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Population Diversity in Latin America by Dr W B Vosloo*, Wollongong, August 2016

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Population Diversity in Latin America by Dr W B Vosloo*, Wollongong, August 2016 1 Population Diversity in Latin America by Dr W B Vosloo*, Wollongong, August 2016 Latin America provides a fertile testing ground for theories about the accommodation of diversity in societies. How much diversity can be absorbed before the cleavages, if mobilised, tear a society apart? Such cleavages are usually based on race, ethnicity, language, religion, class, caste, region or some overlapping combination of these. Latin America, in contrast to North America, also provides a testing ground to investigate the impact of the predominant cultural environment in which socio-economic development takes place. The USA and Canada developed initially within an Anglo-Saxon cultural environment whereas Latin American development took place in an Iberian cultural environment in which the principles of constitutional liberal democracy only took root late in the 20th century during the post-colonial period. Latin America encompasses about 30 countries with a combined population of around 600 million. Amongst these are three main constituent anthropological components: the original Amerindian inhabitants, the descendants of the colonial conquerors (mainly Spanish, Portuguese, British and French) and the descendants of millions of slaves transported by the colonial powers. There is also a major fourth component: the mestizos or mulattos descended from the racial integration of the original components. The characteristic pattern in Latin America is that states originated as lineal descendants of colonial administrative divisions. In the former Spanish realms, pre-existing Indian structures were significant to the extent that the two principal Vice-Royalties (Lima and Mexico City) were seated at or near the former capitals of the two major Amerindian empires, the Aztec (Mexico) and the Inca (Peru). Spanish control was at first assured simply by substituting Spaniards for Aztec or Inca and maintaining the lower ranks of the pre-existing hierarchy for an interim period. Over the three centuries of Spanish rule, with local variation, the relatively small number of Spanish settlers succeeded in imposing themselves as a quasi-feudal caste, abetted by patterns of inter-marriage into Indian lineages. The settler culture served as the unquestioned basis for the newly independent communities that gradually enlarged themselves by absorbing outsiders into the settler-elite culture. Looking at the ten most populous states in Latin America the general population structure for the area as a whole is around 30 percent white, 50 percent mixed, 5 percent black and 15 percent Amerindian. The largest numbers of whites are in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela. The largest proportions of mixed inhabitants are in Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. The only areas where there are still significant numbers of Amerindians are in Mexico (30 percent), Peru (45 percent) and Bolivia (55 percent). The Amerindians The original inhabitants were several “Amerindian” tribes who left traces of their civilisations going back at least 5000 years. The Maya lived in the tropical areas of Central America where they built stone houses, temples and paved streets. They turned out fine ornaments in pottery and crafted copper into implements. They guided their life by calendars based on advanced skills in mathematics and astronomy. Scholars and priests also practised a distinctive way of writing based on some 800 signs or hieroglyphs and wrote on paper manufactured from the bark of the wild fig tree. The great era of the Maya ended by AD800 – possibly partly as a result of the scarcity of water and factional strife. 2 Further east on the highlands of what is today Mexico, were the cities of the Aztec empire. When the Europeans first arrived in the 16th century they found Montezuma’s Aztec city, Tenochtitlan, on the site of today’s Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world. The area of the Aztec empire was almost as large as modern Italy and its population is estimated at around six to eight million. They excelled in the crafts of building, were first-rate goldsmiths and jewellers, competent in mathematics and adept at agriculture. They had a calendar based on the solar year which was followed with strict attention. They also practised the sacrificing of human lives and ceremonial killings, justified by ideology. Far to the south the slopes of the Andes Mountains adjacent to the Pacific coast had been occupied by the Inca. They domesticated the llama and alpaca and cultivated maize and potatoes as early as 2000 BC. They built agricultural terraces, aqueducts and tunnels for the purpose of irrigation. By 900 AD they were able to manufacture bronze ornaments, instruments and tools including axes, chisels and knives. They built a network of roads which enabled them to reach the outskirts of their empire from what