Most Latin Americans have a mixture of African, indigenous, and European heritage (though there are certainly some places with other large ethnicities).
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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Lots. The Spanish were pretty pasty compared to most Latin Americans. Where do you think that came from?
Some Spanish were French-pasty; others were Berber-brown. This is because there were lots of waves of people from Europe and North Africa and the Middle East who settled in Spain.
But the Spanish were also known for being pretty rapacious in the New World; this would mostly have resulted in Spanish blood in people who were indigenous by heritage, but I’m sure over time some of those “Spanish-looking” indigenes would have passed themselves off as Spanish for a better station in life, rejecting their heritage in the process. The Spanish didn’t do the whole “reservation” thing after all, they just moved in and set up camp where they wanted and mixed with the locals — kind of like the French in Canada.
I think the french are more pasty? Any child of a frenchman had lots of rights. That's how Haiti got to rebel, no?
Edit: I'm sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding from my part. Pasty means pale! Now I get it! I think it doesn't make too much sense because America is a european concept for Americus Vespucius, so it's more Mexico than latin america. The spanish are kind white, but they are also very african because they were colonized by the Arabs from the Magreb and beyond.
Italians are kind of dark skinned also, maybe because of North Africa? I don't know. Anyway, the dark skin don't necessarily means the person is hispanic or a original person.
The problem here is the acculturation. I bet some people mark themselves as white for convenience, and there are all the darkskinned "hispanic" people. I don't know, seems kind of bogus to me.
Most demographic information in the US (all?) is self-reported, and unless you were in the American southwest, Hispanic community prevalence and cultural influence in the broader US is pretty recent, so I suspect that not many U.S.-derived Native Americans are mislabeling themselves as Hispanic.
Traditionally it actually went the other way: Native Americans, while second class citizens in a lot of respects, were more respected than black people or dark-skinned immigrants. So, for instance, there were tons and tons of light-skinned black folk passing as Native and marrying into white families in New England especially. It was a big topic in genetics when things like Ancestry DNA reports became more common and lots of people who's great great great grandfather was Cherokee or whatever found out he was actually an escaped slave who passed as Native.
That being said, most Latin American Hispanics are of at least partially indigenous descent, so in a broader sense most Hispanics in the US are indeed indigenous, they're just descended from Nahuatl/Mayan/Quechua/Mapuche or some other indigenous ethnic group, rather than one of the groups that is today considered 'Native American' in the US.
I'd say virtually all Hispanic people have some Native American ancestry. The number of Hispanic people living in the Americas with an exclusively European lineage is probably very small. But, that's just like my opinion, man.
That's probably only true if you accept essentially irrelevant amounts of ancestry. If you take 5 generations, there's likely at least one person 50% or more native in that family, but that would be <5% of their ancestry.
Five generations would be 10 people. If one of them was native American, their descendant would be 1/10 native American.
Generations are exponential, you have 32 5th generation ancestors and 62 total. You're less than 5% of your 5th generation ancestors.
Hmm yeah I obviously haven't figured that out yet.
Most people in Argentina and Uruguay are white, and the (indigenous + indigenous-mixed) majorities in some of the other countries aren't necessarily big enough to be considered "virtually all," especially when you consider that there are folks with African ancestry there as well.
Where I grew up, the Hispanic people were the white people, everyone had Spanish background of some sort, the mayor was Hispanic, I had no idea that was any sort of a difference. Until I visited California and saw the discrimination against Mexicans, because they LOOKED native, not European. Like, my maternal grandpa was probably part Mexican but pale as fuck, my paternal grandpa allegedly French & English but short stature and tan complexion. None of this registered as any sort of difference to me.
Latin American Hispanics are at least partly indigenous to the Americas, yes. So yes you can be Hispanic and of European heritage (España) or, more commonly, Hispanic of the Americas (because of the conquistadores). I don't think straight indigenous not Spanish speaking and from the Americas is Hispanic.
So yes, to your question - a lot of people speak Spanish but their ancestors would have been Mayan or Zapotec, or something. Yes. Millions.
If I'm understanding what you're trying to ask, yes, there are a lot of people with indigenous heritage especially in California/texas/etc (places that until the Mexican-American war belonged to mexico) and they're now considered Latino (which I think is what you mean by "Hispanic".
It should be noted that not all Latin American people are Hispanic (e.g. some speak portuguese), yet many share similar cultures and looks because they are all descendents of indigenous peoples that were colonized.
It's happening in the US to Native Americans that they'll be confused for "illegal aliens"(I hate this term but it's what they call them) and they'll have their American identity questioned, simply because they look like Mexicans or other Latin American people because, like I said, we've all descended from the indigenous peoples of this continent.
Just as an FYI, many Latin American folks don't like to be referred to as Hispanic because a) not all are, and b) that is the name of the people that conquered us.
I'm not sure if this is correct, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a lot of responses of this thread aren't understanding the question. From my reading it sounds like you were asking if a lot of Native American people in the United States are maybe deprived of their Heritage and tradition and labeled as Hispanic and have lost their roots? Like, I don't know, maybe children forcibly relocated and told they are hispanic? Is that what you're asking?
Not children. People of any age. They're dark skinned, sometimes slightly dark skinned. They look like japanese, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're hispanic without a spanish surname. They're not told they're hispanic, they're just marked as hispanic by the demographics. They don't need to be told what they are for people to oppress them.
That's how it works: you mark someone as something and don't give a shit about what they think about it. Sometimes, the person just thinks: "This is how I look like, and this is what my family looks like, so I'm correct and don't know anything about this heritage thing.".
They don't need to be told anything, that's how it works.
Yes I just picked children as an example. Although probably the best one considering there wouldn't be parents there to tell them about their heritage. Not impossible to happen otherwise but much easier that way. That is what you're asking though yes?
Before the Europeans came there were many different native peoples all across North and South America. Many Mexicans and Central/South Americans have Spanish ancestry, but also many are descendants of natives.
Ths might be an over generalization, but it’s my layman’s understanding that all Native American and Latino people migrated over from Europe-Asia; some went south and colonized Mexico and Central America, while others went to Canada and also the US. So if that’s true, then I would imagine they’d have some shared lineage.
You're confusing two things.
The aboriginal peoples of North and South America (the continents) are descendents of Asiatic people who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia during the last ice age. That was over 10,000 years ago.
These include, but aren't limited to, the Canadian First Nations - both inland and Inuit, many nations of Native Americans in North America, and in South America, the peoples of the Amazon, the Maya (who still exist), the Incas, Aztecs and so on.
Then, from roughly 500 years ago and then for a century or three, there was a significant amount of admixture both genetically and culturally with Hispanic colonists that came over the Atlantic from Europe.