Blanqueamiento

Blanqueamiento in Spanish, or branqueamento in Portuguese (both meaning whitening), is a social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries in the Americas and Oceania to "improve the race" (mejorar la raza)[1] towards a supposed ideal of whiteness.

For example, past demographics of Puerto Rico were heavily black and Indian-influenced because the country partook in the slave trade and was simultaneously home to many indigenous groups.

Rather than envisioning a gradual whitening, it holds up the general image of the mestizo in which racial, regional, and even class differences are submerged into a common identification with mixedness.

In the early Republican era of Brazil, miscegenation as a form of whitening was looked down upon, as it was thought that the mestiço population retained the inferior qualities of the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians.

Theorists such as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues believed that education could improve the state of certain groups, such as Muslim Africans, however Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians were excluded from this.

[13] State and federal governments funded and subsidized immigrant travels[12] from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands.

[14] At the beginning of the 20th century, the Cuban government created immigration laws that invested more than $1 million into recruiting Europeans into Cuba to whiten the state.

Many scholars have argued that money has the ability to whiten, where wealthier individuals are more likely to be classified as white, regardless of phenotypic appearance.

In the case of Brazil, immigration policies that would help whiten the nation were seen as progressive ways to modernize and achieve capitalism.

[12] In Cuba, blanqueamiento policies limited economic opportunities for African descendants, resulting in their reduced upward mobility in education, property, and employment sectors.