Editing Mestizo (section)

===Chile===
{{rquote|right|The Chilean race, as everybody knows, is a Mestizo race made of Spanish [[conquistador]]s and the [[Mapuche|Araucanian]]...|[[Nicolás Palacios]] in ''La raza chilena'' (1904).<ref>{{Cite book|title=La raza chilena|last=Palacios|first=Nicolás|year=1918|language=es|author-link=Nicolás Palacios|orig-year=1904|page=34}}</ref>}}
{{Main|Chilean people}}
In Chile, from the time the Spanish soldiers with [[Pedro de Valdivia]] entered northern Chile, a process of 'mestizaje' began where Spaniards began to intermarry and reproduce with the local bellicose [[Mapuche]] population of Indigenous Chileans to produce an overwhelmingly mestizo population during the first generation in all of the cities they founded. In Southern Chile, the Mapuche, were one of the only Indigenous tribes in the Americas that were in continuous conflict with the [[Spanish Empire]] and did not submit to a European power. But because Southern Chile was settled by German settlers in 1848, many mestizos include descendants of Mapuche and German settlers.

A public health book from the [[University of Chile]] states that 60% of the population is of only European origin; mestizos are estimated to amount to a total of 35%, while Indigenous peoples comprise the remaining 5%. A genetic study by the same university showed that the average Chilean's genes in the Mestizo segment are 60% European and 40% Indigenous American.

As [[Easter Island]] is a territory of Chile and the native settlers are [[rapa Nui people|Rapa Nui]], descendants of intermarriages of European Chileans (mostly Spanish) and Rapa Nui are even considered by Chilean law as mestizos.