Chileans
Chileans are an ethnic group and nation native to the country of Chile and its neighboring insular territories. Most Chileans share a common culture, history, ancestry and language. The overwhelming majority of Chileans are the product of varying degrees of admixture between white ethnic groups with peoples indigenous to Chile's modern territory. Chile is a multilingual and multicultural society, but an overwhelming majority of Chileans have Spanish as their first language and either are Christians or have a Christian cultural background. There is a relatively large irreligious minority.
However, many Chileans do not equate their nationality with ethnicity, but with citizenship and allegiance to Chile. This has resulted due to immigration to Chile throughout its history, and thus the term "Chilean" can now also include people identifying with the country whose connection may not be ethnic, but cultural, historical, legal, or residential. For most modern Chileans, several or all of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their Chilean identity.
There is a strong correlation between the ratio of a Chilean's European and indigenous genetic components and their socioeconomic situation. There is a marked continuum existing between the lower classes of a high component of indigenous ancestry and the upper classes of a predominant component of European ancestry. Indigenous inheritance, whether cultural or genetic, is most pronounced in rural areas and in aspects of culture such as Chilean cuisine and Chilean Spanish. Although post-independence immigrants never made up more than 2% of the population, there are now hundreds of thousands of Chileans with German, British, French, Croatian, Italian or Palestinian ancestry, though these have also been mostly miscegenated with other groups within the country.
Though the majority of Chileans reside in Chile, significant communities have been established in multiple countries, most noticeably Argentina, United States, Australia and Canada and countries of the European Union. Although small in number, Chilean people also make up a substantial part of the permanent population of Antarctica and the Falkland Islands.
Ethnic structure
As in other Latin American countries, in Chile, from the onset of Spanish colonization and settlement, miscegenation or mestizaje was the norm rather than the exception. Today, ethnic and racial self-identities are highly fluid and can differ between persons of the same family, including siblings of the same parentage. It is dictated not only by strict physical appearance, nor more loosely by ancestry, but by cultural patterns, social class, wealth and access, language, and prevailing biases of the era. These very factors, indeed, lend to the significantly varying ethnic structure figures from one source to the next. Additionally, those various figures refer to different, even if often overlapping, concepts: including racial vs ethnic categories, self-identity vs genetic findings, as well as culturally assigned categories. These concepts should not be confused, and the figures represented in one source might not be corresponding to figures of concepts from another source.Thus, for instance, UNAM professor of Latin American studies, Francisco Lizcano, in his social research estimates that a predominant 52.7% of the Chilean population can be classified as European, with an estimated 44% as Mestizo. Other social studies put the total amount of Whites at over 60 percent.
According to a 2012 estimate by the US Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook, the population consists of 88.9% of "White and non-Indigenous", with the remaining percentages being Amerindians, except for a 0.3% "unspecified".
Some publications state that the entire population consist of a combined 95.4% of "Whites and White-Amerindians", and 4.6% of indigenous peoples. These figures are based on a national census held in 2002, which classified the population as indigenous and non-indigenous, rather than as White or Mestizo.
Despite this, a Chilean researcher in 2015 stated that "there are no Chileans without Amerindian or European ancestry".
Ancestries and genetics
; General genetic ancestries- 67.9% European; 32.1% Indigenous; : Marco de referencia sociogenético para los estudios de salud pública en Chile, fuente: Revista Chilena de Pediatría.
- 64.0% European; 35.0% Indigenous; : Genetic epidemiology of single gene defects in Chile, fuente: Universidad de Chile.
- 57.2% European; 38.7% Indigenous; 2.5% African; 1.7% Asian; : Genomic Insights into the Ancestry and Demographic History of South America, fuente: PLOS ONE Genetics.
- An autosomal DNA study from 2014 found Chile to possess a genepool averaging 51.85% European, 44.34% Indigenous, and 3.81% African DNA. The genetic study was conducted across all regions of Chile, and while it "ratified the preponderance of mestizaje in Chile", it also found "the indigenous presence is marked by a curve in the Chilean territory. In the north, between Arica and Coquimbo, and in the south, between La Araucanía and Aysén, the genes of indigenous Amerindians exceeds 50%. Only in the central region and the far south does the European component surpass ." However, the majority of Chile's population is concentrated in the central regions of the country.
Cities with a historically higher proportion of European immigration, such as Concepción, in south central Chile, exhibited an average middle class genepool of 75% European and 25% Indigenous DNA, while in Valparaíso the average middle class genepool was 77% European and 23% Indigenous DNA. By contrast, in southern and northern regions of the country, the Indigenous component surpassed the European component.
