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World News See other World News Articles Title: Racial Politics in Latin America What Race in Another America Tells Us About Our Destiny Darkness fell over the São Paulo skyline. Like most cities, dusk brings the evening commute, but this one is a little different. One by one, all across the business district, helicopters lifted off buildings and roared into the humid night sky. São Paulo has one of the largest private helicopter fleets in the world. Usually they are ferrying wealthy businessmen home, but sometimes a trip can include discreet female companionship and a hop to a nearby club. It has been this way for years. When the city still allowed electronic billboards, people said it reminded them of the movie Blade Runner. “My favorite time to fly is at night, because the sensation is equaled only in movies or in dreams,” said one local businessman. “The lights are everywhere, as if I were flying within a Christmas tree.” The view is nice, but the real reason is more prosaic. Like the future dystopia of Blade Runner, life is more dangerous on the ground. Criminals make a good living kidnapping business executives or members of their families. Fear has driven a similar business in bullet-proof cars. The city is no less dangerous for the poor in the favelas, but their lives are worth a lot less. Some say nearby Rio de Janeiro is using secret sniper teams to take out suspected criminals from afar. Anyone seen carrying a gun is a potential target – shoot to kill. Such enormous disparities of wealth and poverty help define Rio and São Paulo, but it is not much different in other mega cities like Lima, Buenos Aires, or Mexico City. This is the stark reality of Latin America, but it is also more than that. It is a window on America’s future. Race in Latin America The United States is currently on track to become a majority-minority nation by the year 2045. Considerable uncertainty surrounds this coming milestone, but we are not flying completely blind. In nations all across Latin America, whites are already a minority or fast approaching that point. Given that many of our newest immigrants are from this part of the world, the region deserves a closer look. What is life like there? How are whites treated? What lessons can we learn? Latin America’s racial dynamics are a product of its history. Its current racial makeup is the result of five historic waves of immigration – a first wave that came over the land bridge from Asia and produced the original native peoples; the later conquests by the Spanish and Portuguese after 1492; a subsequent importation of black slaves to the Caribbean and South American coast; a fourth wave of European immigration beginning in the mid-1800s; and a fifth wave of internal migration from rural areas to the cities, which created its modern urban slums. The fourth wave from Europe was responsible for what is today the whitest portion of the continent, an area centered on Uruguay on the southeastern South American coast. From there, the white population extends northward into southern Brazil and southwest into neighboring Argentina, particularly Buenos Aires where the city’s white porteños (“people of the port”) are internationally known for their alleged arrogance toward browner Latin Americans. Despite the concentration of whites in the area, however, their percentage peaked in the middle of the twentieth century. It has been declining ever since, partly due to lower birthrates and partly because of the internal migrations of the last wave. Most of the rest of Latin America is primarily black, Indigenous, or mixed-race. The last of these is mostly due to what probably seemed like a minor issue when the continent was first colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese. Unlike the British, the conquistadors brought relatively few white women with them. Even during the period of regularized Spanish and Portuguese immigration that followed, white women never came close to equaling the number of white men immigrating to the New World. The predictably high levels of miscegenation that resulted, particularly when coupled with a major disease-driven die-off among the Indigenous peoples, created the large mestizo and mulatto populations that today predominate across most of the continent. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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