Ethnic groups in Latin America

The notion of racial continuum and a separation of race (or skin color) and ethnicity, on the other hand, is the norm in most of Latin America.

Similarly, when African slaves were brought to the Caribbean region and Brazil, where there was very little indigenous presence left, unions between them and Spanish produced a population of mixed mulatos ... who are a majority of the population in many of those Spanish-speaking Caribbean basin countries (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela).

Racial mixing or miscegenation, after all, was something that the Spanish and Portuguese had been accustomed to during the hundreds of years of contact with Arabs and North Africans.

mestizos (sic) and mulatos may not have always have been first class citizens in their countries, but they were never disowned in the way the outcomes of unions of Europeans and Native Americans were in the British colonies, where interracial marriages were taboo and one drop of Black or Amerindian blood was enough to make the person 'impure'.

[3] In his famous 1963 book The Rise of the West, William Hardy McNeill wrote that: Racially mixed societies arose in most of Spanish and Portuguese America, compounded in varying proportions from European, Indian, and Negro strands.

Fairly frequent resort to manumission mitigated the hardships of slavery in those areas; and the Catholic church positively encouraged marriages between white immigrants and Indian women as a remedy for sexual immorality.

However, in the southern English colonies and in most of the Caribbean islands, the importation of Negro slaves created a much more sharply polarized biracial society.

The handful of persons who had been born in the homelands claimed topmost social prestige; next came those of purely European descent; while beneath ranged the various racial blends to form a social pyramid whose numerous racial distinctions meant that no one barrier could become as ugly and inpenetrable as that dividing whites from Negroes in the English, Dutch, and French colonies.

The tricontinental heritage that characterizes Latin America, then, is shared by the United States, but even a casual examination reveals that the outcome of the complex interaction of different peoples has varied.

The terms mestizo or mameluco, mulatto, the general term castas, and dozens of subcategories of racial identity frankly recognized the outcomes of interracial sexual activity in Latin America and established a continuum of race rather than the unrealistic absolute categories of white, black, or Indian as used in the United States.

The following table contains information based on a 2014 non-genetic work entitled "Composición Étnica de las Tres Áreas Culturales del Continente Americano al Comienzo del Siglo XXI" ("Ethnic Composition of the Three Cultural Areas of the American Continent at the Beginning of the 21st Century") by National Autonomous University of Mexico professor Francisco Lizcano Fernández.

[121] A 2022 study based on over 2.785 DNA samples revealed a genetic composition of: 85% Caucasian (74% European + 11% Middle East of which 7% is Jewish), 13% Amerindian and 1% African.

The study's conclusion was not to achieve a generalized autosomal average of the country, but rather the existence of genetic heterogeneity among differing sample regions.

The populations in the North consisted of a significant proportion of Native American ancestry that was about two times higher than the African contribution.

In this work we analyzed the information content of 28 ancestry-informative SNPs into multiplexed panels using three parental population sources (African, Amerindian, and European) to infer the genetic admixture in an urban sample of the five Brazilian geopolitical regions.

[134] It is important to note that "the samples came from free of charge paternity test takers, thus as the researchers made it explicit: "the paternity tests were free of charge, the population samples involved people of variable socioeconomic strata, although likely to be leaning slightly towards the ‘‘pardo’’ group".

[135] An autosomal DNA study from 2009 found a similar profile: "all the Brazilian samples (regions) lie more closely to the European group than to the African populations or to the Mestizos from Mexico".

[99] According to another autosomal DNA study from 2008, by the University of Brasília (UnB), European ancestry dominates in the whole of Brazil (in all regions), accounting for 65.90% of heritage of the population, followed by the African contribution (24.80%) and the Native American (9.3%).

[139] A more recent study, from 2013, found the following composition in São Paulo state: 61.9% European, 25.5% African and 11.6% Native American.

[100] Another 2015 autosomal DNA study carried out in two public hospitals found Chile to be 57.20% European, 38.70% Native American and 2.5% African.

[142] A 2020 autosomal DNA arrived at the following conclusion: "The country’s average ancestry was 0.53 ± 0.14 European, 0.04 ± 0.04 African, and 0.42 ± 0.14 Amerindian, disaggregated into 0.18 ± 0.15 Aymara and 0.25 ± 0.13 Mapuche.

[101] Some studies with samples collected in Paisa region, a genetically isolated population, found the highest European contribution in Colombia.

While the majority of Costa Ricans identify as of criollo or castizo descent, genetic studies demonstrate considerable pre-Columbian Amerindian and a smaller African ancestry.

Increased Amerindian ancestry was found in the south (38%), and a higher African contribution in coastal regions (14% in the Pacific and 13% in the Atlantic).

[153] According to an autosomal DNA study from 2008, by the University of Brasília (UnB), Salvadoran genetic admixture is 75.2% Amerindian, 15.1% European, and 9.7% African.

[156] A 2009 autosomal study found average admixture of Mexican Mestizos from six states (Guanajuato, Guerrero, Sonora, Veracruz, Yucatan and Zacatecas) to be 55.2% Native, 41.8% European, 1.8% African and 1.2% Asian.

[157] Likewise, a 2012 genetic study conducted over samples of six states (Guanajuato, Guerrero, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Yucatan and Zacatecas), found average admixture to be 54.4% Native, 40.2% European and 5.4% African.

[158] A study by Mexico's National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN) reported that mestizo Mexicans are on average 58.96% European, 31.05% Amerindian, and 10.03% African.

The study was conducted among volunteers from six states (Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Sonora, Veracruz, Yucatan and Zacatecas) and an indigenous group, the Zapotecs.

[104] A genetic study with 100 Nicaraguan samples from Western and Southern part of the country, found average admixture to be 48,66% European, 36,83% Amerindian and 16,29% African.