Not being considered White has been good for South America
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (38)
sorted by:
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.
I doubt any of them would deny they are Colombian entirely, but they certainly wouldn't accept her as just like them without considerable prodding and evidence. Her name would probably put in much of the legwork (as would her lack of accent to them), while her appearance would work against her.
To use a much more American example I have personal experience with. Light skinnedness in both black and feather indian tribes can often be a source of derision. Sometimes its just teasing, others it can be outright exclusion. My childhood buddy's mom used to tan her skin to leather daily just to avoid it when accompanying her husband into the tribal activity (her natural color was ghost white), because they would harass them both for it and even attack the children as being "not real Houma" and various other halfbreed insults.
Of course its not a guarantee. But the point being that its really only white people (and mostly white americans at that) that don't have numerous and often strict hierarchies based on skin color within their own group. Each of those three people from Mexico you listed likely has strong opinions about who is actually the real Mexican.