Not being considered White has been good for South America
(media.scored.co)
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The South Americans are, I suppose, representative of their country's primary ethnicity. That would be Spanish with various levels of native admixture. A pure white Spanish woman is a member of this group.
On the other hand, for the United States and the European countries, black is not the primary ethnic group. Those candidates are distinctly not representative of the majority.
Looking at South America in such reductive terms such as "all spanish" is applying an American lens to a continent that doesn't use it. A pure White woman will not be accepted as the same as the brownish one among her countrymen, even if she is native to it because she is so rare. Most of these Nations aren't like the US/Canada where our Natives are basically gone and people have to look for 1/124th blood to be part of it.
Using Guatemala for example, almost half their population is pure Native at around 43~%. The Mixed population is around 56~% and have a majority of their bloodlines as Native, not Spanish. That girl up there is probably rarer in her country than a black person in one of top row. (Honestly given her name, she is almost certainly an immigrant of some sort). The numbers for the others are similar, though they all have very different demographic breakdowns because of how touchy of a subject it is (Colombia seems to not even separate mixed and white).
We all know the black ones are picked for political reasons, but most non-white nation's "beauty contests" are equally non-representative for a completely different reason.
So you're saying that Miss Guatemala would not be recognized as coming from her country's primary ethnic group?
Not this Ms Guatemala. But checking past title holders, Guatemalans select beauty over their admixture spectrum.
This means the women are hot and range from dark featured mestizas (2011) to very light skinned nearly white, whether representative of the majority or not.
As it should be.
Well considering you are using the metric of "Recognize" then unlikely. Both internally and externally. Unless you want to point out the secret history of the Mayans looking incredibly white.
Any of the other ones, their name would give some credence to the claim. But Ivana has a slavic first name and a traditional Scot/Brit last.
That is a good point. So as not to generalize about "South America" I was trying to pick a specific example. But I wasn't even paying attention to her name.
Miss Colombia sounds Spanish. Would Colombians recognize her as part of their primary ethnic group or would they think of her as a member of some minority? This is an honest question, since I don't know.
For me, just taking Mexico as an example since that's a country I know more about, I would recognize a white person, a native person, and a mixed person as being part of the Latino ethnic group that I perceive as the primary group of Mexico. But of course that is my outsider American perspective.