Related genetic studies conducted on Santiago's mtDNA and Y-DNA found a sex bias in the ethnic origin of those sex-specific chromosomes. Thus, across all social classes, an overwhelming 84% of Santiago's mitochondrial DNA is of Indigenous origin, while the Y chromosome is about 70% of European origin, and between 6% and 15% Indigenous, depending on the area of the city. The results indicate a gender asymmetrical pattern of sexual relations leading to childbirth in Chile's history.
On a genotypic level, however, persons in all groups, despite their classification by phenotype would nonetheless contain admixture, not just those with stereotypically mestizo appearance. Thus, in Chile, the three groups, the phenotypically "white," "mestizo," and "indigenous," would represent a genetic continuum rather than isolated groups, including the presence of some Indigenous DNA in Chileans who appear more European and some European DNA in Chileans who appear more Indigenous.
Racial self-perceptions
In a 2011 Latinobarómetro survey which asked respondents in Chile what race they considered themselves to belong to, a majority of 67% answered "white", while 25% said "mestizo", and 8% self-classified as "indigenous".A 2002 national poll revealed that a slim majority of 51.7% of Chileans stated that they believed that they possessed "indigenous blood". Some 43.4% of respondents said that they believed they had "some" Amerindian ancestry and another 8.3% believed they had "much" Amerindian ancestry, but 40.3% responded that they believed that they had no Amerindian ancestry. Despite a majority of Chileans acknowledging that they had at least some Amerindian ancestry, if asked, many Chileans would simply self-identify as white.
As of 2017, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, about 88% of Chileans were white or mestizo, and 12% were indigenous.
Ethnographic history of Chile
Spaniards, Mestizos and Indigenous Peoples
For at least 12,000 years, numerous indigenous peoples settled in central and southern Chile. The predominant Mapuche made up the overwhelming majority the population up until the Spanish conquest. During the colonial period, troops were sent out to the Americas by the Spanish Crown in order to protect distant colonies. Spanish folk immigrated from all regions of Spain, particularly Andalusia, Extremadura, Basque Country, Asturias, Navarra and Castile. Of the Spanish, many immigrants ultimately settled in Chile after the Mapuche resistance to the conquest.The indigenous Picunche population of Central Chile disappeared by a process of mestizaje by gradually abandoning their villages to settle in nearby Spanish haciendas. There Picunches mingled with disparate indigenous peoples brought in from: Araucanía, Chiloé and Argentina. Few in numbers, disconnected from their ancestral lands and diluted by mestizaje the Picunche and their descendants lost their indigenous identity.
The government of Agustín de Jáuregui, which ruled around 1777–1778, ordered the first general population census. The census confirmed a total of 259,646 inhabitants at the time, with 73.5% classified as Caucasian, 9.8% as African, 8.6% as Indian, and 7.8% as Mestizo. In 1784, Francisco Hurtado, governor of the province of Chiloé, conducted a population census in Chiloe that totaled 26,703 inhabitants, of which about 64.4% was classified as españoles and 33.5% considered indios. First generation mestizos sprang largely from the intercourse of Spanish men and indigenous women. The opposite, the union of indigenous men and Spanish women was rare but not unheard of.
In 1812, the Diocese of Concepción conducted a census to the south of the Maule river; however, this did not include the indigenous population — at that time estimated at 8,000 people — nor the inhabitants of the province of Chiloé. It put the total population at 210,567, of which 86.1% was native Spaniards and 10% were Indian, with a remaining 3.7% of African, mulattos, and mestizo descent. Other estimates in the late 17th century indicate that the population reached a maximum total of 152,000, consisting of 72% whites and mestizos, 18% Indians, and 10% blacks and mulattos.
For many years, Spanish-descent settlers and religious orders imported African slaves to the country, which in the early 19th century constituted 1.5% of the national population. Despite this, the Afro-Chilean population was small, reaching a height of only 2,500 — or 0.1% of the total population — during the colonial period. The birth rates of black people were low. According to Sergio Villalobos this could have been indebted to the fact that black women and men were often apart as result of their slave labor and an hesitancy of other racial groups to engage with them.
In the 18th century, many Spanish civilians entered the country, in particular attracted by trade liberalization at the time enacted by the Spanish Crown. In the late 18th century, Basque descendants were estimated to comprise 27% of the total population. Most of the Basque immigrants initially partook in small businesses, though others attained higher levels of prosperity. Of those, many mixed with the Criollo aristocracy of Castilian origin, who owned much of the land. This resulted in the Castilian-Basque aristocracy, which later came to form the basis of the Chilean ruling class; other Basques also integrated with mestizo population of Castilian origin, that resulted in modern Chilean middle classes. The number of descendants from Basques in Chile are estimated at 10% of the population.