White Latin American - Admixture

Admixture

Since the European colonization, the evolution of Latin America's population is embedded in a long and widespread history of intermixing, so that many Latin Americans who have Native American and/or sub-Saharan African and/or, rarely, East Asian ancestry have also European ancestry. The casta classification of colonial Latin America defined a person of mixed European/Native American ancestry, or Mestizo ancestry. A castizo was someone whose mother was European and his father a criollo (who may himself have been mixed).

As it happened in Spain, persons of Jewish or Moorish ancestry up to several generations, were not allowed to enroll at the service of the Spanish Army or the Catholic Church in the Spanish colonies. All applicants to both institutions and their spouses had to obtain a Limpieza de sangre certificate in the same way as those in the Peninsula did, that proved that they had no Jewish or Moorish ancestors. However, being a medieval concept that targeted exclusively those religious groups, it was never an issue among the native population in the colonies of the Spanish Empire, that by law allowed people from all racial groups to join the Army, with the only prerequisite of embracing the Catholic faith. One notable example was that of Francisco Menendez, a freed 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.

Although historically both Colonial and Imperial Brazil had institutionalized discrimination against citizens which were deemed as people of color, contrary to the common sense in its population, it never had a casta classification like that of Hispanic America. White Brazilian people in the social status equivalent to the Hispanic criollo could have less than 80% of European (overwhelmingly Portuguese, seldom Spanish and much rarely other European ethnicities) ancestry. Aside some Amerindian and Black African descent which is knowly widespread among White populations in Brazil among all social classes in its five geographic regions since historically early times (c. 16th to 17th centuries), Moorish, Jewish, Arab and Romani mixed ancestry were also less significant to social status there than in Hispanic America.

It does not mean that social prestige of "fully non-whites" (people of color which are not mulattoes, mestizos, zambos, pardos, etc. in short, multiracial Brazilians, with Caucasian features i.e. Black Africans, Amerindians, their direct descendants and "westernized" Brazilians with wholly or almost fully non-Caucasian phenotypes, which also would be >70% European in their ancestry, since genes that form racial phenotypes are distributed random among the descendants of intermixing couples) and people with knowable non-European ancestry was equal, comparable or even acceptable among Brazilians elites, but that in Portuguese America, people were less concerned with ancestry and Limpeza de Sangue than its Hispanic neighbours.