census category, the census would still serve little purpse. There is too much diversity
within Latin America, and any attempts to broadly group biracial Latinos (who make up a
huge percentage), would gloss over immense differences in cultural experience and
heritage.
Latin America is made up of 20 nations,
and 6 non-independent states. Predominantly
these people speak Spanish (about sixty percent)
and Portuguese (about thirty percent), but within
all these subdivisions, hundreds of languages
and dialects are spoken as native tongue.
Furthermore, all five of the U.S. census ‘races’
are present in significant numbers (CIA World
Factbook).
The first people to inhabit South
America were the natives, who were introduced
to Europeans through colonization by
Europeans (the Spanish). Africans were brought
to the region as slaves along side conquered
indigenous people, and were spread through the
continent. Typically, blacks worked in places where the native population was the most
decimated by European conquest, which tended to be the Caribbean, Brazil, and some
areas on the periphery. Within these ethno-racial groups, racial mixing began to occur,
leading to a rise of what is referred to as ‘Mestizos,’ which typically characterizes people
of European and Native American descent, and ‘Mulatto’, which specifically refers to
people of Black and European ancestry.1 (Keen, Poole) These people were seen as
socially distinct from their parents. Peter Wade’s A companion to Latin American
Anthropology, notes that as early as the late 18th century, the mixed population became
“numerically dominant” in some areas of Latin America (179). By the mid to late 20th
century, significant Asian, Middle Eastern, and European groups immigrated to Latin
America, adding tangibly to the diverse spread of races and ethnicities. It is quite clear
that Latin America and its individual nations are extremely diverse from an ethno-racial
standpoint (Poole).
Looking at the numbers, the most recent Latinobarometro survey (basically a
Latin American Census), which asks respondents to self identify their race, has a Mestizo
majority in 12 of the 20 Latin American nations. Information collected in the CIA World
Factbook has a majority in 10 of those 20. No matter what, it is clear that multiracial
Latin Americans (or at least those who identify with multiple races) comprise a major
portion of the country. Between Mestizo, Mulatto, Mixed, White and Mestizo, don’t
know or other, the multiracial Latino community is expansive, and represents people of
wildly different backgrounds both individually and compared to each other
(Latinobarometro database).
It is this complexity that makes it so difficult to group biracial Latin Americans,
and is key to my issue brief. One of the biggest flaws in the census is the way it glosses
over intragroup difference. The census fails us since it can currently indicate that a
phenotypically white biracial Latino is in the same group as a mayflower descendant. It
similarly fails us if a biracial Brazilian with dark skin is considered Black. People of
Latin American origins are deserving of their own census category. But even if this
category existed, there is so much racial mixing within the peoples of Latin America that
it wouldn’t really tell us much. Such a huge portion of Latinos are of some combination
of European, Black, and Native American descent, that attempts to racially classify
people from Latin America are far fetched. Perhaps this explains why 37 percent of
people of Latinos on the 2010 census identified as ‘Some Other Race’.
The issue at hand is that it is extremely difficult to utilize census data when there
are people who may have been marginalized or privileged based on their background, but
do not have any natural place on the document. To compound this problem, the easy
solution, which would be to add the census category of Latino, would gloss over
enormous differences in backgrounds. From an ethno-racial standpoint, an Argentinian
Mestizo male has likely had a tremendously different cultural experience from that of a
Brazilian Mulatto, yet each of them are ‘multiracial Latinos’. In a region where power
and heritage are so connected, yet so immensely varied and complex, it is exceedingly
hard to group the huge number of people who are of multiracial descent. We can make a
sixth category, but even that would still gloss over important distinctions. This denies
Mestizo and Mulatto are racial categories that the CIA World Factbook (and Latin
American people) uses to characterize races in Latin America.
1
them the empowerment that a functioning census, with greater attention to distinction
within and between all groups, could ideally provide (Planas).
Image Sources:
Latin America Map: http://www.martinsaphug.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LatinAmerica-Political-Map.jpg
Cortes’ Conquest of Tenochtitlan: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/exploring-the-earlyamericas/interactives/conquest-of-mexico-paintings/painting7/
Colonial Latin America: https://s-media-cacheak0.pinimg.com/736x/b0/92/76/b09276a09fdbccdab08074e4031e1692.jpg
Works Cited:
Keen, Benjamin, and Mark Wasserman. A History of Latin America. 3rd ed. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
"Latinobarómetro Database." Latinobarómetro Database. Accessed March 3, 2015.
http://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp.
Poole, Deborah. January 01, 2008. Race in Latin America. In A companion to Latin
American anthropology. Wiley.
Planas, Roque. "Latino Is Not A Race, Despite The Census Debate." The Huffington
Post. January 17, 2013. Accessed March 3, 2015.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/latino-race-census-debate_n_2490592.html.
The World Factbook 2013-14. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2013 .
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html