U.S. TerritoriesPuerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, etc.
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Virtually all Puerto Ricans are what we would call "White Hispanic". That's 88% of the territory's population. The other 12% are a mix of Black and "White non-Hispanic" (the vast majority of these are US military or Federal government employees and their families mixed in with a few beach bums, surfers, and retirees).
I once started a gigantic 10 page discussion about this issue.
I think that 88% White is somewhat of an exaggeration.....closer to 50%, if that.
Spanish is my native language, I know what they mean you read my sentence wrong. I meant it as a tongue in cheek that to most Americans mixed equals white and black, not native and white, since most Americans think of people like Obama when it comes to multiracial, particularly Americans that live in the Midwest and South
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Originally Posted by Lucario
I think that 88% White is somewhat of an exaggeration.....closer to 50%, if that.
Definitely is. Based on my personal experiences, it is definitely less than 50% but more than 25%. But, the numbers would be far less if everyone that moved out of Puerto Rico during the 1930s-1950s stayed. Most of the Puerto Ricans that moved out are definitely multiracial.
Spanish is my native language, I know what they mean you read my sentence wrong. I meant it as a tongue in cheek that to most Americans mixed equals white and black, not native and white, since most Americans think of people like Obama when it comes to multiracial, particularly Americans that live in the Midwest and South
Definitely is. Based on my personal experiences, it is definitely less than 50% but more than 25%. But, the numbers would be far less if everyone that moved out of Puerto Rico during the 1930s-1950s stayed. Most of the Puerto Ricans that moved out are definitely multiracial.
You mean poor, uneducated and dispossessed? Yes, culturally speaking mulato/mestizos/zambos have been on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder in the Eurocentric Western world since that dude Chris Columbus rolled up in his oversized canoe. The Puerto Rican bourgeoisie has historically been pale-skinned and very much Northern Spaniard looking, almost all-American looking at times. You'd put em in a northen suburb of Dallas and you couldn't tell they weren't bona fide "whities". They are not however the majority. The majority in PR is mestizo to varying shades. What else is new?
Spanish is my native language, I know what they mean you read my sentence wrong. I meant it as a tongue in cheek that to most Americans mixed equals white and black, not native and white, since most Americans think of people like Obama when it comes to multiracial, particularly Americans that live in the Midwest and South
I think I was responding to an earlier post that you also responded to.
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Definitely is. Based on my personal experiences, it is definitely less than 50% but more than 25%. But, the numbers would be far less if everyone that moved out of Puerto Rico during the 1930s-1950s stayed. Most of the Puerto Ricans that moved out are definitely multiracial.
You mean poor, uneducated and dispossessed? Yes, culturally speaking mulato/mestizos/zambos have been on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder in the Eurocentric Western world since that dude Chris Columbus rolled up in his oversized canoe. The Puerto Rican bourgeoisie has historically been pale-skinned and very much Northern Spaniard looking, almost all-American looking at times. You'd put em in a northen suburb of Dallas and you couldn't tell they weren't bona fide "whities". They are not however the majority. The majority in PR is mestizo to varying shades. What else is new?
We are not Mexico if anything we look more like Dominicans-Mulatto
We are not Mexico if anything we look more like Dominicans-Mulatto
Well, Mexico is a much bigger demographic than Puerto Rico. To suggest Mexico is a whole country full of de facto amerindians from the Desert Northern states would just be taken from the page of the United States perception of Mexicans; which is the idea that they're all short brown slant-eyed indians. We know the racial makeup of the interior States of Mexico is very much European in shading. Outright Suzie All-american white in some niche samplings...but with a bootai and and full thighs, which makes them simply demigod-like to my weak eyes
As to Puerto Rico, Im not quite sure if Im ready to assert that the African leg of the triad is the dominant caste as it is in the case of the Dominican Republic. If I had to pick one I would still say Puerto Ricans as an aggregate are a mestizo populace. Amerindian mama with Hacienda Hector daddy, back in the days of Chris C.... Cuba would be a more representative parallel to Puerto Rico IMO. Obviously we know there is an intra-Caribbean stratification rivalry among islands. Cubans think Puerto Ricans are ----ers, Puerto Ricans think Dominicans are ----ers, Dominicans think Haitians are ---ers, and everybody echoes the Dominicans sentiment on Haitians, even Jamaicans. Somebody has to get picked last in Dodgeball after all. But that's for another thread.
