Like, I kind of yield, or at least change my position from belief to "it makes sense but it's kinda sussy" regarding the thing about catholics and protestants, the more this thread goes on the more I think about it and there's a few other equally correlated variables, but the base observation of 'omg there's so much more mixing in latin america compared to north" is basically sound, and a thing that probably has cultural causes.
Except, Protestants were just as eager to convert Native Americans. Note that converted Natives allied with the settlers in King Philip's War. The majority of US Native Americans are still Christians.
oh, are they? hmmm fair enough, maybe it wasn't religion.
Um what? Immigration doubled the size of the country; how does that simply not count for you?
cause the question is something like "are catholic/protestant colonizers more into assimilating or removing the natives they encounter" and both assimilation and removal are compatible with high immigration. I know argentinians identify a lot with their italian heritage, of which they have a lot, but if you also have a lot ascendents from natives then your country was likely the result of mestizaje and not replacement. Buenos aires is, again, somewhat whiter, but noticeably less euro than, say, Madrid. because, as you point out
I agree there was more mixing in Latin America
and that's the key thing, there was more mixing (a lot more of it) throughout the entirety of latin america: the bits with and without tropical climate, the bits with and without empires, and (save the sad case of tierra del fuego) the bits with high and low population density. sure, some bits are somewhat less mixed than others for latin american standards, but compared to most of north america it's all relatively high.
I can't say much about Chile, but Peru is far from a benign melting pot of all the races.
Oh, totally! don't get me wrong I'm not saying spain was *better* than england morally and therefore less given to genocide, i'm merely saying that they were happened to prefer enslaving the natives, which is actually a common practice amongst other cultures. taking prisoners may have a big upfront investment, but it's still a pretty good strategy compared to simply killing them. the spaniards were every bit as much racial supremacists as the contemporary english, I gather: in schools we're taught about the intricate race systems they used to control exactly which social roles could be fulfilled by whom: if you were criollo you were second class, but if you were mestizo third, and god forbid you happen to be mulato, or zambo: better to be, say, a tercerón (only one third black, and therefore formally, legally better than being a galfarro, which is 3/4th black). the encomiendas which were formally supposed to be these religious missions to civilize and christianize the indigenous subjects of the crown (for this is indeed what their legal status was in colonial times) were, instead, basically work camps: while spanish colonization did not in fact genocide the peoples entire, they did destroy entire ethnolinguistic groups as such: the kids being taken into slavery, or born into it, and then escaping just to form new tribes or villages in the jungles or mountains, away from the colonial powers, and often alongside escaped slaves from africa or somewhere else in the region entirely are extremely common stories for the peoples of latin america in general, in peru, bolivia, chile, ecuador, venezuela, colombia and the rest of it. but that doesn't make them less genocidal, relatively speaking.
I wouldn't say that's a more enlightened policy! The British thing was to recognize native leaders and sign treaties with them. And later break them, of course.
Oh my god, of course not. the only reason why I may come across as pro-Spanish here is that, honestly, the early republican governments in Latin America weren't a lot better: for reference, there are genocides going on in the amazonia to this day, though thankfully a lot fewer. But no, no the spanish colonizers weren't more enlightened or nicer thanks to being blessed by the fortune of being born under the aegis of the holy see. they were apparently, instead, simply less genocidal as a matter of cultural inclination, for whatever reason.
The reason I suspect cultural inclination is that geography don't add up, the two continents are too diverse for the split to be that black-and-white. you'd expect some exception bigger than argentina (which is 40% mestizo anyway, according to their own censuses). sure, argentina is less mixed than peru, but we're talking 40 vs. 50 vs 90 percent. by contrast, wiki says anywhere from 3 to 10 percent for the us, and 1 or 2 for canadians: this difference is stark. same with density: there was high and low density areas in both the north and south, but behold, all of post-iberian america is super mixed -including mexico in the north, and the whole of central america too- whereas all of anglo-america is... well... not that mixed. you have some survivors of the colonial genocide, as do we, but what you don't have, and all of latin america does have, is this vast chunk of the population being very obviously descended from both colonizers and colonized.
Ares Land's point is good: that kings and popes had little influence on what settlers actually did.
totally. interestingly, the crown in many occasions went into a strongly bartolomé de las casas kind of mood, and tried to control the excess of colonial authorities and strongment, often to little avail. slavery for example was an on-and-off thing. in chile, for example, enslaving mapuches was illegal, then legal for a while after the arauco war, but then it was outlawed in order to try and make peace with them), then a significant grey market i.e. the slave trade was illegal but slaves were slaves, to the point that some queen really tried to end it, then the republic decreed everyone who was born was born free: the latifundios were not that far off from slavery, but I really should read up on the particulars of that.
I am under an impression that the King Philip's War was the last chance for Native Americans to destroy New England as it's demographic advantage was growing every year due to birth rates and immigration from Europe.