Submitted 3 weeks ago by obbeel@lemmy.eco.br to [deleted]
I’m not from the US. What are the chances that many people that are called “hispanic” are actually part of the acculturated original peoples that have been prived from their past?
I’d say virtually all Hispanic people have some Native American ancestry. The number of Hispanic people living in the Americas with an exclusively European lineage is probably very small. But, that’s just like my opinion, man.
That’s probably only true if you accept essentially irrelevant amounts of ancestry. If you take 5 generations, there’s likely at least one person 50% or more native in that family, but that would be <5% of their ancestry.
Five generations would be 10 people. If one of them was native American, their descendant to be 1/10 native American.
Most people in Argentina and Uruguay are white, and the (indigenous + indigenous-mixed) majorities in some of the other countries aren’t necessarily big enough to be considered “virtually all,” especially when you consider that there are folks with African ancestry there as well.
Most demographic information in the US (all?) is self-reported, and unless you were in the American southwest, Hispanic communities and influence on broader US culture is pretty recent, so I suspect not that many U.S.-derived Native Americans are mislabeled as Hispanic.
Traditionally it actually went the other way: Native Americans, while second class citizens in a lot of respects, were more respected than black people or dark-skinned immigrants. So, for instance, there were tons and tons of light-skinned black folk passing as Native and marrying into white families in New England especially. It was a big topic in genetics when things like Ancestry DNA reports became more common and lots of people who’s great great great grandfather was Cherokee or whatever found out he was actually an escaped slave who passed as Native.
That being said, most Latin American Hispanics are of at least partially indigenous descent, so in a broader sense most Hispanics are indeed indigenous, they’re just descended from Nahuatl/Mayan/Quechua/Mapuche or some other indigenous ethnic group, rather than one of the groups that is today considered ‘Native American’ in the US.
Where I grew up, the Hispanic people were the white people, everyone had Spanish background of some sort, the mayor was Hispanic, I had no idea that was any sort of a difference. Until I visited California and saw the discrimination against Mexicans, because they LOOKED native, not European. Like, my maternal grandpa was probably part Mexican but pale as fuck, my paternal grandpa allegedly French & English but short stature and tan complexion. None of this registered as any sort of difference to me.
Latin American Hispanics are at least partly indigenous to the Americas, yes. So yes you can be Hispanic and of European heritage (España) or, more commonly, Hispanic of the Americas (because of the conquistadores). I don’t think straight indigenous not Spanish speaking and from the Americas is Hispanic.
So yes, to your question - a lot of people speak Spanish but their ancestors would have been Mayan or Zapotec, or something. Yes. Millions.
Native American is seen as different from first people equivalent from Mexico who moved to the USA. Also, the native peoples in the USA on formerly Mexican territory generally have some of the strongest native rights out of the various tribes in the USA along with some of the best sourced hereditary records.
And there is a recognition of movement across the border. Guadalupe, Arizona was founded because a people from a Yaqui tribe from the Sonoran state in Mexico fled the Diaz led Mexican government to Arizona.
That’s good. It’s similar to Brazil in the sense of recognizing and preserving tribal cultures. That’s important, but it doesn’t extend to all native people. There are movements here advocating for the recognition of the urban indigenous—people who live in the cities but aren’t officially recognized as having native ancestry.
Even more, it’s increasingly expected that there were big cities in the Amazon, featuring complex trade routes. However, this topic still needs to be studied more profoundly for various reasons.
It all depends on History, specifically how groups like the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca in Peru dealt with the Spanish. Their elites were often made kings (or viceroys) in the early post-colonization period. That makes a significant difference in the subsequent social structure.
It is important to note that Spanish colonization and English colonization had very different strategies. Spanish colonization tended to replace the existing power structures with their own, which typically preserved the native population even if they were demoted to being second class citizens. In contrast, English colonization was a more a form of genocide combined with a settler colonization of free and enslaved persons. There are few tribes east of the Mississippi that are federally recognized and many tribes were forcibly relocated by English and later American government forces.
