White Latin Americans
White Latin Americans are Latin Americans of total or predominantly European or West Asian ancestry.
Individuals with full or nearly full European ancestry in Latin America originate from European settlers and immigrants who arrived in the Americas during the colonial and post-colonial periods. These populations are now found throughout Latin America.
Most immigrants who settled Latin America for the past five centuries were from Spain and Portugal; after independence, the most numerous non-Iberian immigrants were from France, Italy, and Germany, followed by other Europeans as well as West Asians.
Composing 33-36% of the population as of 2010, White Latin Americans constitute the second largest racial-ethnic group in the region after mestizos. Latin American populations have often participated in interracial marriage since the beginning of the colonial period. White is the self-identification of many Latin Americans in some national censuses. According to a survey conducted by Cohesión Social in Latin America, conducted on a sample of 10,000 people from seven countries of the region, 34% of those interviewed identified themselves as white.
Being white
Being white is a term that emerged from a tradition of racial classification that developed as many Europeans colonized large parts of the world and employed classificatory systems to distinguish themselves from the local inhabitants. However, while most present-day racial classifications include a concept of being white that is ideologically connected to European heritage and specific phenotypic and biological features associated with European heritage, there are differences in how people are classified. These differences arise from the various historical processes and social contexts in which a given racial classification is used. As Latin America is characterized by differing histories and social contexts, there is also variance in the perception of whiteness throughout Latin America.According to Peter Wade, a specialist in race concepts of Latin America,
...racial categories and racial ideologies are not simply those that elaborate social constructions on the basis of phenotypical variation or ideas about innate difference but those that do so using the particular aspects of phenotypical variation that were worked into vital signifiers of difference during European colonial encounters with others.
In many parts of Latin America, being white is more a matter of socio-economic status than specific phenotypic traits, and it is often said that in Latin America "money whitens". Within Latin America there are variations in how racial boundaries have been defined. In Argentina, for example, the notion of mixture has been downplayed. Alternately, in countries like Mexico and Brazil mixture has been emphasized as fundamental for nation-building, resulting in a large group of bi-racial mestizos, in Mexico, or tri-racial pardos, in Brazil, who are considered neither fully white nor fully non-white.
Unlike in the United States, by the 1970s, Latin American scholars came to agree that race in Latin America could not be understood as the "genetic composition of individuals" but instead must be "based upon a combination of cultural, social, and somatic considerations". In Latin America, a person's ancestry may not be decisive in racial classification. For example, full-blooded siblings can often be classified as belonging to different races.
For these reasons, the distinction between "white" and "mixed", and between "mixed" and "black" and "indigenous", is largely subjective and situational, meaning that any attempt to classify by discrete racial categories is fraught with problems.
History
People of European origin began to arrive in the Americas in the 15th century since the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Most early migrants were male, but by the early and mid-16th century, more and more women also began to arrive from Europe.After the Wars of Independence, the elites of most of the countries of the region concluded that their underdevelopment was caused by their populations being mostly Amerindian, Mestizo or Mulatto; so a major process of "whitening" was required, or at least desirable. Most Latin American countries then implemented blanqueamiento policies to promote European immigration, and some were quite successful, especially Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the number of European immigrants who arrived far surpassed the number of original colonists. Between 1821 and 1932, of a total 15 million immigrants who arrived in Latin America, Argentina received 6.4 million, and Brazil 5.5 million.
Historical demographic growth
The following table shows estimates of white, black/mulatto, Amerindian, and mestizo populations of Latin America, from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The figures shown are, for the years between 1650 and 1980, from the Ariases' The Cry of My People..., for 2000, from Lizcano's Composición Étnica.... Percentages are by the editor.| Year | White | Black | Amerindian | Mestizo | Total |
| 1650 | 138 | 67 | 12,000 | 670 | 12,875 |
| Percentages | 1.1% | 0.5% | 93.2% | 5.2% | 100% |
| 1825 | 4,350 | 4,100 | 8,000 | 6,200 | 22,650 |
| Percentages | 19.2% | 18.1% | 35.3% | 27.3% | 100% |
| 1950 | 72,000 | 13,729 | 14,000 | 61,000 | 160,729 |
| Percentages | 44.8% | 8.5% | 8.7% | 37.9% | 100% |
| 1980 | 150,000 | 27,000 | 30,000 | 140,000 | 347,000 |
| Percentages | 43.2% | 7.7% | 8.6% | 40.3% | 100% |
| 2000 | 181,296 | 119,055 | 46,434 | 152,380 | 502,784 |
| Percentages | 36.1% | 23.6% | 9.2% | 30.3% | 100% |
Admixture
Since European colonization, Latin America's population has had a long history of intermixing. Today, many Latin Americans who have European ancestry, may have varying degrees of Indigenous or Sub-Saharan African ancestry as well. The casta categories used in 18th-century colonial Latin America designated people according to their ethnic or racial background, with the main classifications being indio, Spaniard, and mestizo, although the categories were rather fluid and inconsistently used. Under this system, those with one Indio great-grandparent but the remainder being Spaniards, were legally Spaniards. The offspring of a castizo and Spaniard was a Spaniard. The same was not true for African ancestry.As in Spain, persons of Moorish or Jewish ancestry within two generations were generally not allowed to enroll in the Spanish Army or the Catholic Church in the colonies, although this prohibition was inconsistently applied. Applicants to both institutions, and their spouses, had to obtain a Limpieza de sangre certificate that proved that they had no Jewish or Moorish ancestors, in the same way as those in the Peninsula did. However, being a medieval concept that was more of a religious issue rather than a racial issue, it was never a problem for the native or slave populations in the colonies of the Spanish Empire, and by law people from all races were to join the army, with openly practicing Roman Catholicism being the only prerequisite. One notable example was that of Francisco Menendez, a free black military officer of the Spanish Army during the 18th century at the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose fort in St. Augustine, Florida.
European DNA
Self-identified Populations
The country with the largest number of self-identified Euro-Latino inhabitants in Latin America is Brazil, with 88 million out of 203.0 million total Brazilians, or 43.5% of the total population, as of the 2022 census. Brazil's southern region contains the highest concentration, at 79% of the population self-identificated. Argentina received the largest number of post-colonial European immigrants, with more than 7 million, second only to the United States, which received 24 million. In terms of percentage of the total population, Uruguay and Argentina have the highest concentrations of self-identified or classified whites, who constitute +80% of their total population, while Honduras, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador have the smallest classified white population, in a range of 1-15%.| Country | Self-identified | Population in |
| Argentina | 54%–85% | 38M |
| Bolivia | 5%–15% | 0.600M–1.7M |
| Brazil | 43.5% | 88M |
| Chile | 30%–52.7% | 10M |
| Colombia | 20%–26% | 10M–14M |
| Costa Rica | 14%-62% | 0.7-2.8M |
| Cuba | 64.1% | 7.1M |
| Dominican Republic | 18.7% | 1.6M |
| Ecuador | 2.2%-9.9% | 0.375M |
| El Salvador | 1%-12.7% | 0.730M |
| Guatemala | 4%–10% | 0.800M–1.8M |
| Haiti | <5% | <0.59M |
| Honduras | 1%–7.8% | 0.09M–0.767M |
| Mexico | ||
| Nicaragua | 17% | 1.1M |
| Panama | 6.7%–15% | 0.366M |
| Paraguay | 20%–30% | 1.7M |
| Peru | 5.8%–12% | 1.3M–5.8M |
| Puerto Rico | 17.1%–75.8% | 0.560–2.8M |
| Uruguay | 85.2%-88% | 2.9M |
| Venezuela | 16.6%-43.6% | 13M |