is Bolivia today in the north, to central Chile in the south. They used their 24,000km of roadways to establish a message system enabling a message to travel up to 240km per day. Their beast of burden was the llama. They had remarkable success in domesticating plants: the potato, the sweet potato, the tomato, various beans, the cashew and peanut, coca, peppers, squash, cassava and the pineapple. Maize originated independently both in South America and Mexico. (See Blainey, G., A Short History of the World, Penguin Books Australia, 2000, pp.305-332) The Colonial Powers The Spanish Conquistador, Hernan Cortes, paved the way for the colonial powers into the New World in 1518 with a small fleet of ships carrying 600 soldiers armed with crossbows and firearms in addition to several hundred Indian servants and African slaves. He also carried 16 horses, the first ever to be seen on American soil. Montezuma II invited Cortes and his men into his capital, who then took the emperor into custody and subsequently destroyed the city, killing thousands of Aztecs. Cortes took over the Aztec empire. The Spaniards also brought diseases which quickly killed thousands amongst the native peoples in Mexico. Smallpox carried by the Spanish traders also spread into Inca territories so that in 1532, Francisco Pizarro’s tiny force easily captured the Sun God, the Inca emperor Atahualpa. The following year they captured Cuzco. After the smallpox epidemic, measles followed, as well as typhus, influenza, whooping cough, scarlet fever, chickenpox and even malaria – all new to the inhabitants and therefore all the more deadly. Of the estimated eight million Indians in Mexico and the area south of the Great Lakes when Cortes arrived, less than one-third survived fifty years later. In the empire of the Incas, far south, the death toll also numbered millions – as many as eight out of every ten people died. Even Indians taken back to Europe as objects of display were prone to catch the new diseases. When the Frenchman Jacques Cartier returned from Canada in 1534 with 10 American Indians, nine were to die from European diseases. The effect of the European diseases on the native Amerindians was disastrous. Cultural and economic life largely disintegrated. In the wake of the Spaniards came the Portuguese, the British and the French. The Pope issued a statement in 1493 allocating trade in the Americas to Spain and trade in Asia to Portugal, but the 3 Portuguese also acquired the area that is now Brazil in the Treaty of Tordesillas. What the British envied most was what the Spanish discovered in America: gold and silver. Englishmen dreamt of finding their own “El Dorado”. The next best thing was to exploit their skills as sailors to pirate gold from Spanish ships and settlements. The English Crown legalised the buccaneering in return for a share in the proceeds. The names of buccaneers Henry Morgan, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh became famous as “Brethren of the Coast” in partnership with the British Crown. In the process the British acquired a string of islands in the Caribbean Sea such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. The French also acquired islands in the Caribbean, such as Martinique and Guadeloupe, which are still part of France today. In the course of the 16th century around 250,000 Spaniards, mostly men, settled in the New World. Many took wives from among the native populations and so gave rise to mixed race offspring called the mestizos. When African slaves began to be imported to South America in large numbers since the early 1500s, female slaves were also taken as concubines by the ruling Spaniards and Portuguese. Children of Afro-Hispanic parentage were known as mulattos. In the absence of an established aristocracy, colonial Spanish society came to be organised according to a careful and legally sanctioned grading of skin colour. “Pureblood” Spaniards were at the top of the social pyramid, native Amerindians and black-skinned Africans were at the bottom and all the varieties and shades of mestizos and mulattos occupied the middle levels. (See Blainey, G., op.cit., pp.305-332) The Slaves Over the course of 400 years, from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century, around 11 million Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands and shipped to North and South America and to the islands of the Caribbean to live out their lives as slaves. Known as the Atlantic slave trade, this transport of humans constituted the largest forced migration in history. The traffic of Africans involved all the main European trading nations: Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and the Netherlands. It also relied heavily on African tribal leaders and kings, who brought a ready supply of slaves from the continent’s interior to the ports of West Africa from where the European traders operated. For the victims of the slave trade, the experience was traumatic and cruel. It is estimated that on average 15 percent of enslaved Africans died in transit, either from disease or maltreatment.
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