ABSTRACT
Latin American and Caribbean societies were founded on the admixture of European, indigenous American, and African slave populations. Yet, while it seems, in theory, simple to separate members of these societies based on their respective racial/ethnic heritage as Indians, Europeans, or Blacks, in reality, such divisions are not nearly so transparent. Although North Americans make simple and rigid racial divisions based on skin color, these divisions are less meaningful in Latin America, where phenotype (overt physical characteristics) alone does not determine race or ethnicity. In fact, three individuals from Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, may look very similar in terms of skin color, hair color, and eye color, and yet may variously identify themselves (and each other) as White, Indian, or Mestizo based on a range of significant cultural differences (see the next section on Racial Categories and Racial Fluidity in Latin America for a discussion of these and other terms). This chapter examines what race and ethnicity mean in the Latin American and Caribbean context, how the racial and ethnic makeup of different regions have come to be historically constructed, and why race and ethnic typologies are best thought of in terms of culturally constructed differences between groups, rather than as biological differences between people.