And I don’t know how it was in South America, but North America saw a collapse of civilization near first contact which shaped English colonization. There were several Native American civilizations with complex urban forms which collapsed by the time there was contact with English/American settlers. A few remained like the Iroquois and Cherokee, but there was seen to be an overall regression which settlers took as a sign from God that they should settle those lands instead.
I’m not sure if this is correct, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a lot of responses of this thread aren’t understanding the question. From my reading it sounds like you were asking if a lot of Native American people in the United States are maybe deprived of their Heritage and tradition and labeled as Hispanic and have lost their roots? Like, I don’t know, maybe children forcibly relocated and told they are hispanic? Is that what you’re asking?
Not children. People of any age. They’re dark skinned, sometimes slightly dark skinned. They look like japanese, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re hispanic without a spanish surname. They’re not told they’re hispanic, they’re just marked as hispanic by the demographics. They don’t need to be told what they are for people to oppress them.
That’s how it works: you mark someone as something and don’t give a shit about what they think about it. Sometimes, the person just thinks: “This is how I look like, and this is what my family looks like, so I’m correct and don’t know anything about this heritage thing.”.
They don’t need to be told anything, that’s how it works.
Yes I just picked children as an example. Although probably the best one considering there wouldn’t be parents there to tell them about their heritage. Not impossible to happen otherwise but much easier that way. That is what you’re asking though yes?
If I’m understanding what you’re trying to ask, yes, there are a lot of people with indigenous heritage especially in California/texas/etc (places that until the Mexican-American war belonged to mexico) and they’re now considered Latino (which I think is what you mean by “Hispanic”.
It should be noted that not all Latin American people are Hispanic (e.g. portuguese), yet many share similar cultures and looks because they are all descendents of indigenous peoples that were colonized.
It’s happening in the US to Native Americans that they’ll be confused for “illegal aliens”(I hate this term but it’s what they call them) and they’ll have their American identity questioned, simply because they look like Mexicans or other Latin American people because, like I said, we’ve all descended from the indigenous peoples of this continent.
Just as an FYI, many Latin American folks don’t like to be referred to ask Hispanic because a) not all are, and b) that is the name of the people that conquered us.
Ths might be an over generalization, but it’s my layman’s understanding that all Native American and Latino people migrated over from Europe-Asia; some went south and colonized Mexico and Central America, while others went to Canada and also the US. So if that’s true, then I would imagine they’d have some shared lineage.
You're confusing two things.
The aboriginal peoples of North and South America (the continents) are descendents of Asiatic people who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia during the last ice age. That was over 10,000 years ago.
These include, but aren't limited to, the Canadian First Nations - both inland and Inuit, many nations of Native Americans in North America, and in South America, the peoples of the Amazon, the Maya (who still exist), the Incas, Aztecs and so on.
Then, from roughly 500 years ago and then for a century or three, there was a significant amount of admixture both genetically and culturally with Hispanic colonists that came over the Atlantic from Europe.
Most Latin Americans have a mixture of African, indigenous, and European heritage (though there are certainly some places with other large ethnicities).
Before the Europeans came there were many different native peoples all across North and South America. Many Mexicans and Central/South Americans have Spanish ancestry, but also many are descendants of natives.
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Lots. The Spanish were pretty pasty compared to most Latin Americans. Where do you think that came from?
adespoton@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Some Spanish were French-pasty; others were Berber-brown. This is because there were lots of waves of people from Europe and North Africa and the Middle East who settled in Spain.
But the Spanish were also known for being pretty rapacious in the New World; this would mostly have resulted in Spanish blood in people who were indigenous by heritage, but I’m sure over time some of those “Spanish-looking” indigenes would have passed themselves off as Spanish for a better station in life, rejecting their heritage in the process. The Spanish didn’t do the whole “reservation” thing after all, they just moved in and set up camp where they wanted and mixed with the locals — kind of like the French in Canada.
obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 3 weeks ago
I think the french are more pasty? Any child of a frenchman had lots of rights. That’s how Haiti got to rebel, no?