Editing Latin America (section)

===Race and ethnicity===
{{Main|Ethnic groups in Latin America|Race and ethnicity in Latin America}}
[[File:Ignacio María Barreda - Las castas mexicanas.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Eighteenth-century Mexican Casta painting showing 16 castas hierarchically arranged. [[Ignacio Maria Barreda]], 1777. Real Academia Española de la Lengua, Madrid.]]{{More citations needed section|date=April 2022}}
Latin American populations are diverse, with descendants of the Indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans initially brought as slaves, and Asians, as well as new immigrants. 

Mixing of groups was a fact of life at contact of the Old World and the New, but colonial regimes established legal and social discrimination against non-white populations simply on the basis of perceived ethnicity and skin color. [[Social class]] was usually linked to a person's racial category, with European-born Spaniards and Portuguese on top. During the colonial era, with a dearth initially of European women, European men and Indigenous women and African women produced what were considered mixed-race children. In Spanish America, the so-called ''Sociedad de [[castas]]'' or ''Sistema de castas'' was constructed by white elites to try to rationalize the processes at work. In the sixteenth century the Spanish crown sought to protect Indigenous populations from exploitation by white elites for their labor and land. The crown created the'' {{Interlanguage link| República de indios|es|República de indios en la Nueva España}}'' to paternalistically govern and protect Indigenous peoples. It also created the ''República de Españoles'', which included not only European whites, but all non-Indigenous peoples, such as Black, mulattoes, and mixed-race castas who were not dwelling in Indigenous communities. In the religious sphere, the Indigenous were deemed perpetual neophytes in the Catholic faith, which meant Indigenous men were not eligible to be ordained as Catholic priests; however, Indigenous were also excluded from the jurisdiction of the [[Inquisition]]. Catholics saw military conquest and religious conquest as two parts of the assimilation of Indigenous populations, suppressing Indigenous religious practices and eliminating the Indigenous priesthood. Some worship continued underground. Jews and other non-Catholics, such as Protestants (all called "Lutherans") were banned from settling and were subject to the Inquisition. Considerable mixing of populations occurred in cities, while the countryside was largely Indigenous. At independence in the early nineteenth century, in many places in Spanish America formal racial and legal distinctions disappeared, although slavery was not uniformly abolished.

[[File:Latin America Ethnic Distribution by Country.png|thumb|300px|Map of ethno-racial distribution by country.]]

Significant black populations exist in Brazil and Spanish Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Puerto Rico and the circum-Caribbean mainland (Venezuela, Colombia, Panama), as long as in the southern part of South America and Central America (Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Peru) a legacy of their use in plantations. All these areas also have significant white populations. In Brazil, coastal Indigenous peoples largely died out in the early sixteenth century, with Indigenous populations surviving far from cities, sugar plantations, and other European enterprises. Many mixed-race people in much of Latin America are tri-racial, usually of European, African, and Indigenous blood, where European (mostly Spanish/Portuguese) tends to be the strongest of the three. In most of Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean, the average ancestral mix is European and African blood, with much smaller amounts of indigenous blood. While the opposite is true in many mainland Spanish-speaking Latin American countries like Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, where the average ancestral mix is of European and indigenous blood, with smaller amounts of African. But in Mexico, and other places in northern Central America and southern South America, mixed race people tend to be completely of European and indigenous blood.

Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil have dominant Mulatto/Triracial populations ("Pardo" in Brazil), in Brazil and Cuba, there is equally large white populations and smaller black populations, while Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico are more Mulatto/Triracial dominated, with significant Black and white minorities. Parts of Central America and northern South America are more diverse in that they are predominantly made up of Mestizos and whites but also have large numbers of Mulattos, Black, and Indigenous people, especially Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. 
[[File:Italian immigrants buenos aires.jpg|thumb|297x297px|Italian immigrants arriving in Buenos Aires, during the [[Great European immigration wave to Argentina|great european immigration wave to Argentina]].]]The [[Southern Cone]] region—encompassing [[Argentine Primera División|Argentina]], [[Uruguay]], and [[Chile]]—is predominantly [[White Latin Americans|White]] due to the massive [[European immigration to the Americas|European immigration]] that occurred from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Vidart |first1=Daniel |url=https://anaforas.fic.edu.uy/jspui/bitstream/123456789/9985/1/Nuestra_tierra_39.pdf |title=El legado de los inmigrantes II |last2=Pi Hugarte |first2=Renzo |publisher=Editorial "Nuestra Tierra" |pages=52 |trans-title=Our land, the legacy of immigrants II}}</ref> The rest of Latin America, including México, northern [[Central America]]—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras— and central South America—Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay—are dominated by mestizos but also have large white and indigenous minorities. Black people make up the majority of the French Caribbean, but is sometimes not considered part of Latin America.
In the nineteenth century, a number of Latin American countries sought immigrants from Europe and Asia. With the abolition of black slavery in 1888, the Brazilian monarchy fell in 1889. By then, another source of cheap labor to work on coffee plantations was found in Japan. Chinese male immigrants arrived in Cuba, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere. With political turmoil in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century and widespread poverty, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians immigrated to Latin America in large numbers, welcomed by Latin American governments both as a source of labor as well as a way to increase the size of their white populations. In Argentina, many [[Afro-Argentines]] married Europeans.<ref>Andrews, George Reid. 1980. The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press</ref>

In twentieth-century Brazil, sociologist [[Gilberto Freyre]] proposed that Brazil was a "[[racial democracy]]", with less discrimination against Black people than in the U.S.<ref>Gilberto Freyre. ''The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization''. Samuel Putnam (trans.). Berkeley: [[University of California Press]].</ref> Even if a system of legal racial segregation was never implemented in Latin America, unlike the United States, subsequent research has shown that in Brazil there's discrimination against darker citizens, and that whites remain the elites in the country.<ref>[[Thomas Skidmore|Thomas E. Skidmore]]. ''Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought''. New York: [[Oxford University Press]], 1974.</ref><ref>[[France Winddance Twine]] Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil,(1997) Rutgers University Press</ref> In Mexico, the mestizo population was considered the true embodiment of "[[La raza cósmica|the cosmic race]]", according to Mexican intellectual [[José Vasconcelos]], thus erasing other populations. There was considerable discrimination against Asians, with calls for the expulsion of [[Chinese immigration to Mexico|Chinese]] in northern Mexico during the [[Mexican Revolution]] (1910–1920) and racially motivated [[Torreón massacre|massacres]]. In a number of Latin American countries, Indigenous groups have organized explicitly as Indigenous, to claim human rights and influence political power. With the passage of anti-colonial resolutions in the [[United Nations General Assembly]] and the signing of resolutions for Indigenous rights, the Indigenous are able to act to guarantee their existence within nation-states with legal [[standing]].