Mestizo
Spanish term to denote a person with mixed European and non-European indigenous ancestry / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Mestizos?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Mestizo (/mɛsˈtiːzoʊ, mɪs-/ mess-TEE-zoh, mis-; Spanish: [mesˈtiθo]; fem. mestiza)[1][2] is a person of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry in the Spanish Empire.[3][4] In Latin America, mestizo also denotes, identifies, and refers to culturally European people of indigenous ancestry.[5] The Spanish Empire used the terms mestizo and mestiza as ethno-racial exonyms for the graded castas that classified peoples of mixed race, and identified men and women as such in official documents, such as the census, the parish register, and the trial records of the Spanish Inquisition.[6] In the 20th century, from the adjective mestizo, researchers derived the noun mestizaje, as the term that describes miscegenation (racial mixing) of the colonial era of Latin America.[7][8]
Regions with significant populations | |
---|---|
Latin America, United States, Spain, Philippines, Micronesia | |
Languages | |
| |
Religion | |
Predominantly Roman Catholic; religious minorities including Protestants and syncretism with Indigenous beliefs exist |
In Latin America, mestizo is a cultural term that opposes the term indio that identifies, describes, and denotes Indian natives who did not mix with the Spanish and did not assimilate to the mestizo culture of mainstream civil society and speak an indigenous language and live in a tribal community. In late 19th- and early 20th-century Peru, mestizaje denoted those peoples with evidence of Euro-indigenous ethno-racial "descent" and access—usually monetary access, but not always—to secondary educational institutions. Similarly, well before the 20th century, Euramerican "descent" did not necessarily denote Iberian American ancestry or solely Spanish American ancestry (distinct Portuguese administrative classification: mestiço), especially in Andean regions re-infrastructured by Euramerican "modernities" and buffeted by mining labor practices. This conception changed by the 1920s, especially after the national advancement and cultural economics of indigenismo.[9]
To avoid confusion with the original usage of the term mestizo, mixed people started to be referred to collectively as castas.[citation needed] In some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, the concept of the Mestizo became central to the formation of a new independent identity that was neither wholly Spanish nor wholly Indigenous. The word mestizo acquired another meaning in the 1930 census, being used by the government to refer to all Mexicans who did not speak Indigenous languages regardless of ancestry.[10][11] In 20th- and 21st-century Peru, the nationalization of Quechuan languages and Aymaran languages as "official languages of the State...wherever they predominate"[12] has increasingly severed these languages from mestizaje as an exonym (and, in certain cases, indio), with indigenous languages tied to linguistic areas as well as[13] topographical and geographical contexts. La sierra from the Altiplano to Huascarán, for instance, is more commonly connected to language families in both urban and rural vernacular.[14]
During the colonial era of Mexico, the category Mestizo was used rather flexibly to register births in local parishes and its use did not follow any strict genealogical pattern. With Mexican independence, in academic circles created by the "mestizaje" or "Cosmic Race" ideology, scholars asserted that Mestizos are the result of the mixing of all the races. After the Mexican Revolution the government, in its attempts to create an unified Mexican identity with no racial distinctions, adopted and actively promoted the "mestizaje" ideology.[10]