by Heather Frutig
During the session with Alex and Ricardo at Quintana’s, Alex mentioned that Chile’s population is made up of white, mestizo and indigenous peoples. I was unfamiliar with the word mestizo, so I went digging.
The term mestizo comes out of an 18th century socio-racial classification system used in the Spanish American colonies. “This complex caste system was used for social control and also determined a person’s importance in society.” Persons of mixed race were collectively referred to as “castas”. By the end of the colonial period in 1821, there were over one hundred categories for people of mixed race. At the time, mestizo referred to a person with one Spanish parent and one Amerindian parent. The term has since come to mean any person of both Spanish and Amerindian heritage.
According to a 2011 survey by Latinobarometro, a nonprofit out of Santiago Chile that collects and publishes data about Latin American countries, 25% of Chileans self-identified as mestizo, 59% as white, 8% as indigenous, 1% mixed black and white heritage, 0% black and 2% other. In the same survey, respondents were asked if they believe themselves to be discriminated against on the grounds of race. Chile had the lowest ranking of the eighteen Latin American countries surveyed with 23% reporting that they believe they are discriminated against. In general, this discrimination is felt most deeply by indigenous peoples.
However, the report goes on to conclude that it is not simply indigenous populations that are discriminated against but also those with darker skin color saying that “Chile, the country where racial discrimination is the lowest, is also the country where indigenous peoples are a very small minority and the discrimination about which people complain is based mainly on skin color and is, in other words, against mestizos (people of mixed race).”
http://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp
https://nativeheritageproject.com/
The term mestizo comes out of an 18th century socio-racial classification system used in the Spanish American colonies. “This complex caste system was used for social control and also determined a person’s importance in society.” Persons of mixed race were collectively referred to as “castas”. By the end of the colonial period in 1821, there were over one hundred categories for people of mixed race. At the time, mestizo referred to a person with one Spanish parent and one Amerindian parent. The term has since come to mean any person of both Spanish and Amerindian heritage.
According to a 2011 survey by Latinobarometro, a nonprofit out of Santiago Chile that collects and publishes data about Latin American countries, 25% of Chileans self-identified as mestizo, 59% as white, 8% as indigenous, 1% mixed black and white heritage, 0% black and 2% other. In the same survey, respondents were asked if they believe themselves to be discriminated against on the grounds of race. Chile had the lowest ranking of the eighteen Latin American countries surveyed with 23% reporting that they believe they are discriminated against. In general, this discrimination is felt most deeply by indigenous peoples.
However, the report goes on to conclude that it is not simply indigenous populations that are discriminated against but also those with darker skin color saying that “Chile, the country where racial discrimination is the lowest, is also the country where indigenous peoples are a very small minority and the discrimination about which people complain is based mainly on skin color and is, in other words, against mestizos (people of mixed race).”
http://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp
https://nativeheritageproject.com/