It's all immaterial. If you're like me, a pale-skinned freckled-shouldered Puerto Rican, you just blend into the general pool of racial indifference of Continental US living and go about your business. And my paternal grand daddy was a hell of a brown man! It's crazy, the way genetics works. I'm straight up whitey for island standards but an impostor white to the xenophobic 'American Beauty' Suburbia. White girls take me to mom and dad's and the poor suckers have no clue until they pick up my accent. Somebody different than me will always consider me less of a "insert your quantifier here". If I were to direct my life based on that I'd never get anywhere. Racial casting is part of the Western way of life. Again, what else is new?
Puerto Ricans who are second or third generation in the States have already aligned largely with the African-American cultural experience, mainly due to their alignment with said group when the waves of island immigrants made their way to the Northeastern city centers in the mid late half of the 20th century. The second and most recent wave of Puerto Rican emigrants (yours truly) tend not to associate or identify at all with the African American experience, and we also tend to be much less 'dark' than the first wave.
One thing is true. As Americans we love us some racism. We can't stand having people next door who don't look like us. Money is the great equalizer in America though. You can pretty much buy yourself the prettiest little blue eyed trophy if you have enough green on your skin. Makes the whole line of argument kinda moot.
This type of thread is like the flu, pops up every year once a year, like clockwork lol
The demographics of Puerto Rico is listed on wikipedia as 75.8% White, 12.4% Black, and only 0.5% American Indian. Why are the majority considered White? Compared this to El Salvador where I'm from, where almost 90% are Mestizo, mixed with American Indian and Spain. Would the 75.8% be considered 100% White?
In the US most white people are probably mestizo. However, the concept has little importance to most Americans as can be evidenced by the fact that when it is referenced at all we've adopted the Spanish word for the concept instead of coming up with an English one.
The land that made up the US had a much smaller population of Indians than the areas south of it. It is usually given as about 1-2 million people in the lower 48 at the time of Columbus's arrival. Given disease and warfare taking their toll you can see that there weren't many Indians in the US especially when you consider that most of those were concentrated in the east which was the first area exposed to European settlement. So as they intermarried with European settlers their descendants phenotype quickly began to look like that of Europeans more often than Indians because there was simply so much more European genetics being put into the mixture. So the concept of being mestizo never caught on in the US because the vast majority of people were but their Indian ancestry was fairly minor. The perfect example of this being that when the Cherokee Indians were sent west from Georgia the white governor of Georgia was fairly closely related to some of the leaders of the Cherokee nation (one family of which even moved in with his family and stayed in Georgia).
The other historical difference running alongside this being that you never really had a peninsulares class emerge in the English colonies. The people heading to the English colonies at their founding were by and large outcasts of mainstream English society, and thus they had shed a lot of pride in the Englishness long before they ever left England. Without this class you don't have a creole class emerge, and thus they don't look to differentiate themselves from mestizos to try to look better to the peninsulares as well as gain a new group of people to push around.
As a result the US census doesn't ask if people are mestizo simply white or Indian.
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you read my sentence wrong. I meant it as a tongue in cheek that to most Americans mixed equals white and black, not native and white, since most Americans think of people like Obama when it comes to multiracial, particularly Americans that live in the Midwest and South
We can't stand having people next door who don't look like us. Money is the great equalizer in America though. You can pretty much buy yourself the prettiest little blue eyed trophy if you have enough green on your skin. Makes the whole line of argument kinda moot.
